Wilderness, Creation, Nature & the Human Soul

Wilderness/Creation/Nature & the Human Soul

Gregg’s Reflection

A few weeks after our wedding, Genie and I went camping. When we got home, we found a fire had destroyed our apartment, burning all our wedding gifts. Although I was not a believer, we took it as a ‘sign’ not to hold too tightly to possessions. Luckily, we had insurance. We took the insurance and bought camping gear and went out west in March for a ten week trip into the Rocky Mountains, Canyonlands and Arches, Tetons, Yellowstone, Olympic, and Banff and Jasper National Parks in the Canadian Rockies. God revealed Himself to me in those mountains and canyons.

In 2011, I attended Halftime Institute. After hearing my story, they presented me with this original painting:

I remember the first time I picked up Richard Foster‘s book on Prayer. It was an exploration of 25 kinds of prayer. I waded a little bit in and put it down for a couple of years. When I returned to read it, I found it speaks of Prayers of Adoration when we are struck by awe in the creation, a sense of wonder. Wonder: a feeling of surprise mingled with admiration, caused by something beautiful, unexpected, unfamiliar, or inexplicable. 

I was overjoyed to read of Prayers of Adoration, because I spend a lot of time out in the wilds in awe of the creation. When I read this was a form of prayer, I thought, “Well, I spend a lot more time in prayer than I thought.” To this day, I spend time out hiking or snowshoeing the mountain behind our cabin, delighting in how the light, the clouds, the wind and sun are a different experience every day.

Forest Bathing and Prayers of Adoration are by far Genie’s favorite form of prayer. For twenty years we have been supporting Wild Bear Nature Center towards their mission of No Child Left Inside. Check it:

Journaling Prompts

How has time in wild places enabled you to experience peace, awe and wonder? How do you experience the holy in the woods, by a lake, a stream, or the ocean? Brian McLaren contrasts “Wild Theology” where saints and mystics like St Francis lived their theology out in the world with “Indoor Theology“ primarily expressed and practiced inside. Can your religion spill outside?

Scripture

The heavens proclaim the glory of God. The skies display his craftsmanship.

Psalm 19:1

Wonder in creation is a primary resource for knowledge of God and thus for our spiritual formation. To view the creation, to study, to stand in awe, reflecting on the Creator who made such marvels, lead to thanksgiving, praise and prayer.

RENOVARE Bible notes on Wisdom of Solomon 13:5

The pride of the higher realms is the clear vault of the sky. The sun, when it rises, proclaims how wonderful the works of God. The moon marks the changing seasons. The glory of the stars is the beauty of heaven, a glittering array in the heights of the Lord. Look at the rainbow and praise him who made it. By his command he sends the driving snow, and the eye is dazzled by the beauty of its whiteness. In his majesty he gives the clouds their strength. The voice of his thunder rebukes the earth. The cold north wind blows, and ice freezes on the water. By his plan he stilled the deep, in it are strange and marvelous creatures. Awesome is the Lord and very great, and marvelous is his power. Who has seen him and can describe him? For the Lord has made all things, and to the godly he has given wisdom.

Sirach 43

Ever since God created the world, his everlasting power and deity – however invisible - have been there for the mind to see in the things that God has made. 

Romans 1:20

Ancient Writings

My book is the nature of created things, and anytime I want to read the words of God, the book is before me.

St Anthony, Thomas Merton, Wisdom of the Desert, p. 62

The soul was led to God by going out to external things to admire in them the work of God’s creative power. Then, looking at creation, the soul beheld God’s footprints upon the world’s surface: the material world became a mirror in which it beheld its God.

Bonaventure, The Mind’s Road to God, trans Father James, p. 69

All of creation-rocks, trees, stars, plants, animals, and humans – in someway reflects the power, wisdom, and goodness of the Trinity. God shines through creation in the face of God is reflected in creation precisely by the way things express themselves.

Bonaventure, Ilia Delio, Christ in Evolution, p. 61

There can be no question that to study creatures is to build up one’s Christian Faith. 

Thomas Aquinas, Matthew Fox, Christian Mystics, p. 100

Sacred writings are bound in two volumes-that of creation and that of the Holy Scriptures. Visible creatures are like a book in which we read the knowledge of God. One has every right to call God’s creatures God’s “works,” for they express the divine mind just as effects manifest their cause. 

