If you can suspend disbelief, as required by every drama, then believe this for a moment: Out of the word came everything we know. Nature. The world. The earth. All creatures, plants, peoples. Four-leggeds and two-leggeds. Wings, legs, heads, thoraxes, abdomens. Thoughts and visions and dreams. We are considering notions regarding Nature and spirituality, but when I hear many people nowadays talk about spirituality, I am puzzled. It seems as if the current definition of being spiritual simply means that I think about my psychological health, that I take refuge in Nature, that “I understand Native American spirituality and where Native Americans are coming from because I once sat in a weekend retreat with a genuine Native American shaman,” that I get touched by the sight of birds or the sun setting over the ocean or mountains or cornfields.
This is nothing new, although it seems more pervasive and simplistic perhaps than it did in earlier times. Evelyn Underhill begins her 1936 book The Spiritual Life by noting, “The spiritual life is a dangerously ambiguous term; indeed, it would be interesting to know what meaning any one reader at the present minute is giving to these three words.” She continues, “Many, I am afraid, would really be found to mean ‘the life of my own inside.’” Others would think of it as “something very holy, difficult and peculiar.” She concludes wryly that this latter view sees spirituality as “a sort of honours course in personal religion—to which they did not intend to aspire.” Both those views in Underhill’s opinion are too individualistic and self centered. We need to get away “from those petty notions,” she holds, and focus on “that great spiritual landscape which is so much too great for our limited minds to grasp.”1
I am feeling my way along here, on thin ice cracking all around me, testing an area about which I feel inadequate . . . and yet the current spiritual scene seems much too facile, too rootless. Though it appears to take Nature into account, it is not genuinely grounded and has no commitment to hard thought beyond the current conventional wisdom, which is generally more current and conventional than wise. It is certainly possible to separate spirituality from conventional religions, or from religious institutions, but it is not possible to separate spirituality from the religious. Spirituality transcends all religions; we all know persons who are profoundly spiritual but belong to no particular church or faith. This does not mean they are irreligious. Neither is it possible to separate the spiritual from Nature and the natural. Because I am on thin ice and seeking (what—safety? a way out? a firm path?), I must look at as many of the available resources as possible, hunting down usable bits that will make a whole mosaic that is sensible, the fragments finally integrated into a larger picture.
Perhaps the problem is simply that spirituality is a complex idea or set of ideas. Robert Cummings Neville, in Boston Confucianism, agrees that “spirituality need not be closely associated with religions,” but he, too, sees a tie between spirituality and the religious. He holds that there are three interrelated aspects to the religious enterprise: “ritual, cognition, and spiritual practices, all shaped by religious symbols engaging what is taken to be ultimate.” For Neville, ritual “includes not only explicit liturgies” but also “repetitive behaviors” that people think are important reflections of our relationship to the world. The cognitive part includes “myth, cosmology and philosophy,” which folks take to be basic categories of reality. Perhaps most important for our discussion, “Spiritual practices encompass the range of behaviors, corporate and personal, aimed at communal or personal transformation so as to better relate to what is taken to be ultimate.”2
One reason we turn to other traditions, such as American Indian or Buddhist traditions, is that we don’t have many spiritual practices that work for us anymore. Our churches and our culture too often offer indoctrination: a closing down of possibilities, rather than of an opening of ourselves to possibility. But most important, we also seem to have lost the self-discipline to work on self and communal transformation. Indeed we may even believe that we no longer need transformation. If we do, we expect to find an easier way in other traditions. Yet self-cultivation is the great spiritual exercise in every great tradition, and in every tradition, spiritual practice requires the utmost in effort. In each of the great traditions, the purpose of self-cultivation is never simply to realize the self. It is to put ourselves in a better position to serve our families, our friends, our society, and the natural environment that surrounds us—and to put us in a better relationship to whatever it is that we see as the ultimate reality (whether transcendent or immanent in the cosmos). It is that improved relationship that finally makes us feel that we have found our place and are at home in the world.
