Consider the Lilies
Coming Home to our Senses
“Direct sensuous reality, in all its more-than-human mystery, remains the sole solid touchstone for an experiential world now inundated with electronically-generated vistas and engineered pleasures; only in regular contact with the tangible ground and sky can we learn how to orient and navigate in the multiple dimensions that now claim us.” – David Abram[1]
Recently, Jessica Grose has written a series of essays in The New York Times documenting the decline in religious affiliation among Americans; that is, the move away from participation in “organized religion.” Fewer people are attending worship services regularly, but many of them still believe in God and engage in religious practices such as prayer. As Grose notes, those who no longer attend worship regularly (or at all) seek to find replacement activities. These commonly include spending time in nature, meditation and physical activity. Grose interprets the purpose of these activities as “basically anything that got them out of their own heads and the anxieties of the material world.”[2]
This is a somewhat odd interpretation, given the way in which respondents describe their worship replacement activities. One woman, a former Roman Catholic, said, “I try to spend Sunday morning outside appreciating the glory of nature.” It is not that people are seeking to escape the material world and its “anxieties.” They are describing a desire to connect more deeply with the material world; not simply to get out of their heads but also to get into their bodies. They are replacing traditional worship with a desire for embodied communion with the more-than-human world. This is not a world of dead matter. It is a world filled with “glory”: alive, dynamic, and communicative.
Many people are intuitively recognizing a profound, unmet spiritual need for re-connection with the natural world. The modern scientific objectification of nature, separating the human subject from the objects of perception, has left us feeling lonely and disoriented in a soulless landscape. Science itself is moving beyond this paradigm to embrace a renewed intersubjectivity, in which perception is participation in the reciprocal relationship between the sensible and the sensed. We are inextricably a part of nature, of reality. There is no privileged standpoint outside of it. We wouldn’t want to go there, even if there were. We long to be at home to the world, not to escape it.
We also are awakening to the destructive consequences of our separation from nature. The climate crisis is only the latest example of a 500-year orgy of violent exploitation of the earth and the indigenous peoples who lived in harmony with it for millennia. It results in clear-cut forests, mountaintop removal, polluted air and water, and toxic waste destroying oceans, lands, and bodies. Our separation from nature is making us all sick, in epidemics of drugs, disease, and loneliness. We need healing, which is the core meaning of “salvation.”
Too often, traditional worship exacerbates our feeling of spiritual homelessness. The model of salvation as escape from the world is alienating. It is also a betrayal of the fundamental revelatory experience of wonder and awe that nature inspires. We need to reclaim a sense of salvation as homecoming; of coming home to our senses in the world.
Authentic spirituality is never a flight from the natural world. It is an ever-deepening communion with reality marked by wisdom and love. It is about learning how to live in the world with dignity, grace, beauty, and justice. Such learning cannot occur apart from a profound openness, attention, and communication with the natural world of which we are apart.
In the Christian tradition, spiritual seekers often retreated to the wilderness or the desert precisely to cultivate a deeper capacity for such attention. The noise and distraction of the city was left behind – and its false ideologies – so as to enter more deeply into communion with the natural world. They also went there because they knew that the healing we need from the violence of human culture can only be found by renewed intimacy with nature. Nature and the Bible were understood to be the two great books of revelation; and, properly understood, they were not in conflict with each other.
I feel the call of communion with nature very deeply in my own life. I discover insight, peace, and healing in time spent in communion with the more-than-human world, and in monastic communities embedded in places of natural beauty. We have made such spaces the exception, rather than the rule, of a harmonious and whole life. What if we began to reimagine our congregations, and our communities, as sites for the recovery of spiritual attunement to reality as a whole, and not as places of escape from reality? What if we centered our sensuous connection with nature, the Word made flesh, in our worship? What if the thin spaces of spiritual energy in wild places became our cathedrals?
There is much in Christian tradition that we can draw upon for this reconfiguration of spiritual community: rich traditions of singing, chanting, movement, pilgrimage, meditation, and art - the sacramental principle that all created things are bearers of divine grace, beauty, and meaning - Jesus’ own profound invitation to “consider the birds of the air and the lilies of the field,” not as metaphors but as intelligences that communicate the divine glory and impart valuable lessons on how to live, if we pay attention. Consider, too, Jesus’ ambivalence toward the Temple in favor of seashores, mountains, and fields as sites for prayer, teaching, healing, and communion.
The Christian tradition is the bearer of a premodern wisdom that never lost touch with our sensuous embodiment in a world of signs and wonders. It is a tradition that understood enlightenment as the capacity to perceive reality in all its glory and to live in harmony with it. It is a tradition with a unitive vision of body and soul, heaven and earth, nature and culture. Our task is to recover this vision, and to enlarge it to reconcile all the invidious distinctions we make to justify relationships of domination.
The greatest and most invidious of these distinctions is that between humans and nature. Until the Church addresses its anthropocentrism and comes to understand salvation as truly cosmic in scope, people will continue to exit the churches and go outside to appreciate the glory of nature. Maybe we need to march out there with them.
[1] David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-Human World (New York: Vintage Books, 2017), p. X.
[2] Jessica Grose, “The Largest and Fastest Religious Shift in America Is Well Underway,” The New York Times (June 21, 2023).