The Spiritual Creation

Thank you all for being here. Happy Halloween. My UNIV 101 students wanted me to dress in costume today. I apologize. I’m actually in my inner self. I’m really still a 14-year-old. So this is me dressing up as a college professor, which is basically my costume every day.

Today we’re going to talk about the spiritual creation. I just want to thank the Maxwell Institute, all my friends there, and thank you for coming, and thank this university. I mean, really, my thinking on this has been enabled and facilitated by my 28 years here at this university, for which I’m so immensely grateful.

Thirty years ago, I was on a walk with a Jewish colleague of mine at Northern Arizona University, where I taught before coming to BYU. She was a scholar of ecotheology, a field about which I knew nothing, and she inquired about Latter-day Saint views of the Creation. She was genuinely curious, and I told her about several doctrines.

But when I described the spiritual creation that happened before the physical creation and explained that plants and animals were considered living souls, she stopped in her tracks, looked right at me, and asked me, “Do Mormons know this?” And I said, “Well, of course we do.”

But the puzzled look on her face confused me. So I asked, “Why is this so important?” And she explained that the concept of spirit in nature was indispensable to any moral motivation to care for the earth. She said, “I mean no offense. I’ve known many Mormons, but I have never known a Mormon environmentalist. I would expect more from a religion that had such a view of the Creation.”

She poked my chest with her index finger and said, “You have to write about this and tell your fellow members about it.” That was when I first began to wonder at this doctrine.

Now, of the many distinct doctrines that we are given in the restored accounts of the Creation—in the endowment ceremony, in the book of Abraham, and in the book of Moses through Joseph Smith—nothing stands out as more significant than this one.

And here are the words from Moses 3:5:

“I, the Lord God, created all things, of which I have spoken, spiritually, before they were naturally upon the face of the earth.”

And just in case we might have missed the extent of this, we are told that this applies to “every plant of the field before it was in the earth, and every herb of the field before it grew.”

Only a few verses later, we discover something core about this spiritual creation. It is itself a source of wonder. We read:

“Out of the ground made I, the Lord God, to grow every tree, naturally, that is pleasant to the sight of man; and man could behold it. And it also became a living soul.”

So I wonder at this scripture just as I have come to wonder at trees themselves. After my colleague opened my eyes to these words in a new way, I began to see a myriad of ways in which the scriptures of the restored gospel taught me to see nature as holy and deserving of my care. And the more I saw this, the more these verses changed and enhanced my relationship to the Creation.

Maybe it was for this reason that when my wife and I were house-shopping 23 years ago, I fell in love with two trees that are central features of my backyard. As soon as I saw them, I knew I had to move into the house, even if I had to sell my right arm to afford it.

The first is this one, which isn’t easily photographed because it’s so large. It’s a climbable, enormous, shade-giving, and bird-bearing male mulberry. And he has a cousin, a large Norwegian maple. And Amy and I have admired these trees for almost 25 years.

Joseph Smith’s revelations explain to me that God delights in my delights at the astonishing facts and reality of my embodied life:

“Yea, all things which come of the earth, in the season thereof, are made for the benefit and the use of man,
Both to please the eye and to gladden the heart;
Yea, for food and for raiment, for taste and for smell,
To strengthen the body and to enliven the soul.
And it pleaseth God that he hath given all these things unto man; for unto this end were they made,
To be used, with judgment, not to excess, neither by extortion.
And in nothing doth man offend God, or against none is his wrath kindled,
Save those who confess not his hand in all things, and obey not his commandments.”

Now, a year ago, this mulberry tree was long overdue for a pruning. They have an unbelievable ability to sprout branches, and we hired a team to do the job. Sitting inside the house, I watched as enormous limbs fell to the ground.

It’s still embarrassing to me how emotional I am. I found myself unable to breathe, and I had never suffered a panic attack in my life before, so I’m not sure if that was what was happening, but I simply could not stay in the house. So I got in the car and went for a drive to get away from the murderous sight.

Returning to the humiliated tree hours later, looking like a poodle who had just been sheared, I was in mourning for weeks. I was alarmed, and still am embarrassed, by my reaction. It bore no resemblance to rationality, but it was a feeling similar to what I felt when my wife and I watched the surgeon and nurses take away our then six-year-old daughter for eye surgery, and her little hand waved goodbye to us with a look of terror.

After so many years of contemplation and wonder, the tree is clearly a part of me, and I am part of the tree. I believe that somehow it knows when I am present, and that the many birds that sit in its branches know me too, and I them.