Martin Buber writes, “Religiosity is man’s urge to establish a living communion with the unconditioned; it is man’s will to realize the unconditioned through his deed, and to establish it in his world. Genuine religiosity, therefore, has nothing in common with the fancies of romantic hearts, or the self-pleasure of aestheticizing souls or the clever mental exercises of a practiced intellectuality.” Rather he finds it in our daily life and work: “Genuine religiosity,” Buber says, “is doing.” It lies in sculpting the unconditioned out of the matter of this world. For him, “the countenance of God reposes, invisible, in an earthen block.” It is our human task to carve it out, let it appear from our work on the earth. “To be engaged in this work means to be religious—nothing else.” He continues,
Men’s life, open to our influence as is no other thing in this world, is the task apportioned to us in its most inward immediacy. Here, as nowhere else, there is given to us a formless mass, to be in-formed by us with the divine. The community of men is as yet only a projected opus that is waiting for us; a chaos we must put in order; a Diaspora we must gather in; a conflict to which we must bring reconciliation. But this we can accomplish only if, in the natural context of a life shared with others, everyone of us, each in his own place, will perform the just, the unifying, the in-forming deed: for God does not want to be believed in, to be debated and defended by us, but simply to be realized through us.3
There is a common, underlying element in Buber’s contention, in the Upanishads, in the sermon by the Priest of the Sun, and in Heraclitus’s gleaming fragments: the world is one. For a time we argued over whether everything in the cosmos is continuous or discontinuous. After Newton we insisted in our mathematics that everything is continuous—until physics showed us what our least sophisticated personal observations always led us to believe: that there are gaps; things do come in units. Whether continuous or with gaps, whole or fragmented, nothing comes without relationships, without connections. When those relationships are healthy—that is, when the things around us are healthy—we tend to be healthy. If the things around us tend to be weak or spindly or unhealthy, we have little chance to become otherwise. There is an astonishing unity that we share with everything else in the cosmos, animate and inanimate. That unity is established by our relationships, our ties, to everything around us. The ties of all those things we relate to extend their own connections to everything around them, an expanding circle of connections. Despite our individuality there is a sense in which we are all a tangle of ganglia, reaching out, ultimately touching all, everything related, everything one in our unified, interrelated (the word itself implies units connected) cosmos.
This entire, mysterious, ever emerging, ever puzzling cosmos is what I think Buber would call “the unconditioned.” It is the primary material with which we have to work, and it is what undergirds, lies immanent within, our souls and is of the substance of God himself, herself, itself. In many traditional views, including the Western view, that unity is created and sustained by, indeed is, the word. Right here, embedded in this great mystery and metaphor, lie the clues we seek to the relationship between Nature and the spiritual life.
In the earliest Western visions of the universe, our elders sound like Zen priests or some truly archetypal American Indian shaman, seeing the world as a single, living organism. Pre-Socratics like Thales, Heraclitus, Empedocles, and Diogenes are very clear about this. “Everything breathes in, breathes out. . . . So all creatures have a share of scent and breath. . . . All things have intelligence and a share of thought,” writes Empedocles. In the beginning, he continues, “all creatures were tame and gentle to men, all animals and birds and loving minds glowed.” Diogenes proclaims, “Everything is of one substance,” but “we have complicated every simple gift of the gods.” How much he sounds like the Priest of the Sun. Heraclitus agrees: “Not I but the world says it: All is one.” What makes it one, in his view, is the logos, the precise word of relationship and harmony, adding to a comment he makes earlier: “The Logos is eternal.”4 For those ancients from the West, everything is tied to the earth, our physical and spiritual lives rooted in and of both the earth and the cosmos.
Anglos, too, come from a tradition of humans embedded in Nature, an inextricable part of a single living organism that includes every creature. We have not followed the best of our cultural traditions—no culture ever has for long. But we are not descendants of a cultural tradition that was poisoned at the root as some would have us believe. Indeed, one of the great clues to a satisfactory spiritual life in our time lies in our own culture’s most ancient beliefs. Finding the right words—and finding ways to honor their sacred function in the world—is one of the great spiritual and intellectual disciplines for our time.
If there is confusion about what it means now to be spiritual, it seems to me that a similar confusion characterizes our talk about Nature and the environment. We have not gotten our rhetoric straight, even among environmentalists, about what we mean when we say “Nature.” For most it still means someplace out of town, preferably away from people. We “go back to” Nature. The distinctions we make among Nature, the land, the earth, the environment, the natural world, and wilderness are fuzzy at best. We tend to use the terms as if they were synonymous, but they are not. Worse, our environmental rhetoric continues to betray some confusions in our thinking, and it indicates that we need to take another look at what we say about what we believe. Too often the implication of our words is that we do not—despite our public rhetoric—really believe that humans are part of Nature. Some may dismiss such concerns as mere “semantics,” but I think the matter is of graver import. The ghosts of all those I’ve talked of thus far support me in this.
