Soul and the Natural World
Sunday, April 19, 2026
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.
All that Breathes Gives Praise
Monday, April 20, 2026
I love to think of nature as unlimited broadcasting stations, through which God speaks to us every day, every hour…. How do I talk to a little flower? Through it I talk to the Infinite. And what is the Infinite? It is that silent, small voice … that still, small voice.
—George Washington Carver, The Man Who Talks with the Flowers
Black farmer and author Leah Penniman celebrates the faith of agricultural scientist and inventor George Washington Carver (1864–1943):
Dr. George Washington Carver was a devout Christian and had a practice of waking before dawn to go pray in the forest. He believed that nature was God’s broadcasting system and credited his conversations with plants as informing his numerous scientific breakthroughs and patents. He explained, “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.”
In conversation with Penniman, Chris Bolden-Newsome, co-founder of Sankofa Community Farm in Pennsylvania, shares:
I am a practitioner of in-cultured African (American) Catholic Christianity…. So much of Catholic Christianity has its origins within an earth-based African context that existed way before its settling and redefinition in central Europe. The Catholic Church as a whole is catching up to its origins. Starting in 1971, with Pope Paul VI, the church has expressed ecological concern, which was amplified to an urgent appeal by 2015, with Pope Francis writing:
If we approach nature and the environment without this openness to awe and wonder, if we no longer speak the language of fraternity and beauty in our relationship with the world, our attitude will be that of masters, consumers, ruthless exploiters, unable to set limits on their immediate needs. By contrast, if we feel intimately united with all that exists, then sobriety and care will well up spontaneously. The poverty and austerity of Saint Francis were no mere veneer of asceticism, but something much more radical: a refusal to turn reality into an object simply to be used and controlled. [1]
At its core, Catholicism—and this reflects the African Spiritual ethos in general, I think—is a practice of deep reverence for the intertwining of matter and spirit, and regard for the indispensable role of ancestors, be they blood ancestors, canonized saints, or cultural ancestors like Baba George Carver. At the center of this belief is our understanding that God chooses to connect with creation in Yeshua (Jesus). This essential unity of spirit and matter means that I can’t do anything earthly that does not have a spiritual ramification, and vice versa. I show the same respect for the spider and the snake as I do for people. They are valued friends….
When I see a snake in my garden, I feel so blessed, so I greet them in one of their ancient names and thank them. All creatures bring us God’s wisdom—they are agents and living sacramentals of the guardian spirits of the land.
References:
[1] Pope Francis, Laudato Si’: On Care for Our Common Home. Read here for the full text of this encyclical.
Leah Penniman, Black Earth Wisdom: Soulful Conversations with Black Environmentalists (Amistad, 2023), 23–25.
