Our Sacred Earth
Finding our place in an evolving, living world
I have always been one of those people who feels more still, more placid in the natural world. It's difficult to name exactly. I am not just calmer, although it is that too.
At the Cincinnati Nature Center, I delight in the deciduous forests, the ponds and streams, the frogs and turtles, and the cattails and grasses of the wetlands. Another of my favorite places in Ohio, where I satisfy my yearning for the outdoors, is Hocking Hills, walking through the gorges and caves.
In both of these places, I can feel myself shift. The trees. The water. The trails. The gorges. The sky. My breath. My stillness.
The natural world opens me to the Divine in a way I have never experienced sitting in a church pew. There is such a palpable, numinous quality in nature for me. There is a sense of connection with the Sacred that feels both beyond me and a part of me, if that makes sense.
There are places where I feel, very clearly, that I am not separate from the world around me. I am part of it.
All of this keeps bringing me back to something I believe deeply: the Earth does not belong to us. We belong to the Earth.
I recently put together a presentation called The Sacred Earth: Finding Our Place in an Evolving, Living World. I thought I was preparing a talk about spirituality and nature. It turned out to be much more about relationship: our relationship with the Earth, with one another, with the Divine, with the universe itself.
And with the fact that we are not standing outside any of it.
An unfinished universe
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a Jesuit priest, paleontologist, and scientist, was fascinated by evolution. He did not see evolution as something religion needed to defend itself against. For him, evolution was part of the sacred story.
I have always thought this understanding of creation fit naturally into the Catholic sacred story, which is probably why I have never quite understood the alarm over anything that sounds remotely like pantheism.
To be sure, Teilhard was not a pantheist. He was not saying that God and the universe are simply the same thing. But I have never understood what is so threatening about the idea that everything might contain some spark of the Divine, that creation itself participates in God, and that because of that, all of it is sacred.
Wendell Berry comes to mind here too. Berry, who died just recently at the age of 92, was an American poet, novelist, essayist, farmer, and conservationist whose writing explored our relationship with the land, community, and the sacredness of the natural world.
He was deeply rooted in the Christian tradition, but he had very little patience for a Christianity that treated the Earth as though it were spiritually unimportant. If creation comes from God, if it is called good, and if we ourselves are creatures within it, why would we imagine that the sacred stops at the edge of the human body?
Berry wrote about human beings as creatures living among other creatures in a holy world. That makes intuitive sense to me. It does not require believing that a tree is God or that a river is God. It means that the tree and the river belong to a creation infused with meaning, value, and sacred presence.
That has always seemed far more consistent with the Christian story to me than the idea that God created the world and then somehow became absent from it. After all, Catholicism is already an incarnational faith. The Divine enters matter. Bread, wine, water, oil, bodies, touch — ordinary material things can become bearers of grace.
So the idea that God might also be deeply present in trees and mountains and rivers and animals has never seemed like much of a theological leap to me.
Maybe the distinction that matters is that the world is not God in its entirety, but God may be present in every part of it.
That makes much more sense to me.
Another of Teilhard's gorgeous propositions is that the universe was not created once, long ago, and then left sitting there finished. Creation is still happening.
Ilia Delio has carried Teilhard's thinking forward in contemporary theology. She writes about a God who is not separate from an evolving universe but present within its unfolding.
I absolutely love that idea. It changes the picture completely. We are not living on a finished planet inside a finished universe. We are living within something that is still becoming.
And, wondrously, so are we.
Thomas Berry — unrelated to Wendell Berry — also pushed against the idea that nature is basically scenery surrounding human life. Berry, a Catholic priest, cultural historian, and ecological thinker, spent much of his life writing about the relationship between humans, the Earth, and the larger universe. He wrote about the Earth as a living community, not simply a warehouse of resources.
That sounds obvious when you say it that way, but we don't live as if it is obvious. Rivers are useful if they provide water. Forests are useful if they provide lumber. Land is valuable if we can build on it. Animals matter according to how much we like them, need them, or can make use of them.
Berry reminded us that we are one species among many. Granted, a remarkably noisy species with highways, cell phones, leaf blowers, nuclear weapons, and a fairly impressive capacity to assume everything is about us.
But still, one species among many.
Relationship changes the question
Robin Wall Kimmerer's work shifted something for me.
Kimmerer is a botanist and a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. In Braiding Sweetgrass, she writes about reciprocity. Not simply what we take from the natural world, but what we give back.
That question stays with me: What do we give back?
We are very good at asking what land is worth, what can be built there, what can be harvested from it, what sits underneath it.
We are less accustomed to asking what we owe it.
Indigenous traditions have understood relationship with land in ways Western culture often has not. I want to be careful here because I am not Indigenous, and I do not want to borrow traditions that are not mine or pretend I understand them more deeply than I do.
But I can listen.
And what I hear, again and again, is an understanding of land not as backdrop, but as relationship. Earth, water, animals, plants, ancestors, human beings are not separate categories lined up in neat boxes. They are part of a web.