If we love the world, and if our practice is to be true and our rhetoric revealing of the truth, we have to be clear about our language, and here we are remembering Heraclitus and Confucius, and the Priest of the Sun, and honoring John and Vāc—all of whom honored the word. Yet we environmentalists talk of the natural world as if there were another, unnatural world. We talk of sacred places as if there were other, nonsacred places. We talk of natural materials and plastic, of natural and man-made. We talk of getting back to Nature, as if we could possibly—ever—tear ourselves away. If we humans are inextricably in Nature, linked to it, part of it, as our own environmental rhetoric insists, then we have to forego the language and ideas that imply that somehow we can go to it, as if we were not already in it, wherever we are—mountain height, skid row, radiant coast, New York Bowery flophouse, lush Midwest, downtown Chicago, Sonoran Desert, or the seediest side street of our nation’s capital. Yet we seem to think that we can go out and come back; that we’ll find something “out there,” experience something different “out in Nature” than we find in other places such as offices and back alleys and dank urban canyons, or in our own hearts and minds and actions.
There is no other place; there is only this one entirely natural world, and the trashed-out back alley in the shadows of concrete is as natural as the mountaintop, and as sacred. The roadside strewn with Styrofoam cups and the corner behind the Dumpster covered with vomit from one of our culture’s homeless drunks are also natural, and therefore sacred. The red rock arches of the West may be more pleasing, but no more sacred; less changed by human endeavor or human failure, but no more natural. Buber would hold it all sacred. “The holy is not a segregated, isolated sphere of Being, but signifies the realm open to all spheres, in which they can find fulfillment.” Buber believed the difference between the sacred and the secular to be fuzzy at best. “There is no not-holy, there is only that which has not yet been hallowed.” But hallowing is what we humans do. It is the result of a decision and grows out of commitment. “In reality,” writes Buber, “the main purpose of life is to raise everything that is profane to the level of the holy.”5 There is only one sacred place, then, only one Nature in all its distinctive manifestations in the ten thousand things: it is everywhere, and it is up to us in all our frailty, greed, desire, and longing, and with all the self-discipline we can muster, to hallow it all.
This Nature, dependable in its eternity, is our one given in the world. The earth may be blasted, pillaged, deformed, raped, debauched, and despoiled, but Nature is the one thing always, from the beginning, omnipresent, ever there. It is impossible to imagine a world, or a time, without it. It is the ultimate under-around-above-within us thing-being-presence; it is inescapable, eternal, uninvented and uncreated. It is the one being that is all beings and at the same time is a power beyond all beings. However our planetary expression of Nature—“the earth” or “the land”—came to be, from a big bang or a prime mover, from creator or trickster, it clearly came from the still larger, preexisting Nature that encompasses our own little planet as well as all those other planets and galaxies known and not yet known.
There is no way in which Nature and the earth are coequal. We can cause the earth, the land, the environment, great pain; we can wreck its natural beauty and damage everything in it; but it is just another manifestation of our human hubris to think we can change anything fundamental about Nature. The natural processes go on; even at our worst we cannot warp them or shape them to our ends, despite our efforts. Any success in bending Nature to our will is only apparent and surely temporary.
