The modern and postmodern self largely lives in a world of its own construction,
and it reacts for or against its own human-made ideas. While calling ourselves
intelligent, we’ve lost touch with the natural world. As a result, we’ve lost touch
with our own souls. I believe we can’t access our full intelligence and wisdom
without some real connection to nature.
My spiritual father Francis of Assisi spent many days, weeks, and even months
walking the roads of Umbria and letting nature teach him. Francis knew and
respected creation, calling animals, sun, moon, and even the weather and the
elements his brothers and sisters. Through extended time in nature, Francis
became intimately connected with non-human living things and came to
recognize that the natural world was also imbued with soul.
Without such soul recognition and mirroring, we are alienated and separated
from nature, and quite frankly, ourselves. Without a visceral connection to the
soul of nature, we will not know how to love or respect our own soul. Instead, we
try various means to get God and people to like or accept us because we never
experience radical belonging to the world itself. We’re trying to say to ourselves
and others, “I belong here. I matter.” Of course, that’s true! But contrived and
artificial means will never achieve that divine purpose. We are naturally healed
in this world when we know things center to center, subject to subject, and soul
to soul.
I think of soul as anything’s ultimate meaning which is held within. Soul is the
blueprint inside of every created thing telling it what it is and what it can
become. When we meet anything at that level, we will respect, protect, and love
it.
Many human beings simply haven’t found their own blueprint or soul, so they
cannot see it anywhere else. Like knows like! When we only meet reality at the
external level, we do not meet our own soul and we have no ability to meet the
soul of anything else either. We clergy would have done much better to
encourage Christians to discover their souls instead of “save” them.
While everything has a soul, in many people it seems to be dormant,
disconnected, and ungrounded. They are not aware of the inherent truth,
goodness, and beauty shining through everything. If God is as great, glorious, and
wonderful as religions claim, then wouldn’t such a God would make such
“wonderfulness” universally available? Surely, such connection and presence are
as freely available as the air we breathe and the water we drink.
Making a Morning Connection
On spring and summer mornings, I love to go out early with my little cup of
coffee and walk through my garden with my dog Venus. If I can somehow let my
“roots and tendrils” reconnect me with the “givens” of life, as Bill Plotkin calls
them—not the ideas about life, but the natural world, what is—I experience the
most extraordinary grounding, connection, healing, and even revelation. One
little hopping bird can do me in!
Many of us have a sense of self or identity created by our relationship to ideas,
thoughts, and words. We can spend our whole lives rattling around inside of
ideas, rarely touching upon what is right in front of us, when it’s the “givens” that
heal us and reconnect us to Reality. We spend a majority of our time interacting
with thoughts and opinions about everything. We’re almost entirely fixated on
our computers, smart phones, news feeds, email, social media, and selfies. This is,
of course, an “unnatural” world of our own creation.We don’t even realize that
we’ve disconnected ourselves from the only world that people lived in for most
of human history.
One of the foundational reasons for our sense of isolation and unhappiness is
that we have lost our contact with nature. In the natural world, there is no
theology to agree or disagree with. We don’t have to identify as Presbyterian or
Lutheran, male or female, conservative or progressive. There is nothing to argue
about. It is in contact with all the “givens”—that which has been available to
every creature God has created since the Big Bang—that something is indeed
given. I guess in the spiritual world we would call it grace.
This is not some New Age idea. In Scripture we read, “What can be known about
God is perfectly plain, since God has made it plain. Ever since God created the
world, God’s everlasting power and divinity, however invisible, have been there
for the mind to see in the things that God has made” (Romans 1:19–20). Every
day, we are given a natural way to reconnect with God and it doesn’t depend
upon intelligence, education, or a religion. It depends on really being present and
connecting with the soul.If we can find a way to be present to the “givens,”
especially the natural “givens,” I believe we can be happy.
The Stones Cry Out
Marya Grathwohl, describes an experience with a longtime friend driving up
Wyoming’s Bighorn Mountains: Dorie, who had distanced herself from organized
religion, nevertheless coins the phrase “rock rosary” to express the sequence of
life mysteries locked in the rock layers: reptiles, forests, amphibians, fish, bodies
of cooperating cells, photosynthesis. As the mountain reveals the splendor of
life’s evolution, I find myself asking, “Who are we human beings? Within this
array of life-forms, what is our role, our gift to Earth?” Then near the summit, we
abruptly round a cliff. Another sign: Precambrian, 2.9 billion years ago. Granite.
And my soul slams into awe….
We find a pull-off. I race back to the cliff and near the sign pick up something
small. A stone, heavy for its size, glistens with quartz. I hold it close to my lips.
“You,” I whisper, “you witnessed life’s genius in creating photosynthesis.” I stand
silent, listening. Time stops. In my hands is a scripture, a stone crying out. I recall
that it was a mere two thousand years ago that Jesus said, “If the people are
silent, the stones will cry out.”
Earth, a rocky planet, cries out. Earth cries out against global mass extinction of
species, the destruction of human-caused climate change, and the prowess of
militarised and industrialised humanity to poison and destroy Earth’s support
systems: soil, air, and water. Earth cries out against the suffering we humans
cause each other.
Here is my question for the mountain. How do we learn to become contributing
members of the pageant of life, of this ongoing story of a communion of species,
subjects in their own right?
A Pattern of Reciprocity
Robin Wall Kimmerer, Potawatomi botanist, writes of our place in nature: In the
indigenous view, humans are viewed as somewhat lesser beings in the
democracy of species. We are referred to as the younger brothers of Creation, so
like younger brothers we must learn from our elders. Plants were here first and
have had a long time to figure things out. They live both above and below ground
and hold the earth in place. Plants know how to make food from light and water.
Not only do they feed themselves, but they make enough to sustain the lives of all
the rest of us. Plants are providers for the rest of the community and exemplify
the virtue of generosity, always offering food….
Many indigenous peoples share the understanding that we are each endowed
with a particular gift, a unique ability…. It is understood that these gifts have a
dual nature, though: a gift is also a responsibility. If the bird’s gift is song, then it
has a responsibility to greet the day with music. It is the duty of birds to sing and
the rest of us receive the song as a gift.
Author Debra Rienstra considers the destructive role humanity has often played
in relation to the earth: If humans didn’t exist at all, life would continue on earth.
Let’s not flatter ourselves: biologically speaking, the earth does not need us to
tend and care for it. Life on earth existed for eons before we arrived. Have we
made the earth better by our arrival? “Stewarding” and “caring” are only
necessary because humans take things from the earth to survive.
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). Before the
resonance of love, we are largely inattentive to the meaning, value, and power of
ordinary things to “save” us and help us live in union with the Source of all being.
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.