Now, I must confess, I did not ever consider myself a tree-hugger when I was your age. I know some members of the Church worry that environmentalism is a secular political philosophy that commits the mistake of seeking what Paul describes as “worshipping and serving the creature more than the Creator.” And I often mocked my environmentalist friends when I was your age for doing just that.

Secularity, of course, has its shortcomings, and it has had its various influences in my life, for better and for worse. But I stand before you today as someone who believes in caring for the environment because of our doctrine. And when I really started letting the doctrine instruct me on my relationship to the Creation, the doctrine gave me the experiences in my adult life that have converted me to the committed path of a disciple-steward.

Now, I think Joseph F. Smith frames the problem Paul poses much more effectively. We should simply learn to worship God in His creations. We should not worship them alone, but we should not worship God independent of them either.

I recognize that many scientists who have studied nature for their entire lives do not credit a Creator. E. O. Wilson is an intriguing example to me. Although he refuses to acknowledge anything above nature and beyond science that might be worth knowing—something that often frustrates me to no end—I must concede that he pays more attention to the Creation than I do.

I resonate with these lines from his book Biophilia:

“The living world is the natural domain of the most restless and paradoxical part of the human spirit.
It is possible to spend a lifetime in a Magellanic voyage around the trunk of a single tree.
Humanity is exalted not because we are so far above other living creatures,
But because knowing them well elevates the very concept of life.”

So we might feel justified in criticizing environmentalists like Wilson who too easily dismiss God, but it hardly seems preferable, as Joseph F. Smith’s statement implies, for believers to insist on God and then walk past God’s creations as if it were all just so much background decoration to our lives.

Believers of all people should be learning from people like Wilson to pay attention to God’s creations. The spiritual creation gives us special motivation for such attention.

So in my study of Come, Follow Me this year, I was recently wondering at these verses:

“For man is spirit. The elements are eternal,
And spirit and element, inseparably connected, receive a fulness of joy.”

Man is certainly not just spirit. My heart right now is pumping blood and transporting oxygen to my body, allowing me to move, speak, and have my physical being with you right here and right now. This is the result of my autonomic nervous system. I do not choose to make this happen, and yet all of my experiences of making choices, engaging in conscious thought, and all of my spiritual experiences depend on this substratum of physical life.

This substratum, of course, goes far beyond my body. The conditions of the planet are such that it provides oxygen to breathe and food to eat. And the atmospheric conditions of the Holocene have enabled humankind to begin using agriculture, domesticating animals, and building civilizations—all of the conditions that are described in the Creation story in Genesis as necessary for our moral development, in which our Creator is so heavily invested.

King Benjamin writes that God is “preserving you from day to day, by lending you breath, that ye may live and move and do according to your own will, and even supporting you from one moment to another.” Breathing is a process that has both an individual biological and a collective planetary physical explanation, and yet it is also the unearned mercy of God.

Section 93 clarifies that collapsing the binary of spirit and body creates the conditions of a fulness of joy. So although this promise of joy could be in reference to the reunion of body and spirit after death—which it certainly is—it is consistent, in my experience, with those moments of what Adam Miller calls an “early resurrection,” those experiences of deepest joy here and now on this earth.

For me, such joys are both spiritual and physical. My experiences in nature, in hard work and service, in the warmth of family love, in friendship and laughter, meals with family and friends, and in recreation, where I find myself physically and spiritually nourished—discovering myself on earth in a body, uniting my consciousness with my present physical conditions—brings me simultaneously closer to heaven.

In such moments, I do not yearn for anything more than the abundance of what is real, actual, and present to me here and now. And most forms of sadness, it strikes me, are forms of blindness to what is real and present before us. To be truly alive is to accept existence itself as a miracle.

So if spirit and body are not easily separable, neither are heaven and earth. “The elements,” Joseph Smith’s revelations continue, “are the tabernacle of God. Yea, man is the tabernacle of God, even temples.”

So our bodies are temples, but only as an extension of the idea that all elements, bodies, and matter of all kinds are temples. Or, more accurately, these verses make a slight distinction between temples and tabernacles, which are smaller, more mobile, and more agile carriers of the holiness of God and of His will in space and time.

These sacred elements are not set apart in time and space from the secular world around them, but are the very building blocks of that world, moving about in their various forms. So God is found in His holy house, but He is also found, perhaps paradoxically, everywhere—anywhere.