Thomas Aquinas, Matthew Fox, Christian Mystics, p. 108

One meditates on creation in order to view and marvel at divine wisdom. Each creature is made as a witness to God in so far as each creature is a witness to God’s power and omnipotence; and its beauty is a witness to the divine wisdom. 

Thomas Aquinas, Matthew Fox, Christian Mystics, p. 98

All of nature is a book about God

Meister Eckhart

Modern Writings

The sun shines not on us but in us, the rivers flow not past but through us.

John Muir, John of the Mountains Journal

Keep close to Nature’s heart and break clear away, once in a while, and climb a mountain or spend a week in the woods. Wash your spirit clean.

John Muir

Our deepest religious need is to make direct contact with the elemental life of the cosmos, mountain-life, cloud-life, thunder-life, air-life, earth-life, sun-life. To come into immediate felt contact, and so derive energy, powers, and a dark sort of joy.

D. H. Lawrence, Matthew Fox, The Hidden Spirituality of Men: Ten Metaphors to Awaken the Sacred Masculine, pp. 3, 13f.

Nature is full of genius, full of the divinity, so that not a snowflake escapes its fashioning hand.

Henry David Thoreau, Matthew Fox, The Hidden Spirituality of Men: Ten Metaphors to Awaken the Sacred Masculine, pp. 3, 13f.

To the dull mind nature is leaden. To the illuminated mind the whole world burns and sparkles with light.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essay: Nature

Love all of God's creation, both a whole of it and every grain of sand. Love every leaf, every ray of God’s light. Love animals, love plants, love each thing. If you love each thing, you would perceive the mystery of God and things. Once you have perceived it, you will begin tirelessly to perceive more and more of it every day. And you will come at last to love the whole world with an entire, universal love.

Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, p. 319

In the contemplation of the earth, I know that I am surrounded by the love of God.

Howard Thurman, Meditations of the Heart, p. 210–211

Man cannot long separate himself from nature without withering as a cut rose in a vase. One of the deceptive aspects of the mind in man is to give him the illusion of being distinct from and over against but not a part of nature. It is but a single leap thus to regard nature as being so completely other than himself that he may exploit it, plunder and rape it with impunity. 

Howard Thurman, Matthew Fox, Christian Mystics, p. 216

Our atmosphere is polluted, our streams are poisoned, our hills are denuded, wildlife is increasingly exterminated, more and more man becomes an alien on the earth and fouler of his own nest. The price that is being exacted for this is a deep sense of isolation, of being ruthless and a vagabond.

Often I have surmised that this condition is more responsible for what seems to be the phenomenal increase in mental and emotional disturbances in modern life then the pressures that abound on every hand. The collective psyche shrieks with the agony that it feels as a part of the death cry of a pillaged nature.

Howard Thurman, Matthew Fox, Christian Mystics, p. 217

How absolutely central is the truth that we are first of all part of nature, though we are a very special part, that which is conscious of God. In solitude, one is entirely surrounded by beings which perfectly obey God. 

Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, p. 268–269.

When your tongue is silent, you can rest in the silence of the forest. When your imagination is silent, the forest speaks to you. But when your mind is silent, then the forest suddenly becomes magnificently real and blazes transparently with the reality of God.

Thomas Merton, A Year with Thomas Merton, p. 73

The first act of divine revelation is creation itself. The first Bible is the Bible of nature. It was written at least 13.8 billion years ago, at the moment that we call the Big Bang, long before the Bible of words. “Ever since God created the world, God’s everlasting power and divinity—however invisible—are there for the mind to see in the things that God has made” (Romans 1:20).

One really wonders how we missed that. Words gave us something to argue about, I guess. Nature can only be respected, enjoyed, and looked at with admiration and awe. Don’t dare put the second Bible in the hands of people who have not sat lovingly at the feet of the first Bible. They will invariably manipulate, mangle, and murder the written text.

Richard Rohr, CAC Daily Devotion, 2/28/16

We have the wind and the rain and the stars for our Bible. The world is an open Bible for us. We Indians have studied it for millions and millions of years.