That is very different from the idea that humans are in charge and everything else is here for our use.
Francis was saying something radical
Long before ecology was a familiar word, Francis of Assisi called the sun his brother and the moon his sister.
Brother Sun. Sister Moon. Sister Water. Mother Earth.
We have made Francis very cute over the years. Put a little stone statue of him in the garden with a bird on his shoulder and a fawn at his feet; then we move on.
But his language was actually rather radical.
You do not own your sister. You do not exploit your brother. They are your kin.
Pope Francis returned to this understanding in Laudato Si', his encyclical on care for our common home. Environmental destruction, poverty, inequality, and human suffering are not separate problems sitting in different drawers.
The way we treat vulnerable people and the way we treat the Earth often grow out of some of the same assumptions: that some lives matter more than others, that some things exist mainly for our use, and that there will always be more.
There won't.
Maybe separateness is the real problem
The more I thought about all of this, the more I kept circling back to one idea.
We have forgotten that we are connected.
Thích Nhất Hanh was not part of my original Sacred Earth presentation, but I cannot think about this subject without thinking of him. He gave us the word interbeing — the understanding that nothing exists entirely on its own.
Think about a cup of tea.
There is rain in it. Clouds. Soil. Sunlight. The people who grew and picked the leaves. The person who transported them. The fuel that moved them. The tree that became the paper box sitting in your cupboard.
Take away everything that is "not tea," and eventually there is no tea.
The same is true of us.
The oxygen I am breathing while I write this came from plants. The elements in my body were forged in stars billions of years ago. The food that becomes my body comes from soil and sun and water.
There is an old Buddhist image I love called Indra’s Net. Imagine an infinite net stretching in every direction, with a jewel at every intersection. Each jewel reflects every other jewel, including all the reflections within those jewels, on and on without end. It is almost holographic: the whole is somehow present in every part.
Each jewel remains itself, but it cannot be understood apart from all the others. That feels very close to Thích Nhất Hanh’s idea of interbeing. We are distinct, but we are never truly separate.
We like tidy boundaries, don't we? Me. You. Tree. River. Animal. Sky.
Reality seems less interested in those categories.
That is what I hear in Thích Nhất Hanh's idea of interbeing. And I hear echoes of it in Teilhard, Wendell Berry, Thomas Berry, Kimmerer, Francis of Assisi, and Indigenous understandings of reciprocity and kinship.
They come from very different traditions and use very different language, but they keep bringing us back to relationship.
We are not separate.
Why certain places get to us
Maybe that is why some places affect us so strongly.
I've written before about thin places, places where the distance between the ordinary and the sacred seems almost transparent. Santa Fe is that kind of place for me. So are the mountains. And sometimes it is simply a quiet trail through an Ohio forest.
Nothing dramatic has to happen.
A hawk flies overhead. Light comes through the trees. Water moves over rock. For a few seconds, the endless commentary in my head shuts up.
That alone is practically a miracle.
And there it is again, that numinous quality I was trying to describe at the beginning. The Sacred feels very close.
Contemplation is really about noticing
Thomas Merton spent much of his life thinking about contemplation, silence, and our tendency to lose ourselves in busyness.
I do not think we all need to become Trappist monks. As a woman, I would not have been invited into the order in the first place.
But that's beside the point.
We do not need to live like Merton to understand something he understood very well: we cannot be in relationship with anything we never stop long enough to notice.
Contemplation does not require a monastery. It may mean walking outside without listening to anything, sitting beside a tree, watching birds, putting your hands or bare feet in the dirt, standing at the edge of a lake and simply looking at it.
For those of us who spend a lot of time in our heads, the body can be a doorway back. Notice the air. Feel warmth or cold. Listen. Feel the ground underneath you.
Our bodies already know something our minds often forget: we are animals.
Complicated animals, certainly. Animals who write poetry, file taxes, use Zoom, and argue on Facebook. But embodied creatures all the same.
We breathe. We need water. We respond to light. Our nervous systems register safety, rhythm, warmth, darkness, shelter.
We never really left nature.
We just became very good at pretending we had.
The sacred may be closer than we think
Maybe honoring a sacred Earth does not require adopting a particular theology. Maybe it begins with paying attention.
A tree is not simply lumber we have not cut down yet. A river is more than water headed somewhere useful. An animal is not an object wandering through a human world.
And we are not visitors who arrived here fully formed and somehow separate from everything that came before us.
We emerged from this place. We belong to this enormous family of life.
There is humility in that, but I also find comfort in it.
The natural world does not solve my problems or give me answers. When I am outside, the things I am worried about are usually still waiting for me when I get home.
But something shifts.
I notice the trees, the light, the sky, the feel of the ground beneath me. My world gets larger than whatever happens to be occupying my mind that day.
And once again I have that sense of being connected to something beyond myself and, at the same time, somehow a part of it.
For a little while, the Sacred feels very close.