What happens in Nature is a range of mountains, the deep ranges of the sea, the short grass ranges of the American West and the far-reaching ranges of the African veldt, the oak savannahs and tall grass ranges of the upper Midwest, sky-searching midlatitude redwoods and ground-hugging sub-Arctic blueberries, royal elk and dappled fawns and white-face calves, dogwood and poison ivy, big bluestem and Canadian thistles—the incredibly diverse range of species, animal and vegetable and mineral, and the complex range of genders with all their means of pleasure and possibilities of reproduction that support it all. And all of this is not even a tiny fraction of the diversity of the ten thousand ineluctably, deliciously, riotously, profusely, natural “things”—all of them natural, yes, and far beyond our deepest sensibility or power to describe. For us Nature is always both here and beyond. That is, Nature includes not only earth but the Milky Way and Andromeda and all those other galaxies and potential galaxies beyond our most powerful instruments of observation. They are, just as this earthly Nature is, us. If that sounds a bit ethereal or unearthly, even our scientists now say that “generations of heavy stars could have been through their entire life-cycles” before our solar system even formed. The cosmos is an atom recycling bin, and the atoms of those long-dead stars found themselves in the cloud that condensed into our sun. “The earth, and we ourselves,” explains the British astronomer Martin Rees, “are the ashes of those ancient stars.”6
The natural processes go on because there are no supernatural or subnatural or unnatural processes. There is only Nature, of whose fundamental workings we have only the tiniest glimmer of understanding at best. We know so little of it, despite our science, that no matter how closely we associate ourselves with it, we never really know the outcome of any action we take toward it. We pull at a loose thread and unravel a whole ecosystem. We may be able to revision it, revise it, alter it, heal it, change our attitudes and actions toward it, or change our perceptions of it, but we did not invent it and we cannot destroy it. No matter what we might wish, we do not and never will have, thank heaven, such power.
What seems to me beautiful and reassuring about all this is that when the last leaf has strangled and fallen; when the last fish has floated, gills flexing and belly up, to the surface; when the last human has torn off the elaborate clothing designed to protect him from the poisons he has created; and when the earth has blown to smoke like a puffb all on the solar wind, what will be left, operating as always in the silence after all our human clamor—and the final whimper—will be Nature. And the rules will still be the same: give in to hubris and Nature will thwart you; abuse it, use it too much for your purposes instead of its own, and Nature will pull the rug out from under you—there will be no place to stand. So the titles The Death of Nature (Carolyn Merchant) and The End of Nature (Bill McKibben) are wrong. The rest of those books may be wonderfully right, but there is no end to Nature.
We invest our concern and our care in the land, give it our allegiance, and work for its preservation, but we place our confidence, our trust, and our faith in Nature. Whether we destroy it or not, the earth will surely die; that is its nature as well as ours; but Nature goes on. This concept of Nature that I am arguing for is far larger and more encompassing than a single planet. This larger Nature includes us as citizens of the cosmos, participants in decisions of ultimate importance: Will there be human life in the galaxies? What kinds of persons do we have to become to enable a future for these lives (and not only our own human lives) on earth? How do we live to assure our continued presence?
Some people do very nicely without any gods but still feel that there is something more to life and the world than our corporeal bodies and that the life of the world is more than mechanics on a grand scale. They are caught up by the sheer aliveness of it all. They deeply love the world and care for it. Dietrich Bonhoeffer was such a person, a young Lutheran pastor who took part in the famous attempt to kill Hitler. He was profoundly involved in the life of his time and confronted squarely every terrifying moral dilemma humans may face. While in prison, just a few months before Hitler had him strangled with piano wire and hung on a meat hook, Bonhoeffer speculated that the only future for Christianity was to develop a religionless faith that would square with the true nature of the world. God, he believed, was no longer necessary for some.7 Others remain comfortable identifying a God who created it all and who still cares for all creation—including humans—as part of the creative process of Nature.
Either way, the first great sacrilege is to believe in sacred places, as if there were other, nonsacred places. Perhaps we’ll begin to honor best that elemental spiritual life that we seek when we learn to meditate on the darkest corner of the great and dingy city’s meanest alley, in the smell of urine and staleness and filth and rotting things well set on their course of decay. They are all natural, and if we love Nature and see ourselves inextricably in it, then our actions are in it too, all our actions, including the creation of desperate circumstances and devastated places. Why would we expect ourselves to be different? Nature, given its own destructive aspects, does the same, and we are in and of Nature. How could we be different? And yet we know ourselves, and we have friends as examples, to be capable of more persistently doing positive, creative work than surrendering to destructive actions.