Matthew King, spokesman of the Lakota people, Daily Meditations with Matthew Fox, 7/1/21

We’ve learned that God rules the universe and that everything God made is living. Even the rocks are alive. When we use them in our sweat ceremony we talk to them and they talk back to us. Our work as spiritual seekers and contemplatives is to see all of creation as woven together in holiness and to live this truth. In this loving act we begin to knit together that which has been torn; we gather all that has been scattered. Contemplative practice is a way to bring healing presence to the world. .

Christine Valters Paintner, Earth, Our Original Monastery: Cultivating Wonder and Gratitude through Intimacy with Nature, p. x

Jesus’s parables reflect a love for both nature and human affairs. Jesus saw God at the heart of nature. Biblical Scholar C. H. Dodd said, “the sense of the divineness of the natural order is the major premise of all the parables.” 

Denis Edwards, Jesus and the Cosmos, p. 56

The natural world is a mirror in which we can see the face of God reflected. We do not escape the created world in the spiritual journey, we plunge down into its innermost depths and contemplate the creator in the smallest atom and the largest galaxy. The beauty of the natural world enlightens our minds and unites them with the beauty of God, from which all beauty comes. We gain wisdom by learning from nature and this wisdom is an illumination of our inner being. It is an awakening and an opening of the spiritual senses. Something as simple as a loaf of bread can be the real presence of Christ for us, if we have eyes which see the truth. 

Justin Coutts, In Search of a New Eden, 7/3/22

The DNA of Creation: We Franciscans believe that the first coming of “the Christ” is in creation itself. In other words, God’s “first idea” and priority was to make the Godself both visible and shareable. The whole of creation is the beloved community, the partner in the divine dance. Everything is the “child of God”—not only Jesus. All creation must in some way carry the divine DNA of the Creator.

Whenever the material and the spiritual coincide, there is the Christ. The Christ “comes again” whenever we are able to see the spiritual and the material coexisting, in any moment, in any event, and in any person. All matter reveals Spirit, and Spirit needs matter to “show itself”! What I like to call the “Forever Coming of Christ” happens whenever and wherever we allow this to be utterly true for us. This is how God continually breaks into history.

Richard Rohr, CAC Morning Devotion, 12/6/20

All mystics show how God is found in creation itself, in nature, and encourage us to encounter the divine there. In modern times, we see that it is not only our personal relationship to God that suffers when we don’t. The health of nature and earth depend on our awakening out of “spiritual sloth.” What actions can we take that connect us to the primal in the primitive? What forms of ritual needed this time to wake us up to the sacredness of nature and the pain of nature. 

Matthew Fox, Christian Mystics, p. 185

Whenever you bring your attention to anything natural, anything that has come into existence without human intervention, you step out of the prison of conceptualized thinking and, to some extent, participate in the state of connectedness with Being in which everything natural still exists.

To bring your attention to a stone, a tree, or an animal does not mean to think about it, but simply to perceive it, to hold it in your awareness. Something of its essence then transmits itself to you. You can sense how still it is, and in doing so the same stillness arises within you. You sense how deeply it rests in Being—completely at one with what it is and where it is. In realizing this, you too come to a place of rest deep within yourself. 

Eckhart Tolle, Stillness Speaks p. 22, 77–78.

Knowledge was inherent in all things. The world was a library and its books were the stones, leaves, grass, brooks….We learned to do what only students of nature ever learn, and that was to feel beauty. 

Luther Standing Bear, And Wisdom Comes Quietly, Helen Exley

Nature is religious in its very essence. The star-studded firmament is one great supplication. The spirit of every landscape is a spirit of prayer, and so is the deep silence of solitary places. The entire cosmos aspires to a union with that God from whom it has gone forth...The law of love is the supreme law of the universe and the one and only moral law. (Love one another as I have loved you.) 

Ernesto Cardenal, To Live Is to Love, p. 88

Our world needs saving. We act as though the resources we consume are infinite and the wastes we deposit are invisible. Just as our bodies consume food and produce excrement, in this economy we consume trees and produce smoke, consume clean air and produce smog, consume clean water and produce sewage and toxic waste, consume rock and produce radiation, consume oil and coal and produce gases that turn our planet into an overheating oven in which storms boil and oceans rise and deserts spread and forests wither.

Our prosperity system thus becomes an excrement factory. To many of us, the suicidal nature of our civilization remains invisible. The economist Herman Daly has said, “There is something fundamentally wrong with treating the earth as if it were a business in liquidation.”

