I am writing this blog from Portland, OR, as I am visiting my brother and his wife, Jeanine, following a recent surgery that she is recovering from.
My brother, Marc, is an organic farmer and teacher and knows so much about plants, vegetables, flowers and trees. One thing I love about being at their house – especially at this time of year – is that so much of their property in the front and back yards features edible gardens, fruit trees, etc. I get to go around the place chomping on kale, peas, cherries and strawberries and then get to sit among beautiful flowering plants. If that’s not conducive to spiritual reflection, I don’t know what is!
Perhaps you live in or have access to such spaces of beauty. I hope so and encourage us all to be in these spaces as often as we can (in whatever ways we can). Maybe it’s in your garden or in a local park. Maybe it’s at a local botanical conservatory or in the woods somehow. Maybe we sit outside of where we live and take in whatever we can of the natural world. These are all places to encounter the divine presence of the universe.
Barbara Brown Taylor, one of my favorite spiritual authors, says,
“People encounter God under shady oak trees, on riverbanks, at the tops of mountains, and in long stretches of barren wilderness. God shows up in whirlwinds, starry skies, burning bushes, and perfect strangers. When people want to know more about God, the son of God tells them to pay attention to the lilies of the field and the birds of the air…Whoever wrote this stuff believed that people could learn as much about the ways of God from paying attention to the world as they could from paying attention to scripture…People…can learn as much from a love affair or a wildflower as they can from knowing the Ten Commandments by heart.” (An Altar in the World)
This was not necessarily a message I heard in church growing up, but it is one I try to remember very often these days.
Richard Rohr, OFM, says it a different way. He says that, “the first Bible is the Bible of nature. It was written at least 13.8 billion years ago, at the moment that we call the Big Bang, long before the Bible of words…One really wonders how we missed that. Words gave us something to argue about, I guess. Nature can only be respected, enjoyed, and looked at with admiration and awe. Don’t dare put the second Bible in the hands of people who have not sat lovingly at the feet of the first Bible. They will invariably manipulate, mangle, and murder the written text…Holy [whole] people will find God in nature and everywhere else too. Heady people will only find God in books and words, and finally not even there.”[1]
In whatever ways that you are able, I hope that you can sit at the feet of the “first bible” this week, discover God there and receive what you need from our primal teacher.
[1] https://cac.org/daily-meditations/the-first-bible-2016-02-28/