Welcome to Tuesday and our feature on nature as a window into the divine with a reflection based on the writing of Carl Safina, this time from The View from Lazy Point.
The Sarum Prayer
God be in my head—and in my understanding
God be in my eyes—and in my looking
God be in my mouth—and in my speaking
God be in my heart—and in my thinking
God be at my end—and at my departing
Wisdom of Jesus Portion
Matthew 7: 12
“In everything do to others as you would have them do to you; for this is the law and the prophets.”
Reflection Based on The View from Lazy Point
In his fourth book, The View from Lazy Point, Carl Safina’s spiritual take on nature emerges with heightened clarity. The book opens with a quote from Howard’s End, by E. M. Forrester: “Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon… Live in fragments no longer. Only connect.”
Toward the end of the book, Safina writes of his understanding of what it means to be religious in the best sense. “Religare,” he writes, using the Latin, “means to re-tie, or to gather to bind…thus the word “religation”—reconnection—is one root of the word, “religion.” Albert Einstein said our task is to “widen our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”
Now Safina gets right to his point: “So what I guess I’m trying to say is that, though I’m a secular person and a scientist, I believe that our relationship with the living world must be mainly religious. But I don’t mean theological. I mean religious in the sense of reverent, revolutionary, spiritual, and inspired. Reverent because the world is unique, thus holy. Revolutionary in making a break with the drift and downdraft of outdated, maladaptive modes of thought. Spiritual in seeking attainment of a higher realm of human being. Inspired in the aspiration to connect crucial truths with wider communities. Religious in precisely this way: connection, with a sense of purpose” (The View from Lazy Point, 324–225).
This is a sense of “religious” that I can embrace. And it seems to comport with the great religious figures of the ages, including my personal favorite, the teacher of the Sermon on the Mount. In this midrash on Torah, he called for a radical embrace of non-rivalrous love with these words—the words, not of a Hallmark Card, but of his narrow path that leads to life, in contrast with the wide path that leads to destruction: “In everything do to others as you would have them do to you; for this is the law and the prophets.”
This phrase, “the law and the prophets” referred to the Bible that Jesus knew. In other words, if our reading of sacred text violates the rule of empathy-love, then it is a bad reading of sacred text. Worse than that, it violates the crucial meaning of religion: “Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon.” And his.
And Safina’s religious love of the wild and its inhabitants enhances my reading of this rule for reading the law and the prophets (his bible) aright: in everything do to others as you would have them do to you. Others, that’s an important word. In the Abrahamic faiths, God is the ultimate Other. That is, God is “set apart” from all else, uncreated, unique. Just as Safina defines holy as “unique.” To love the ultimate other, we must love the proximate others. And who is to say that this word, “others” is limited to human others? Could it not refer as well to “others than us humans”—that is to all living creatures? Albert Einstein’s expanding circle of compassion is one that embraces compassion toward ourselves, our loved ones, our groups, our nation and the others of our species with whom we don’t identify in these ways. But it doesn’t end there. It encompasses “all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.” This is what the indigenous nations who came here long before the Europeans arrived have been trying to tell whoever will listen for centuries now. As the Sermoner on the Mount might say it, “Those who have ears, let them hear.”
Meditation: Sounds of the Rainforest
For our meditation, as you listen to the sounds of the rainforest in the background, place your focus on the chest, where the heart resides. Imagine the heart throbbing with the same quality of life that animates the rain forest—in fact, that animates the universe since the time of the Big Bang. Imagine this animating power as an orb of light encompassing your heart, inclining your heart to love yourself and to love your loved ones. Then imagine the orb of light expanding until it encompasses your entire body, the room in which you find yourself today, and beyond as far as you can imagine. Or if you prefer, just listen to the birds.
Prayer to the Spirit
Fire of the Spirit, life of the lives of creatures,
spiral of sanctity, bond of all natures,
glow of charity, lights of clarity, taste
of sweetness to sinners, be with us and hear us.
—Hildegard of Bingen, 12th century nun, writer, composer, mystic, visionary, polymath, regarded by many as a founder of scientific natural history in Europe.
Prayer for Loved Ones
Over the next minute simply call to mind your loved ones (of any species, plants included) lifting them in the embrace of remembered love, to the Source of All Being.
Serenity Prayer
God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
courage to change the things I can,
and wisdom to know the difference.
Benediction
So have a blessed day, go in peace, wash your hands, love your neighbor: we are not alone.