One of the things I hear a lot in my profession is some version of the statement: “I don’t come to church because I experience God in nature.” And I’m not the only one who hears this--I was at an interfaith gathering of clergy recently, and one of the participants was talking about a prospective new member of her congregation, one of those most rare and highly prized of creatures, a young male who comes to church. She told us that during a recent conversation with him he’d been explaining his resistance to getting more involved and used the “I find God in nature” line—in this case while scuba diving. There was an outburst of groans and shaking of heads around the circle. “How unique!” cried out another pastor sarcastically, “I’ve never heard that before.”
I knew how she felt, but I also wondered to myself if there might be some better way to respond. Because the truth is, nature is a good place to find God. Many of my own most profound experiences of holiness have come outside; outside the artificially-lit, socially-constructed human world. Haven’t we all had our moments of awe at the beauty and intricacy of the wild creatures, the round of the seasons, the grandeur of the mountains, the sea, or the sky? Haven’t they spoken to us of a greater wholeness, a majestic presence to which we are in some way related? So why belittle those who testify to the power of such experiences to move them to reverence? It seems to me that as religious men and women in a secular age we ought to be celebrating transcendence wherever it shows up in people’s lives. In a time when the human race casts a long shadow over the future of the earth, we ought to be affirming the sacred meaning and value of our connection with nature.
And if we feel that such moments of solitary communion do not make for a complete religion, we ought to be able to do better than to just get grumpy. We ought to be able to begin a conversation on the common ground of our own experiences of finding God outside. Maybe we could ask people to tell us what those moments have taught them and how they inform the way they live every day. Maybe we could give an account of what we have learned from them, and how they fit into a larger pattern of religious faith and ethics and practice. It may not always work, but it seems worth a try.
Because I have a hunch that even the most confirmed nature mystic has found from time to time that right at the heart of the experience of the magnificent sunset or the thundering waterfall is a uniquely sharp kind of loneliness. In part it is the loneliness of realizing that there is no way to communicate the experience to others. Any words you could say, or picture you could draw, or photograph you could take would be inadequate to convey what you perceived at that moment, even to a lover or an intimate friend. And there is also the loneliness of realizing how out of accord our everyday lives are with the harmonious and sacred order of God’s creation. We come back from that day-hike or that vacation in peaceful natural surroundings and find ourselves in the midst of noise, waste, haste, confusion, competition, and struggle.
You don’t have to have an overly romantic and idealized view of nature, or an overly jaded view of human society to recognize that things are failing to connect up in some very important ways. And that is one way of explaining what biblical religion is about. Because the bible is very clear that the God who orders heaven and earth in beauty and harmony, and the God who acts in history to liberate, to redeem and restore humanity are the same God.
That is what the passage we read from Isaiah today is arguing. “Have you not known?” the prophet says, “Have you not heard?” It is God “who stretches out the heavens like a curtain, and spreads them like a tent to live in.” It is God “who brings princes to naught, and makes the rulers of the earth as nothing.” It is God who numbers the stars and calls them by name, and it is God who gives “power to the faint, and strengthens the powerless.” God is the creator and sustainer of humankind and does so along with, and through, the goodness of the natural order, which testifies to his wisdom and power.
If human society does not reflect the harmony of God’s creation, if the goods of the earth are not shared equally but are hoarded by some and denied to others, if carelessness and greed are making a world that is violent and ugly, toxic to life and menacing to the future, it can only be in the spirit of rebellion against God. The harsh language of the bible that is so distasteful to our contemporary ears, and leads so many people to dismiss it as the work of weird fanatics, comes out of grief, horror, and anger at that rebellion and the destruction it has caused. The bible does not let us rest easy about the consequences of a life out of harmony with God’s work and God’s will. But it never despairs. It never loses faith in God’s purpose for us, the purpose that was there at the beginning. And it never loses hope that God is able, that God is active, that God is sending another spirit to heal the spirit of rebellion in our souls and recreate us, a spirit of truth, of wisdom, of holiness and peace.
The New Testament is the good news about that Spirit, as it breaks forth into the human world in the person of Jesus Christ. We have been reading in the Gospel of Mark about the first day of his public ministry. It was a Sabbath day, the day of the completion of creation, and he began it at the synagogue, teaching with authority and casting out an unclean spirit. In the Jewish reckoning of time the day ends at sundown, and immediately when the Sabbath is over the residents of Capernaum go to work, bringing the sick and the demon-haunted to Jesus to be healed.
We don’t learn when he finally goes to sleep, but he is up again in the darkness long before dawn. He goes out alone to a deserted place, where we can imagine him standing and gazing up into the heavens and drinking in the immensity of the universe. We can imagine him listening to the silent music of the stars and feeling his whole being vibrate with the same song. We can imagine his heart uniting with them in joy and praise and love for the creator of all this wondrous beauty. And in this moment he renews his will to go out and to preach to as many people as he possibly can that the same creator is coming now to act in their lives. He knows himself again full of the Spirit of the one he loves as Father, and he steels his resolve to confront the spirit that condemns and excludes and dominates, that fears and hates, wherever it may be at work.
In Jesus we see that the solitary encounter with God in nature has the purpose of sending us back to the human community, to find God there. That is where our real work is. It is there that the language of religious tradition helps us make meaning of our private moments of religious experience (which are, after all, only moments). Religious practice extends the influence of these experiences into the choices we make and the actions we take day after day after day. The common ground of scripture, of liturgy, of applied ethics and mutual concern, gives us a starting point for community. It gives us a place to stand together, and a place to hold each other accountable for what it is we claim to have learned about God when we went scuba diving, or backpacking, or made that spiritual retreat. In place of a lonely epiphany that cannot be communicated, religion gives us the proclamation of the Gospel, the shared experience of God’s love for us all.
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