NatureTheology5

Marie-Louise von Franz shares an example of how some cultures have retained a deep sense of connectedness with the earth, acknowledging the spirit and life within creation. She writes of a beautiful custom among Australian aborigines:

[W]hen the rice does not grow well the women go into the rice field and squat among the rice and tell it the myth of the origin of rice. Then the rice knows again why it is there and grows like anything. 34

This story of aborigine women is reminiscent of the story found in Matthew chapter 21, in which Jesus Christ, while once leaving Jerusalem became quite hungry. He saw a fig tree near the road and approached it, hoping to assuage his hunger. But upon finding nothing but leaves on it, he said to the tree: “Let no fruit ever grow on thee hereafter.” The fig tree then, to his disciples’ amazement, withered away. 35 Both stories attribute an element of spirit to life encountered in the natural world.

Yet, even if this reintegration of spirit and nature were to take place among all humankind, one of the greatest stumbling blocks in espousing a nature theology would still exist. It is the fact that it is difficult to express and to render the thoughts and feelings, particularly theological reflections, evoked by observing and studying the natural world. Poets and artists are among the few who have come closest to accurately expressing the beauty and mystery sown into all aspects of the natural world. To render the beauty of the natural world, whether in words or with an artist’s supplies, is a difficult undertaking, given that anything humans create is a mere copy of that creation which has already been perfectly crafted by the Author of all life. Vasily Zhukovsky explains this dilemma, saying:

To captivate and amaze us with its pictures, nature employs precipices, the green of trees and meadows, the sound of waterfalls and springs, the sky’s shining lights, storm and silence, while to express the impression that nature produces, the poor human is obliged to replace the manifold objects of nature with monotonous ink-scrawls... How can one depict that feeling of unexpectedness, magnificence, boundless distance, the host of mountains that has suddenly revealed itself to the gaze, like the blue waves of the sea turned to stone, the light of the sun and the sky with its myriad clouds throwing huge moving shadows on the mountains, fields, expanses of water…which delight and amaze the eye with their colorful variety! Every one of these may be named with a particular word; but the impression which all of them together produce on the soul, nothing can express [though many have tried]; at this point the tongue of man is silent, and you feel that the charm of nature lies in its inexpressibility. 36

Yet, despite the inexpressibility of the natural world, we are drawn to it, made more complete by attempting to understand it more fully. I am frequently drawn out into the natural world. One evening this fall, while walking beneath a fabulous layout of stars, near a forest on the St. Olaf College campus, I passed beneath thousands of maple leaves with deep orange-ing tips. These scenes triggered thoughts of renewal and new-life in my mind. Autumn is gorgeous, but those lovely leaves fall dead to the earth and lie under wet snow during the long winter months, decaying and decomposing. This is essential as they become valuable nutrients for the new-growth and beauty of spring, which must come about for the voluptuous greens of summer to flourish. We can view the seasons in nature as being analogous to seasons in life. The autumns and winters are not always enjoyable, but it can be comforting to know that, if we wait long enough, summer comes. I thought to myself: Stop and look all around to see Your Majesty. Believe me, you have already seen Him! This experience is merely one example of the many ways in which God is revealed to us in the natural world. The analogies are there, it is just a matter of looking closely enough to notice them. Thomas Merton, a catholic monk, once said:

Life is this simple. We are living in a world that is absolutely transparent, and God is shining through it all the time. This is not just a fable or a nice story. It is true. If we abandon ourselves to God and forget ourselves, we see it sometimes, and we see it maybe frequently. God shows Himself everywhere, in everything—in people and in things and in nature and in events. It becomes very obvious that God is everywhere and in everything and we cannot be without Him. It’s impossible. The only thing is that we don’t see it.