I am not aware of any scripture, epic, or folktale from any culture that holds that gods reside only in the beautiful. There are many from around the world who hold that the sacred resides in it all, not just its parts. Perhaps we’ll begin to honor the gods when we learn to meditate on the darkest aspects of Nature, those that are normally associated with our human actions. That should be possible, for everything that humans do is as natural as anything that a coyote does. The rusting motor block in the junkyard and the dogwood on the edge of the forest are equally natural. Perhaps one is not as aesthetically satisfying as the other, and they play different roles in how the world works, but they are both natural. Therefore, if we love Nature—and see ourselves inextricably in it, as we claim—that back alley scene of a homeless drunk ought to be a source of love rather than antipathy, of acceptance rather than rejection or disdain and disgust, of action rather than impotence. If it is not beautiful or pleasing, then we must work to eliminate both the homelessness and the waste and make it so.
Often what we reveal when we write about Nature is our own desire. We are looking for something: to get away from the city, to find solace or aesthetic pleasure, to be moved emotionally, to learn something. Or we are looking for adventure, for food or water or shelter or resources, for knowledge, for revelation. Whatever it is we seek, we often look to those great and beautiful landscapes we call sacred places for those things, not Nature. Given the state of the world today, how could we possibly focus our sense of the sacred only on beautiful places? That is the landscape equivalent of what Bonhoeffer calls “cheap grace.”8 It is harder, but perhaps more essential, to find the sacred in the ugly, the demeaned, the diminished—the Dumpster that the homeless woman leans against to vomit or pee in a city alley. If you want to see how humans relate to Nature, that is one crucial place to look.
Finding Nature in the marred and the scarred, the ugly and the mean, is harder but also inspiring, for it puts us to work on behalf of a much larger and more inclusive environment than trees and whales, not to protect but to change an environment that includes homelessness and waste and ugliness and disease and injustice. Meditating on that darker environment—the rich and maybe wildest part of all our wild lands as well as a wild part of our own interior life—we find it moves our spirits and minds to create something of beauty where it is most needed rather than where it is most obvious or comes ready-made. When we learn to tell stories about those places and about grand canyons, glacial cirques, and red rock arches, we’ll be telling a story that will ultimately create a sustainable life for all the world and all its creatures. This is all part of learning “how to love this world,” as Mary Oliver puts it. As much as she loves the out-of-doors, she does not suggest in her poems that we learn to love only benign and beautiful parts of the world but the whole of it.9
Our nature writers rarely write about Nature; they write about parts of Nature, especially the parts that appeal to them. Most often they write about landscape, or place, and ignore those elements of Nature that are not beautiful or pleasing. The problem with the nomenclature is that Nature does not reside only in a landscape; it lives in everything, whether the most minute particle or the great vastnesses beyond our globe. In our writing about landscape, we unwittingly dismantle the very unity, disconnect the connections in Nature that we urge others to see. If one wants to look at humans in Nature, one can look at landscape, and one can fret about our impact on it or take refuge in it. But if one wants to witness the way that humans are immanent in Nature, and the way that Nature is immanent in humans, one might also look at the cancer ward in any hospital. When we think of Nature as a pleasing landscape, we may find ourselves with nothing to say to those who are relating to Nature on those other, most intimate terms, where we live with Nature’s diseases and where we see Nature as a whole, all-encompassing being in which we live and move and discover—or fail to discover—our own being, and finally die.
Such a view makes some of our claims for landscape sound like platitudes or clichés. “Learn to live with Nature” instead of fighting it or seeing it as an enemy, our writers urge. But what guidance does that give my friends with cancer? Which aspect of Nature do I learn to live with, the part that is trying to kill me or the part that heals my body and feeds my soul? They are both expressions of the same Nature. There, in a larger context that includes disease, is Nature hard at work, the handiwork on proud display. And there are humans hard at work relating to Nature’s manifestation as illness. How do we look at that and recognize in those lifescapes inspiration equivalent to that which beautiful canyon landscapes offer us with no effort on our part (except blisters soon healed)? Such friends’ hospital rooms and homes and lives are so filled with grief and potential grief, not to mention physical pain—all of it so ineluctably natural in its causes—that one might well come to hate this Nature that seems to destroy us without qualm or care.
So for those who love Nature, one spiritual task for our time is to look at our friends with ravaging diseases directly, full on, in all the implications of their circumstances, and see them too as part of the sacred lifescapes we all love where Nature does her splendid thing. Our nature writing will help us greatly in this territory, for it will show us the connections among the naturalness of disease, the naturalness of urban life, and our beloved natural landscapes. The connections lie in that deeper, more comprehensive Nature that encompasses all of it, in which it all abides, that affects us all just as we affect it in that endless reciprocity in which all the connections come together, the parts are seen whole, and the fundamental unity of all things is made clear.