So perhaps we could consider our being on two axes. We are, on one hand, set apart from Creation as children of heavenly parents with a divine nature and eternal destiny on a vertical axis. Maybe this is like the temple, a consecrated space aimed vertically to heaven.

And yet our ensoulment as embodied beings also places us on a horizontal axis, on a continuum with all physical matter and all living things, which are also living souls, not entirely unlike us. Maybe this is more like the tabernacle—God’s ubiquitous holiness.

The jump from a human living soul to an animal or plant living soul, or even to rocks and water, is apparently not a categorical leap. John Widtsoe had looked at the Prophet’s revelations and considered the possibility that intelligence is the foundational substance of all things. He wrote, “All matter possesses intelligence in a rudimentary form. The particles of matter act according to law. They respond to stimuli. They are obedient. This is the manifestation of intelligence.”

We could think of Creation, then, as an organization of agents—elements that are tabernacles of divine intelligence. Although we might not want to equate ourselves with the newt or the rock or even the cell, this doctrine suggests that we can’t easily draw a definitive and impermeable circle around the uniqueness of our human consciousness and agency.

It fascinates me that such doctrines resonate with much contemporary science and the writings of many of our best environmental thinkers—people such as the great Catholic scientist and theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.

Teilhard thought deeply about geology and evolution and intuited, in 1955, that consciousness pervades all things and that it organizes itself in greater levels of complexity and power in more complex systems and organisms, creating higher levels of consciousness that culminate in God.

He felt that we ought not to think of spirit and matter as separate “things” or “natures,” but as simply related variables.

John Muir, the OG tree-hugger, who once climbed sequoias in the Sierras in the middle of thunderstorms, wrote, “Every particle of rock or water or air has God by its side, leading it the way it should go. The clearest way into the universe is through a forest wilderness. In God’s wildness is the hope of the world. The glory of the Lord is upon all God’s creations. It works; it is written plainly upon all the fields of every clime, and upon every sky.”

Disillusioned by his grandfather’s logging empire, our very own Hugh Nibley devoured Thoreau and Emerson as a young man and spent a summer at age 16 sleeping in caves in the mountains of Oregon for weeks at a time. Converted into a lover of mountains, Hugh Nibley became the first Latter-day Saint environmentalist.

So, if we think of these two axes, it would seem to be mistaken to try to divorce ourselves from either one. King Benjamin again provides some insight:

“I would that ye should remember, and always retain in remembrance, the greatness of God, and your own nothingness,
And his goodness and long-suffering towards you, unworthy creatures,
And humble yourselves even in the depths of humility,
Calling on the name of the Lord daily, and standing steadfastly in the faith…
And behold, I say unto you that if ye do this ye shall always rejoice, and be filled with the love of God,
And always retain a remission of your sins; and ye shall grow in the knowledge of the glory of him that created you,
Or in the knowledge of that which is just and true.”

I think when I was young, I heard that phrase “unworthy creatures” as a sort of finger-pointing condemnation. It is instead a reminder that our unworthiness isn’t so much related to what we do wrong, but to the fact that we are created out of grace.

It would seem, then, that the two axes are not a binary, but a cross that should be at the center of our consciousness.

Remembering and honoring our Creator means we should remember our creation as part of the Creation. Benjamin explains that this is how we keep the power of the Atonement alive in our lives. This is the “always retaining a remission of our sins.”

Our theology dignifies human identity to a level few other religions reach. And yet, at the same time, it connects us to physical life and matter also more than most religions. So if I might revise E. O. Wilson, we could say that remembering our createdness stimulates a uniquely human humility and wonder at our kinship and shared intelligence with all of Creation.

Simply put, acceptance of embodiment is vital to an understanding of the true meaning of our spiritual identity. Such acceptance inspires the reverent and peaceable walk of a disciple, who walks peaceably with all of Creation and who receives the promised fullness of joy.

The deepest happiness of humans is not found in freedom from nature, but in harmony with it.

Now, I want to suggest we could adjust our vocabulary a bit to more adequately capture our doctrine. I fully recognize, of course, that we speak often, and for good reason, of the importance of an eternal perspective and the need to go to God’s holy house, the temple, for access to this more spiritual understanding. And we speak of the importance of remembering our identity as sons and daughters of heavenly parents.

We speak of these as higher things than the things of the world. Nothing I wish to say here should be imagined as a contradiction to such ideas. These are foundational to my faith.

However, the vocabulary can be misleading. When human value is disconnected from God’s love and Creation of all things, the pursuit of human salvation has motivated American Christianity to embrace a human-centered philosophy of dominionism, which rejects the obligations to be stewards of the Creation. Our theology rejects such a conclusion.