Jesus Christ saw it. Throughout his ministry he told parables, in which he illustrated moral lessons by using images from the natural world to mirror truths of life. This made the parables more readily understandable by those agrarian people who followed and listened to him. In Matthew 6:25-30, Jesus uses images of birds and flowers to explain God’s faithful provisions to humankind, saying:

[D]o not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothes? Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? And can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life? And why do you worry about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these. But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you--you of little faith? 37

Today, like the parables of Christ retold throughout the last two thousand-plus years, Scott Russell Sanders, too, tells of the value of the natural world, as a holy creation, worthy of our curiosity, inspection, awe, and undivided love. Like Jesus Christ, Sanders also sees the relevance of life in the natural world for the moral, and social, growth of humankind. Of creation he writes:

It is the work of a Creator whom we can apprehend directly, if fleetingly, in the depths of our own being, a Creator who transcends all categories and labels. We perceive the Creator in wildness, in beauty, in art, in the surge of ideas, in communion with our fellow creatures. 38

Let us heed the calls of Jesus Christ to look at the birds of the air and to consider the lilies of the field. Let us do as Sanders observes, to perceive the Creator in wildness. The natural world does all but beg for humanity to notice it more closely. There is so much value being overlooked.

The natural world certainly does have intrinsic value. But in a world ruled by money, is it possible, or even ethical, to monetarily valuate all forms of life in the biotic community? Aldo Leopold thought it not possible to do so, advocating that all life has value, significantly more than monetary value. He speaks of one such value, aesthetics, saying:

One basic weakness in a conservation system based wholly on economic motives is that most members of the land community have no economic value.Wildflowers and songbirds are examples…Yet these creatures are members of the biotic community… 39