The universe accepts me; I accept the universe—all of them, however many there are, however they work, the full mystery of it all. I learned something about this on a solo backpacking trip across high plains sagebrush desert from Red Lodge, Montana, to Shoshone, Wyoming—a couple hundred miles of scarce water, heat, wind, and, once, heavy snow that disappeared in a few days and returned the landscape to dust as suddenly as its alchemy had turned it to boot-sticking gumbo. Out there alone, miles from other humans, I felt the full indifference of Nature. For some that experience sends a chill through the spirit. The chill we feel comes from the fear that it is not just this landscape that is indifferent but the universe, all the universes, that as far as we can extend our minds or souls, there is Nature, and it is thick, perhaps even dark, with indifference.
But there is something more. The indifference is real, for nothing out there cares whether you live or die. There is no ill will in Nature, and there is no apparent goodwill either. But within that indifference, beyond the landscape, beyond the stars and within them all too, there is also a kind of acceptance. Purpose is not an issue here. Nothing out there wishes you were other than you are; nothing out there cares if you are just or unjust, wise or foolish, good or evil. My friends, my spouse, my church, my boss, all society may wish me other than I am, but Nature does not. Though you may learn from it, Nature will not insist that you change your life; it takes you, all of you, just as you are and makes no complaint. That acceptance, that absence of judgment, I think, is one unrecognized source of the solace we find in remote and beautiful landscapes. We walk out into the great landscapes to find our fulfillment. But our fulfillment is not in the landscape. Rewarding as the landscape is, we are not fulfilled in it but in that vast, indifferent, utter silence that lies behind it, was there before it, and will still be there after it is gone.
There is in that acceptance a kind of compassion as well. Its absence of judgment includes a kind of forgiveness that we all need. Both acceptance and compassion are prerequisites for love, the love that accepts us entire, as we are. That love can be found at the heart of Nature, that larger Nature that transcends all landscapes, our little earth, even our universe, that lies behind all our cosmos. The universe accepts me; my spiritual task then is to learn to accept (love) the universe with all its powerful goodness and its abhorrent, implacable disease and its ultimate capital punishment. My spiritual task is to tie my spirit to its accepting spirit, so that I can extend that acceptance to all other creatures, every landscape, to all disease and to all health. All of that is natural, all of it deserving of my love because every expression of Nature’s voice is, like me, part of Nature, all natural and deserving.
I love Paul’s metaphor that describes the church as “many parts, but all one body” (Rom. 12:4–5). But in our time we need to extend the metaphor, for what Paul did not know, had no reason to think of, we do know and must think of: the beloved community includes all creation, not just the human part of it. We cannot take care just of our human needs, or we will not take care of “God’s world.” There is a principle here, a law. Our compassion has to include it all, out to the farthest star. If it does not, those of us who love “God’s creation” will find ourselves at war against that creation. We must love even what is anathema to us and make no judgments on behalf of whatever god we have faith in. Whatever we withhold or exclude from our love (gay folks, straight folks, transgendered folks, white folks, black folks; Ebola, cancer, the common cold, flu) stunts our growth and diminishes our potential to love our God and become God’s servants in the only world given us. Extending Paul’s metaphor extends our field of view, opens us up to possibilities we may have seen before without the urgency a second look from a new perspective can bring. We may move from “That’s interesting” to “Wow, that’s really important!” Then we are really open to the possibility of care.
Nature asks nothing of us, but our experience of it does. It asks that we extend the acceptance in the heart of Nature through us to everything else, that we do not insist that the world change to suit our desires or to be what it cannot be. What it cannot be is the infinite resource to serve our economic systems, or a commodity we exchange for personal affluence, or a place where life is easy for us. It can be our inspiration, our solace, an aesthetic pleasure, a balm to our psyche, yes, even a measure of the world’s health and our own, for we are healthy only as long as Nature is healthy. But Nature is not here to provide us solace, inspiration, pleasure, or health. It has no intent toward us. We can give back to it the same acceptance and compassion it offers us by having no intent toward it, except the intent that Schweitzer recognized nearly a century ago, the intent to continue to live. That intent, he tells us, is the source of reverence for all life.10