Bishop Gérald Caussé’s 2022 general conference talk should be a powerful reminder to all of us of this.

Let us remember also that the temple endowment itself spends considerable time reminding us of God’s love of the Creation—of the plants and soils and animals around us—including, my favorite, the great blue heron that can be seen on the Provo City Center Temple mural.

Moses and Jacob were both invited to witness the diversity and immensity of the Creation. Both were decentered by the experience of contemplating forests, oceans, mountains, atmospheres, and stars. After witnessing worlds without number, Moses concludes, “For this cause I know that man is nothing, which thing I never had supposed.”

And Job listens to four chapters of the longest sermon by God the Father in all of scripture. Its topic? The Creation. God asks in one of the most powerful and beautiful moments of the sermon:

“Who hath divided a watercourse for the overflowing of waters,
Or a way for the lightning of thunder;
To cause it to rain on the earth, where no man is;
On the wilderness, wherein there is no man;
To satisfy the desolate and waste ground,
And to cause the bud of the tender herb to spring forth?
Hath the rain a father?
Or who hath begotten the drops of dew?”

Job contemplates the reality of such a world loved by God “where no man is,” and he concludes, “Behold, I am vile; what shall I answer thee? I will lay mine hand upon my mouth… I repent in dust and ashes.”

This nothingness does not contradict Moses’s or Job’s divine nature and eternal destiny. It is instead vital to it. They discover that although theirs is an infinitesimally small and human story in the larger scheme of things, they are also known individually and loved by this merciful God.

The Lord reassures Moses, “Thou art my son,” and Job too knows that though worms will eat his body, nevertheless, in his flesh he shall see God.

So in contemplating the immensity, diversity, and otherness of the Creation, they each move from an anthropocentric perspective to maybe a theocentric one—a God-centered one—in which their human place is both vertically exceptional and horizontally akin across all of Creation.

Now, admittedly, we tend to speak of the personal God who intervenes, but less often of the value of those experiences that shrink our self-importance. We should recognize that such experiences make His love for us that much more miraculous and humbling.

His light and love do not choose between the individual and the whole. He lends me breath, but He sustains the miraculous biodiversity of our soils, our fluid and life-giving watersheds, the myriad community of life in mountain ranges, the rotations of the planets in our solar system, and apparently the light of the stars.

God is close, intimate, and personal—and as distant and impersonal as the farthest star. He is both transcendent and immanent. “Jesus ascended up on high, as also he descended below all things, in that he comprehended all things, that he might be in and through all things, the light of truth.”

He is “in the light of the sun, and the light of the sun, and the power thereof by which it was made.” The prepositions are dizzying, but they signal, perhaps, that there is something salvific not only about discovering God’s love for you, but about discovering and sharing in His love for all things—a love that, when fully comprehended, tempers our tendency to put ourselves at the center of the world.

As a species, historically, we have always recognized nature as a majestic, powerful, and superior spiritual presence. Of course, the Old Testament prophets insisted, and clarified importantly, that nature’s grandeur was a sign not of a god of a grove of trees or of a valley, but of the God of all Creation—of all groves everywhere—a God whose love and creative power made and sustains us individually, but also sustains the heavens and the earth.

So it was a colossal mistake for Christians to have ever concluded that one God meant that He was only transcendent, only spiritual, always standing apart and above this world altogether. This false belief allowed Christians to conclude that God was only interested in human life and that the natural world was dead matter, raw material, devoid of meaning and value.

So that’s been human history for thousands of years. But in recent years, with the rise of consumerism, we came to mistakenly believe that the greatness of humans lies in our ability to break free of the meaningless necessity of nature.

The Restoration appears to have been necessary, as it says in section 1 of D&C, because believers were “living and worshiping after the image of their own God.” To worship a God after our own image is to assume that God’s reality and love are only meaningful if they are meaningful to us personally. This is to instrumentalize God for our own selfish ends.

Nothing facilitates such narcissism more than to imagine that the world is devoid of spirit, subjectivity, intelligence, or meaning, and is only there for our use.

Narcissus looked into the waters and he saw only a reflection of himself. To see God or nature narcissistically is to see a reflection of our moods and our feelings and our story. This is what John Ruskin famously criticized as the “pathetic fallacy”: the skies pour down rain and we believe selfishly that this reflects our sadness. And the sun shines and we convince ourselves that it reflects our happiness. Bad things happen and we imagine some root cause in our story.