Brian McLaren, Great Spiritual Migration, p. 148-149

As broken-hearted as God must be over what we have done to the gift of creation, God still has a dream. . . . God dreams that humans seek spiritual rather than material progress. God’s dream envisions a just world at peace because gratitude has dissolved anxiety and generosity has eclipsed greed. God dreams of a time when love and mutual respect will bind humanity together, and the profound beauty of creation will be treasured. Let us embrace God’s dream as our own.

Suddenly, the horizon of our hope comes nearer. As we live into God’s dream, we will rediscover who we truly are and all of creation will be singing: resilience in place of growth, collaboration in place of consumption, wisdom in place of progress, balance in place of addiction, moderation in place of excess, vision in place of convenience, accountability in place of disregard, self-giving love in place of self-centered fear . . .

Richard Rohr, CAC Morning Devotion, 8/26/20

God is not the “author” of creation, removed and overarching; the whole thing is God. There is not a single place in all creation where God is not, because God is creation itself, endlessly outpouring, endlessly receiving itself back. From top to bottom, we live and move and have our being in a participative reality, every fractal joined to every other fractal in a symphony of divine becoming pouring forth from that infinite wellspring.

Richard Rohr, CAC Morning Devotion, 10/21/20

"To see a world in a grain of sand and heaven in a wildflower, hold infinity in the palm of your hand and eternity in an hour,"

from poet William Blake.

If you want to see God the father, look at the creation.

"If we give nature the slightest chance to win a child's heart, most often it will beat out the competition." 

National Wildlife Federation Magazine

Abraham, Moses, Job, Jonah, Elijah, and Jesus all had life-changing religious experiences in natural settings. A man craves contact with the substantial, the solid, the authentic and the eternal. We experience awe when we encounter ruins and artifacts. This is the search for the ancient soul, our uncluttered originality in God- “The face you had before you were born.” Anything natural or old speaks to that face. If that primal encounter does not happen in a man’s life, religion will have little ability to guide his journey. Encountering the natural allows us to know what we’ve always known, but somehow forgot. What significant spiritual experiences have you had in nature?

Richard Rohr, On the Threshold of Transformation, p. 49.

When God manifests spirit through matter, then matter becomes a holy thing. The material world is the place where we can comfortably worship God just by walking on it, loving it, and respecting it. Everything visible, without exception, is the outpouring of God. What else could it really be?

The incarnation is not only “God becoming Jesus.” It is a much broader event, which is why John’s Gospel first describes God’s presence in the general word “flesh” (John 1:14). When we love something, we grant it soul, we see its soul, and we let its soul touch ours. We must love something deeply to know its soul (anima).

In fact, until we can appreciate and even delight in the soul of other things, even trees and animals, we probably haven’t discovered our own souls either. Soul knows soul through love, which is why it’s the great commandment (Matthew 22:36). 

Richard Rohr, CAC Morning Devotion, 6/26/20

Perhaps once we can see God in plants and animals, we might learn to see God in our neighbors. And then we might learn to love the world. And then, when all of that loving has taken place, when all of that seeing has happened, when such people come to me and tell me they love Jesus, I’ll believe it!

They’re capable of loving Jesus. The soul is prepared. The soul is freed, and it’s learned how to see and how to receive and how to move in and how to move out from itself. Such individuals might well understand how to love God.

Richard Rohr, “Christianity and the Creation: A Franciscan Speaks to Franciscans,” in Embracing Earth: Catholic Approaches to Ecology, p. 130–131

Divine Revelation was not God disclosing ideas about God or religion, but actually God disclosing God’s self, first of all, through the natural world. 

Second Vatican Council, p. 36

Earth elder Thomas Berry reminds us that children must understand that their home is not the industrial world but the world of “woodlands and meadows and flowers and birds and mountains and valleys and streams and stars.” Thomas Berry, Every Being has Rights, p. 7,

Bill Plotkin, Nature and the Human Soul, p. 393

If we lose the forest, we lose our souls. If we lose the singing of the birds, we lose our souls. If we can no longer see the stars because of the artificial light of our cities, our children lose their souls; they lose their imagination. They’re deprived of an inner development. If we devastate or distort the natural world, to that extent our inner world is distorted because our inner world is determined by our outer experiences.

