Sunday
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.
—Richard Rohr
Monday
Reading about nature is fine, but if a person walks in the woods and listens carefully, he can learn more than what is in books, for they speak with the voice of God.
—George Washington Carver
Tuesday
Twice per year, we pause the Daily Meditations and ask for your financial support. If the CAC’s work has been meaningful to you, including these Daily Meditations, please consider making a gift. Every gift, no matter the amount, helps bring the gospel message of healing to a world that desperately needs it.
Wednesday
The earth was entrusted to us in order that it be mother for us, capable of giving to each one what is necessary to live.… The earth is generous and holds nothing back from those who safeguard it. The earth, which is mother of all, asks for respect, not violence.
—Pope Francis
Thursday
Every day we have opportunities to reconnect with God through an encounter with nature, whether an ordinary sunrise, a starling on a power line, a tree in a park, or a cloud in the sky. This spirituality doesn’t depend on education or belief. It almost entirely depends on our capacity for simple presence.
—Richard Rohr
Friday
We can begin to heal that rift between our love and actions, our values and our daily lives, by turning our attention to whatever patch of ground we have been given to tend, even if it is a potted planter on a balcony in the city.
—Ragan Sutterfield
Week Sixteen Practice
Loving One, Loving All
Co-founder of the Wild Church Network and Seminary of the Wild, Victoria Loorz writes of love as intimacy with another, whether with a person or part of the created world:
Heart-opening, transformational conversation often happens in small moments: an unexpected gasp of awe as colors shine more vividly and you can almost see the threads of the web connecting you; at least you can feel them…. These encounters are invitations to fall in love. Relationship is where the holy dwells.
You can “love the earth” by taking care of it: by getting involved with advocacy campaigns to remove dams and protect forests, by living simply and adding nutrients to the soil, by limiting fossil fuels and eating local foods. And I hope we all do. All of us need to make significant changes that may feel, at first, like sacrifices, yet in the end are only the surrender of privileges that were never ours in the first place.
But falling in love with Earth? That’s different. First of all, it’s a bit of a misnomer. You don’t fall in love with Earth; she’s too big. You are allured to pay attention and enter into conversation with a particular being, a particular place. And then, through fidelity and time and a thousand small acts of kindness and reciprocal giving and receiving, you fall in love. Through that particular, deepening relationship, a portal is opened and your heart is expanded to love the whole.
To quote farmer and poet Wendell Berry, “People exploit what they have merely concluded to be of value, but they defend what they love….” [1]
This is a courtship of the particular. Of the many others in the world, some—or maybe just one—will choose you. Pursue you, even. We love all by authentically loving the one or the few who are near us: those who give themselves to us to whom we open our hearts and love back. To regard a wild one as a sacred other, one who has her own wisdom and relationships and concerns beyond our encounters with her—this is entering into conversation as a practice of love, which is participation in the presence of the sacred, of Christ.
References:
[1] Wendell Berry, Life Is a Miracle: An Essay Against Superstition (Counterpoint, 2001), 41.
Victoria Loorz, Church of the Wild: How Nature Invites Us into the Sacred (Broadleaf Books, 2021), 127–129.
Image credit and inspiration: Siska Vrijburg, untitled (detail), 2017, photo, Netherlands. Unsplash. Click here to enlarge image. We gaze lovingly upon the trees, the light, the deer—appreciating them, then taking steps to protect them.
