{"id":27703,"date":"2026-10-05T07:28:49","date_gmt":"2026-10-05T11:28:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/?p=27703"},"modified":"2026-10-05T07:53:05","modified_gmt":"2026-10-05T11:53:05","slug":"27703","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/?p=27703","title":{"rendered":"God\u2019s Resting Place"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio\"><div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Joni Mitchell - Big Yellow Taxi (Official Lyric Video)\" width=\"500\" height=\"281\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/2595abcvh2M?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe>\n<\/div><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p>Sunday, October 4, 2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Feast Day of Francis of Assisi&nbsp;<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Father Richard Rohr explains how Saint Francis of Assisi (1182\u20131226) experienced the natural world as filled with God\u2019s presence: &nbsp;&nbsp;<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In stories of his life, Francis is quoted as talking to or about larks, lambs, rabbits, pheasants, falcons, cicadas, waterfowl, bees, the famous wolf of Gubbio, pigs (whom he praised for generously giving their bodies for our food), and hooked fish that he tried to throw back into the water whenever possible. He addressed inanimate creation too, as if it were indeed ensouled. We know this because his \u201cCanticle of the Creatures\u201d includes fire, wind, water, Brother Sun, Sister Moon, and, of course, \u201cour Sister Mother Earth\u201d herself. [1]&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So-called \u201cnature mysticism\u201d was in fact a worthy first path for Francis and also for Bonaventure, the first Franciscan theologian, who saw all things as likenesses of God (<em>vestigia Dei<\/em>), fingerprints and footprints that reveal the divine DNA underlying all living links in the Great Chain of Being. &nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Creation itself\u2014not ritual or spaces constructed by human hands\u2014was Francis\u2019s primary cathedral, his resting place in God, which then drove him back into the needs of the city. It\u2019s very similar to Jesus\u2019s own movement between desert solitude and small-town healing ministry. The gospel transforms us by putting us in touch with that which is much more constant and satisfying, literally the \u201cground of our being,\u201d and has much more \u201creality\u201d to it, rather than theological concepts or the mere ritualization of reality.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Daily cosmic events in the sky and on the earth are the reality above our heads and beneath our feet every minute of our lives: a continuous sacrament. I find that a<strong> preoccupation with religious rituals tends to increase the more we remain untouched by Reality Itself\u2014to which the best rituals can only poin<\/strong>t. &nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Jesus himself commonly points to things like the red sky, a hen, lilies, the fig tree, a donkey caught in a pit, the birds of the air, the grass in the field, the Temple animals (which he released from their cages), and on and on. <strong>He was clearly looking at the seemingly \u201cnonreligious\u201d world, ordinary things all around him, and he appeared to do most of his teaching outside. &nbsp;<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In the five-day Men\u2019s Rites of Passage that was a focus of my work for fifteen years, many men discovered that prayers and rituals inside of human-scale buildings made with artificial materials also came to seem very domesticated and controlled. They often perceived that the salvation offered there was also \u201csmall\u201d and churchy. Almost without exception, the greatest breakthroughs for the men occurred during<em>&nbsp;<\/em><strong><em>extended times of silence in nature, where the human and the merely verbal were not in control\u2014or during rituals that were raw and earthy<\/em>.&nbsp;<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Rediscovering Our Connection to Nature&nbsp;<\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p>Monday, October 5, 2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Father Richard Rohr considers how Christianity throughout history lost touch with the natural world as a place of grace and divine presence:&nbsp;<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The sacramental nature of the world was largely lost until its more recent rediscovery by seers that we usually think of as \u201csecular,\u201d \u201cmere\u201d nature mystics, poets, and artists: people like Chief Seattle, John Muir, Rachel Carson, Walt Whitman, Wendell Berry, Annie Dillard, and others. We Catholics ended up limiting \u201csacramentals\u201d to things like religious medals, blessed candles, and holy water, instead of honoring the inherent holiness of the earth ores, beeswax, and water that actually formed them. Please think about that! [1] &nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>We limited the official church sacraments to seven (six for women, subtracting the sacrament of Holy Orders) when \u201cthere should be seven hundred,\u201d as an old man once said to me in Tanzania. <strong>We ended up actually&nbsp;<em>desacralizing<\/em>God\u2019s world without realizing<\/strong> it. The <strong>people we called pagans and animists actually had a head start on us, because they at least saw the world as filled with spirits, whereas our world became empty, foreign, and without any natural balm for the sou<\/strong>l. In the modern world, wild was always bad, and domesticated was always good. Yet C.S. Lewis said of God (in the character of the lion, Aslan), \u201cHe\u2019s wild, you know!\u201d <strong>Domesticated, of course, means subservient to us. We liked our world more than God\u2019s world, it seems.&nbsp;<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>For much of Christian history, we preached inside of a disenchanted, small, and lonely universe where there was no natural holiness or inherent goodness in anything non-human or non-Christian. I thought Jesus was \u201cthe Savior of the world\u201d (John 4:42), not just human souls. We then <strong>tried to fill up the loneliness with books and ideas, since the world beneath us and above us had become boring, merely functional,<\/strong> and not subject to the predictability we wanted.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>We grasped for meaning in merely mental ways when it was all around us in tangible and visible ways. We failed to kiss the ground on which we stood and preferred to fly off into the heavens. \u201cThe first level of perception,\u201d according to Bonaventure, \u201cis toward exterior material objects,\u201d and only when we see respectfully and lovingly at that level can we \u201cascend\u201d to his second and third levels of full spiritual seeing. [2] Francis knew and taught that <strong>\u201cGod does not lose energy by plunging into form<\/strong>,\u201d as Cynthia Bourgeault so forcefully puts it [3], and that true transcendence is to be found in immanence and materiality itself. What a surprise!&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Most of us were trained to be good Platonists, where body and soul are enemies, much more than Christian incarnationalists, where body and soul are friends. <\/strong>And where were we to experience this incarnation? Precisely&nbsp;<strong><em>everywhere and all the time<\/em>, <\/strong>not just in places defined as sacred, special, churchy, or religious. That is why<strong> Paul could confidently tell us we could and should \u201cpray always\u201d<\/strong> (I Thessalonians 5:17).&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Sunday, October 4, 2026 Feast Day of Francis of Assisi&nbsp; Father Richard Rohr explains how Saint Francis of Assisi (1182\u20131226) experienced the natural world as filled with God\u2019s presence: &nbsp;&nbsp; In stories of his life, Francis is quoted as talking to or about larks, lambs, rabbits, pheasants, falcons, cicadas, waterfowl, bees, the famous wolf of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27703"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=27703"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27703\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":27708,"href":"https:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27703\/revisions\/27708"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=27703"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=27703"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=27703"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}