Thomas Berry, The Universe is our University, p. 22. No child left inside! 

The world is created as a means of God’s self-revelation so that, like a mirror or footprint, it might lead us to love and praise the creator. We are meant to read the book of creation so that we may know the author of life. 

Sister Ilia Delio, Making All Things New: Catholicity, Cosmology, Consciousness

For a true contemplative, a gratuitously falling leaf will awaken awe and wonder just as much as a golden tabernacle in a cathedral. 

Richard Rohr, Everything Belongs: The Gift of Contemplative Prayer

The planet is a living spiritual being, of which we are a part. 

Llewellyn Vaughn-Lee, Kathleen Singh, The Grace in Living, p. 238

Creation Practice: Go out into nature if you can, if that is impossible can you find a window or something from the natural world inside your home. 

Listen and look into creation grounded in your whole self. God is present and speaking to you through all of creation. Start with what you are drawn to in your senses - a smell, a sense of the wind, the beauty of a flower, the simplicity of a rock, the sense of warmth from the Sun. 

What do you notice? Where in your body do you experience God’s presence communicating to you? Could be a sense of warmth, or softness on your body, a quickening or a welling up in your heart, thoughts relating to what you see, a feeling of being connected to creation? Take a moment to focus there.You might be moved to pray – respond spontaneously – gratitude, desire, concern. 

At some point you may be drawn to let go of anything getting in the way of you communing with creation. You might let go of thoughts, emotions, sensations and stay present and open. You and creation in God. Move around these experiences as you feel drawn.

Nature Mysticism was in fact a worthy first path for Francis, and also for Bonaventure who saw all things as a likeness of God (vestigia Devo), fingerprints and  footprints that reveal the divine DNA underlying all living links in the Great Chain of Being.

Richard Rohr, Eager to Love, p. 46

Our difficult and very urgent task is to accept the truth that nature is not primarily a property to be possessed, but a gift to be received with admiration and gratitude. Only when we make a deep bow to the rivers, oceans, hills, and mountains that offer us a home, only then can they become transparent and reveal to us their real meaning.

Henri Nouwen, Nouwen Society Daily Devotion, 7/5/20

All nature conceals its great secrets and cannot reveal its hidden wisdom and profound beauty if we do not listen carefully and patiently. John Henry Newman sees nature as a veil through which an invisible world is intimated. He writes: “The visible world is . . . the veil of the world invisible . . . so that all that exists or happens visibly, conceals and yet suggests, and above all subserves, a system of persons, facts, and events beyond itself.”

How differently we would live if we were constantly aware of this veil and sensed in our whole being how nature is ever ready for us to hear and see the great story of the Creator’s love, to which it points. It is sad that in our days we are less connected with nature and we no longer allow nature to minister to us. We could do an immense service to our world if we would let nature heal, counsel, and teach again. I often wonder if the sheer artificiality and ugliness with which many people are surrounded are not as bad as or worse than their interpersonal problems.

Henri Nouwen, Nouwen Society Daily Devotion, 7/6/20

When despair for the world grows in me

and I wake in the night at the least sound

in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,

I go and lie down where the wood drake

rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.

I come into the peace of wild things

who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief. 

I come into the presence of still water.

And I feel above me the day-blind stars

waiting with their light. For a time

I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

~Wendell Berry, Poem: The Peace of Wild Things

The whole of creation is a wonderful picture drawn by God to tell us of his love and care for us.

Basil Pennington, Lectio Divina, p. 138

How blessed are we,

Genie and me. 

Our dogs roam free,

To walk out the back door

Into wilderness. 

On land we share

With Eagle and Owl,

Hawk and Crow,

Deer and Elk,

Moose and Rabbit,

Mountain Lion and Bobcat,

Weasel and Marten,

Coyote and Fox,

Hummingbird and Rosy Finch,

Trees and shrubs,

And wildflowers glorious. 

All of them we’ve seen

In our two decades here

On Eagle Peak, 

A thin place. 

Many have crossed this land,

Seeking food or shelter. 

Many more cross this land

On their spiritual journeys, 

seeking wisdom of the Wilds. 

But, far as we know,

We are the first permanent residents

On this land. 

Not pioneers, but settlers

In this beautiful place. 

How blessed are we…..

Gregg & Genie Burch