The Soul of Nature

Father Richard encourages us to recognize how the soul of nature mirrors our own: 

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. Almost all male 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 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 

In a talk offered in 2009, Father Richard shares his morning practice of engaging with the natural world:

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 [DM team: Venus passed in 2017]. If I can somehow let my “roots and tendrils” reconnect me with the “givens” of life, as Bill Plotkin calls them [1]—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. 

Of course, it’s not as simple as just standing in my garden. If I get my email first or start worrying and planning my day, the moment’s over. It’s done because I’m not really present. But we can preserve and protect those sacred moments before we read the news or check our email, before we look at social media or review the day’s agenda. If we can find a way to be present to the “givens,” especially the natural “givens,” I believe we can be happy.

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After learning there was a prophet in Israel who could heal his leprosy, Naaman asked the king of Syria for permission to seek him out. The king did more than grant this request. He also wrote a letter to the king of Israel requesting his assistance for Naaman.The significance of the king’s letter is easily lost on us. This was more than a polite gesture. Imagine needing a rare medical procedure only available in a foreign country, and having the President of the United States personally contact the other country’s leader on your behalf to ask that you be given V.I.P. treatment. And then sending you there aboard Air Force One. In a way, that’s what the king of Syria did for Naaman.But his arrival in Israel did not go as he hoped. Rather than welcoming Naaman and helping him find the prophet, the king of Israel mistook the letter from the king of Syria as a threat. “As soon as the king of Israel read the letter, he tore his robes and said, ‘Am I God? Can I kill and bring back to life? Why does this fellow send someone to me to be cured of his leprosy? See how he is trying to pick a quarrel with me!’” (2 Kings 5:7).Syria and Israel shared a border, and the two countries were not always peaceful neighbors. Therefore, rather than reading the letter as a sincere request for help, the king of Israel interpreted the message as a trick; a kind of diplomatic Trojan horse the king of Syria was using to justify an invasion of against Israel.The king of Israel’s dramatic reaction to the letter shows how expectations can warp how we interpret messages and events. If we assume malice, we are more likely to see malice. If we expect a conflict, we will often unwittingly create a conflict. This tendency is known as a self-fulfilling prophecy. One psychologist defines it this way: “When you set certain expectations, those expectations can lead you to notice certain things but not pay attention to others. Your mind focuses on details that confirm what you expect.”A common example is waking up expecting to have a miserable day. Although each day is always a mix of positive and negative things, expecting misery will cause you to fixate and magnify any negative experiences and ignore or minimize any positive ones thereby guaranteeing you have the miserable day you expected. Likewise, the self-fulfilling power of negative expectations can make us misread the tone of a text message, taint important relationships, and sow the seeds of our own failure.Some will argue the solution is to banish negative thoughts and utilize self-fulfilling prophecy for good through what Norman Vincent Peale called “the power of positive thinking.” This is a wildly popular message among prosperity preachers and self-help gurus, who often push the concept into heretical absurdity. While I’m certainly not against positivity, I think there are two other antidotes more firmly rooted in godly wisdom.First, we should cultivate patience. The king of Israel jumped to the wrong conclusion because he did not slow down, question his own immediate reaction, and carefully discern the letter’s other possible meanings. Patience isn’t merely something we give to others; it’s a discipline we must extend to ourselves. While we cannot always control our immediate emotional reaction to something, we can give ourselves the space to examine our feelings before we choose to act.Second, we can practice gratitude. Even amid the most negative circumstances, there are always things to be thankful for, and we can train ourselves to look for them. The “power of positive thinking” that is widely peddled in our culture is often subtly narcissistic—think positively and positive things will come to you. Both its origin and goal are the self. Gratitude, in contrast, is a kind of God-oriented positivity that turns us outward. Thankfulness diminishes the self as our vision of God’s goodness expands.How different might the king of Israel’s reaction to the letter have been if he had practiced patience and gratitude? If he had slowed down enough to question his first reaction, and if he had the eyes to recognize God’s presence and goodness? DAILY SCRIPTURE EPHESIANS 5:15-20  2 KINGS 5:1-27 WEEKLY PRAYERAmbrose of Milan (340 – 397) Preserve your work, Lord. Guard the gift you have given even to those who pull back. For I knew I was not worthy to be called your servant, but by your grace I am what I am. And grant that I may know how with genuine affection to mourn with those who sin. Grant that as often as I learn of the sin of anyone who has fallen, I may suffer with them, and not scold them in my pride, but mourn and weep with them, so that in weeping over another I may also mourn for myself. Amen.

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