The day my oldest brother died, when I was 18 years old, I remember feeling rage that the earth kept moving at all—that the sun rose and set and that life went on seemingly indifferent to the collapse of my personal universe.

Although understandable, mine was an immature and self-centered understanding of nature and of reality. We all have an instinct to want the world to reflect our inner life. The hard but necessary lesson of suffering is that all of us suffer. Even nature herself suffers.

As Job and Moses learn, nature brings a deeper joy when we stop seeing it as a mirror, but instead allow it, like a good book, to help us forget about ourselves for a time—to challenge and decenter the story of the self. Nature reconstructs and rebuilds the self, expanding our consciousness into something much more closely resembling the heart and mind of a cosmic Creator who loves and cares for us and the wild goats, the trout in the streams, the eagles in the air, and the whole earth—teeming with more life than our selfish imaginations had ever conceived possible.

When we pay enough attention to nature in this way, we also discover that it isn’t always beautiful or always friendly or always reassuring. The Preacher of Ecclesiastes understands that the importance of maturing our perspective of nature beyond the pathetic fallacy requires that we learn “that the race is not to the swift,” but that “time and chance happeneth to them all.”

Or, as Jesus puts it, “the rain [falls] on the just and on the unjust.” It can rain on your wedding day, and the sun can shine in the midst of your agony. If randomness and accident were not possible in the universe, life itself would not be possible.

We cannot claim to love life if we do not accept nature as both the source of our life and the source of our inevitable death and physical disintegration, and one of the sources—maybe the main source—of much of our suffering. After all, if God loves the eagles, He also loves maggots and the worms and plenty of beetles.

I simply submit that the doctrine of the spiritual creation invites us to love all people and all things as God does. Loving the spiritual intelligence of all of nature as God does is not just a voyage into a lovely garden, but also a voyage into the dark night of the soul. It is not for the faint-hearted.

This earth is not a Thomas Kinkade painting—I won’t leave this up for too long—a world perpetually lit by a rosy sunset. It is a world not only of light, stunning beauty, and teeming life, but a world of darkness, of unspeakable expanse, of dizzying diversity, of eons of time full of life and beauty, but also of violence, death, and suffering.

Life as a whole is what we must love. Life is existence—for all that is. Not merely the love of family and friends, not merely love of comforts and a life narrative that is shaped by safety, success, and achievement. This is part of the lesson that Job had to learn.

Love means acceptance for the simple fact that we are granted breath, as King Benjamin puts it—gratitude that we can move and have our being and breathe and have heartbeats, and the chance to taste, smell, and experience an embodied life, even if only for a short time. And yes, that includes the chance to suffer.

So maybe the conjoining of spirit and matter suggests that existence itself ought to be enough for us. Maybe we can experience a fuller eternal perspective by a visit to the temple and a climb to the top of a mountain.

And by the way, the new temple will be the Provo Rock Canyon Temple, framed, as it has been historically, by our beautiful Rock Canyon.

Maybe we can have a fuller eternal perspective by the joy of an infant’s birth and by the death of a loved one. Modern consumerism is as profoundly in denial of the fact that you and I are dying animals as it is in denial of the fact that we are children of God with an eternal destiny. Consumerism wants neither reality to be true.

We could say that the opposite of an eternal perspective is not an earthly one, but a religious or secular worldview that simply fails to account for spirit in the world. Consumerism wants us to pretend that consuming things and protecting ourselves through material means gives us a kind of value and meaning that avoids both heaven and earth simultaneously.

The fact is, I am a beloved son of God, and I am also an unworthy creature. This is not a contradiction. It is a holy paradox. And we honor this holy paradox of our spiritual and physical lives when we learn to see and honor and love the divine light in all people and in all things.

If “the light of God… proceedeth forth from the presence of God to fill the immensity of space,” and this light is found even in the smallest particle of the strangest or ugliest being, we turn away from that light to the degree that we deny it in other people or in other things. Our job as disciples of Christ is to “lay hold upon every good thing.”

So it would seem, then, that only a determination to seek and cleave unto that light of intelligence in all things will suffice for us to realize our divine potential. “Light cleaveth unto light,” and “that which is of God is light; and he that receiveth light, and continueth in God, receiveth more light; and that light groweth brighter and brighter until the perfect day.”

Now, when I was your age, I used to hear this as a call to heed the Holy Spirit in my life—and you should do so. But I think it also means, in its fuller meaning, a call to heed the Spirit in all things. God is not just interested in inspiring me. He is interested in giving light to all things. He calls me to have His power to bear, endure, and love all things.

