While calling ourselves intelligent, we’ve lost touch with the natural world. As a result, we’ve lost touch with our own souls.
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.
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).
--Fr. Richard Rohr
Happy Earth Day!
How (and where) will you
reconnect with nature today?
How (and where) will you
reconnect with nature today?
Image source: Pirates Cove Trail, Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy, https://www.parksconservancy.org/trails/pirates-cove-trail
Quotation source
Quotation source
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