34 Marie-Louise von Franz, An Introduction to the Interpretation of Fairy Tales (Texas: Spring Publications, 1982), 46.

36 Vasily Zhukovsky as cited by Anderson and Debreczeny, Russian Narrative and Visual Arts: Varieties of Seeing, 31.

38 Scott Russell Sanders, Hunting For Hope: A Father’s Journeys (Boston: Beacon Press, 1999).

NATURE THEOLOGY
HOME	Nature Theology, by Christie Gibbons, page 5 Marie-Louise von Franz shares an example of how some cultures have retained a deep sense of connectedness with the earth, acknowledging the spirit and life within creation. She writes of a beautiful custom among Australian aborigines: [W]hen the rice does not grow well the women go into the rice field and squat among the rice and tell it the myth of the origin of rice. Then the rice knows again why it is there and grows like anything. 34 This story of aborigine women is reminiscent of the story found in Matthew chapter 21, in which Jesus Christ, while once leaving Jerusalem became quite hungry. He saw a fig tree near the road and approached it, hoping to assuage his hunger. But upon finding nothing but leaves on it, he said to the tree: “Let no fruit ever grow on thee hereafter.” The fig tree then, to his disciples’ amazement, withered away. 35 Both stories attribute an element of spirit to life encountered in the natural world. Yet, even if this reintegration of spirit and nature were to take place among all humankind, one of the greatest stumbling blocks in espousing a nature theology would still exist. It is the fact that it is difficult to express and to render the thoughts and feelings, particularly theological reflections, evoked by observing and studying the natural world. Poets and artists are among the few who have come closest to accurately expressing the beauty and mystery sown into all aspects of the natural world. To render the beauty of the natural world, whether in words or with an artist’s supplies, is a difficult undertaking, given that anything humans create is a mere copy of that creation which has already been perfectly crafted by the Author of all life. Vasily Zhukovsky explains this dilemma, saying: To captivate and amaze us with its pictures, nature employs precipices, the green of trees and meadows, the sound of waterfalls and springs, the sky’s shining lights, storm and silence, while to express the impression that nature produces, the poor human is obliged to replace the manifold objects of nature with monotonous ink-scrawls... How can one depict that feeling of unexpectedness, magnificence, boundless distance, the host of mountains that has suddenly revealed itself to the gaze, like the blue waves of the sea turned to stone, the light of the sun and the sky with its myriad clouds throwing huge moving shadows on the mountains, fields, expanses of water…which delight and amaze the eye with their colorful variety! Every one of these may be named with a particular word; but the impression which all of them together produce on the soul, nothing can express [though many have tried]; at this point the tongue of man is silent, and you feel that the charm of nature lies in its inexpressibility. 36 Yet, despite the inexpressibility of the natural world, we are drawn to it, made more complete by attempting to understand it more fully. I am frequently drawn out into the natural world. One evening this fall, while walking beneath a fabulous layout of stars, near a forest on the St. Olaf College campus, I passed beneath thousands of maple leaves with deep orange-ing tips. These scenes triggered thoughts of renewal and new-life in my mind. Autumn is gorgeous, but those lovely leaves fall dead to the earth and lie under wet snow during the long winter months, decaying and decomposing. This is essential as they become valuable nutrients for the new-growth and beauty of spring, which must come about for the voluptuous greens of summer to flourish. We can view the seasons in nature as being analogous to seasons in life. The autumns and winters are not always enjoyable, but it can be comforting to know that, if we wait long enough, summer comes. I thought to myself: Stop and look all around to see Your Majesty. Believe me, you have already seen Him! This experience is merely one example of the many ways in which God is revealed to us in the natural world. The analogies are there, it is just a matter of looking closely enough to notice them. Thomas Merton, a catholic monk, once said: Life is this simple. We are living in a world that is absolutely transparent, and God is shining through it all the time. This is not just a fable or a nice story. It is true. If we abandon ourselves to God and forget ourselves, we see it sometimes, and we see it maybe frequently. God shows Himself everywhere, in everything—in people and in things and in nature and in events. It becomes very obvious that God is everywhere and in everything and we cannot be without Him. It’s impossible. The only thing is that we don’t see it. Jesus Christ saw it. Throughout his ministry he told parables, in which he illustrated moral lessons by using images from the natural world to mirror truths of life. This made the parables more readily understandable by those agrarian people who followed and listened to him. In Matthew 6:25-30, Jesus uses images of birds and flowers to explain God’s faithful provisions to humankind, saying: [D]o not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothes? Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? And can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life? And why do you worry about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these. But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you--you of little faith? 37 Today, like the parables of Christ retold throughout the last two thousand-plus years, Scott Russell Sanders, too, tells of the value of the natural world, as a holy creation, worthy of our curiosity, inspection, awe, and undivided love. Like Jesus Christ, Sanders also sees the relevance of life in the natural world for the moral, and social, growth of humankind. Of creation he writes: It is the work of a Creator whom we can apprehend directly, if fleetingly, in the depths of our own being, a Creator who transcends all categories and labels. We perceive the Creator in wildness, in beauty, in art, in the surge of ideas, in communion with our fellow creatures. 38 Let us heed the calls of Jesus Christ to look at the birds of the air and to consider the lilies of the field. Let us do as Sanders observes, to perceive the Creator in wildness. The natural world does all but beg for humanity to notice it more closely. There is so much value being overlooked. The natural world certainly does have intrinsic value. But in a world ruled by money, is it possible, or even ethical, to monetarily valuate all forms of life in the biotic community? Aldo Leopold thought it not possible to do so, advocating that all life has value, significantly more than monetary value. He speaks of one such value, aesthetics, saying: One basic weakness in a conservation system based wholly on economic motives is that most members of the land community have no economic value.Wildflowers and songbirds are examples…Yet these creatures are members of the biotic community… 39 --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 34 Marie-Louise von Franz, An Introduction to the Interpretation of Fairy Tales (Texas: Spring Publications, 1982), 46. 35 Translation from the Latin Vulgate, Holy Bible, 22. 36 Vasily Zhukovsky as cited by Anderson and Debreczeny, Russian Narrative and Visual Arts: Varieties of Seeing, 31. 37 The HarperCollins Study Bible, 1869. 38 Scott Russell Sanders, Hunting For Hope: A Father’s Journeys (Boston: Beacon Press, 1999). 39 Aldo Leopold, TheLand Ethic (NY: Ballantine Books), 246. page 1<>2<>3<>4<>5<>6
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