This is not natural affection based on taste and preference—and sorry if I offended anyone’s preference for Thomas Kinkade. If this were so, we would be unable to love what we don’t like. We certainly could not love the Creation as the Creator does.

As you and I touch leaves, listen to birdsong, taste mountain water, smell a pine forest, or look up at the stars, we are promised:

“Any man who hath seen any or the least of these hath seen God moving in his majesty and power.”

Do not underestimate the significance of that promise in our scriptures. If you would wish to see God, you could start by paying attention to the motions of this world. It’s not that hard.

And then, as you are challenged by things strange and beautiful and unexpected, you can ask for the pure love of Christ to strengthen you if you find your will flagging. As Teilhard puts it aptly:

“We are often inclined to think that we have exhausted the various forms of love with a man’s love for his wife, his children, his friends, and to a certain extent for his country.
Yet precisely the most fundamental form of passion is missing from this list:
Cosmic affinity, and hence cosmic sense.
A universal love is the only complete and final way in which we are able to love.”

A spiritual creation means we must reach for and cleave unto the light of Christ everywhere, or we risk seeing it nowhere.

Finding reverence and compassion for the earth—for every creature—tempers our ego, heals our souls, and centers God in our lives. We feel motivated to care for Creation and to work to enhance life of all kinds, to remove any and all obstacles that block God’s breath of life from moving through all things and allowing all things to fulfill the measure of their creation.

I don’t think this means that we have to climb sequoias in the middle of a storm or spend a summer in a cave—but if that’s your thing, go for it. I don’t think it means we can’t sacrifice the life of plants and animals to make our lives possible.

But if we take life with no thought of our creatureliness, if there is nothing that disrupts our urbane and gentrified and comfortable modern life, we will have a difficult time having an eternal perspective of who we really are.

We need worship of God in temples, as well as regular practices in the realm of service, recreation, and civics that bring us into repeated contact with each other and with the physical world—that help us unite spirit and element and experience deeper joy.

I think this looks like Latter-day Saints dedicated to ecological restoration, non-motorized recreation, and institutional and community sustainability. And it looks like teachings that deliberately, consciously connect these actions to our worship of Jesus—to connect the elements to how we think of Him, speak of Him, and understand Him.

The restored gospel is not a call to abandon care for the human family in the interest of caring for the Creation. It is instead a call to care for the Creation in order to better care for one another. Jesus suffers not only for sin, but for the physical experience and mortality of all human and more-than-human flesh. He suffers, dies, and resurrects for all of us and for all of Creation, which tells us something about His heart and His mind.

In a powerful revelation, the Lord chastises Joseph Smith and his colleagues because they are divided from one another. He wants to shower them with revelations, but He says they remain blinded by their separation from one another. He says that it is as if they “walk in darkness at noonday.” What a powerful image—to be beneath the scorching, burning light of Christ’s immanent presence in the world and to miss it entirely. This is to live tragically.

Similarly, after promising us that we can see God if we will observe His creations in the verses I was just showing you, He says, “I say unto you, he hath seen him.” If you look at my creations, you will see me.

“But nevertheless, he who came unto his own was not comprehended. The light shineth in darkness, and the darkness comprehendeth it not.”

So let’s not be blind—least of all at noonday. Separation causes blindness to God’s majesty, and it starts with separation from each other: division, polarization, hostility, contempt. And it extends to separation from all of God’s creatures.

How can I claim to love or defend a God who is my Creator and be indifferent to, or ignorant of, His equal interest in His other children, or ignorant of any of His creations—let alone live in such a way that I am dangerous to them?

How can I expect to experience a fulness of joy when my life is lived in denial that I and all things around me are tabernacles of God, sacred spaces where I am asked to remove my shoes and walk on holy ground?

I have needed to experience God’s personal love for me, but I have also needed experiences with His love for others and for His creations. It was after my brother’s death that I experienced my deepest connections to the natural world. It was my personal wounds that brought me to my knees before God’s creations and allowed me to see the light of Christ running through all things and healing me with experiences of wonder far beyond my simple story and individual sorrows.

It might be harder for us to relate to this more impersonal aspect of God, but it promises a deeper joy. Our embodied experience in nature can assist. “The glory of God is intelligence.” The love of God is inseparable from all intelligence everywhere. Let us seek such love of intelligence. Our deeper joy depends on it.

Thank you.