Father Richard encourages us to recognize how the soul of nature mirrors our own:
The modern and postmodern selves largely live in a world of their own construction and react for or against 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 cannot access our full intelligence and wisdom without some real connection to nature.
My spiritual father Francis of Assisi (1182–1226) 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. Almost all initiation rites—including those of Jesus and John the Baptist (see Matthew 3:13–17)—took place in nature, surely for that reason.
Without such soul recognition and mirroring, we become alienated from nature and from 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 accept us instead of experiencing 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. [1]
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 in it, loving it, and respecting it. Everything visible, without exception, is the outpouring of God. What else could it really be? When we can enjoy all these things as holy, “we experience the universe as a communion of subjects, not as a collection of objects,” as the “geologian” Fr. Thomas Berry said so wisely. [2]
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. Soul knows soul through love, which Jesus teaches as the Great Commandment (Matthew 22:37–39). [3]
Reference:
[1] Adapted from Richard Rohr, The Soul, the Natural World, and What Is (Center for Action and Contemplation, 2009). Available as MP3 audio download.
[2] Thomas Berry, The Sacred Universe: Earth, Spirituality, and Religion in the Twenty-First Century, ed. Mary Evelyn Tucker (Columbia University Press, 2009), 86.
[3] Adapted from Richard Rohr, A New Cosmology: Nature as the First Bible (Center for Action and Contemplation, 2009). Available as MP3 audio download.
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.
Story from Our Community:
The meditation on the sacredness of water (and everything else) resonated with me. Water holds a significant place in my creative world. My work centers around brokenness in beauty and the need to be more respectful. We can create heaven on Earth. We just need to open our eyes.
—Karen B.
