Second only, perhaps, to Sunday worship, communion with nature is the most common spiritual practice for Unitarian Universalists. When we visit a National Park, hike in the woods, stand looking out at the sea, or get our hands dirty in a garden, we are continuing a spiritual tradition that links us to the Transcendentalists and to the earliest forms of spiritual practice.
If you ask a Unitarian Universalist to describe a spiritual experience they have had, they probably will tell you a story of a time they were in nature.
Walking in the woods.
Sitting on a bluff over-looking the ocean.
Standing in the desert looking up at a sky full of stars.
Or maybe an experience of a smaller piece of nature, such as getting their hands dirty in their own backyard garden.
If you ask a Unitarian Universalist where they are when they feel most spiritual, some might say in their church during a worship service, singing with the choir, sitting with a group of friends at a lunch or discussion group, or at the bed of a loved one, or standing with other church members at a protest or rally, or testifying at the council chambers.
But most of us, recognizing the spiritual quality of those settings, will likely agree, that we feel most spiritual, in nature.
It’s natural, perhaps.
Nature is the place we came from. It’s our original home. It’s still the place our bodies are fitted for. When we’re in nature we’re usually not at work, so there’s that spiritual gift right away. Our schedule is clear. The air is clear. There’s nothing but trees and sky and stars and sea and our human self taking it all in and looking out in wonder..
Nature is the clearest and easiest example we have of that, “something larger than ourselves” that both respects our individual self and encourages an expanded sense of self, which is the basis of all spirituality.
We have to strive to find that kind of “larger than myself” relationship in the midst of the city, in the midst of our daily lives. But in nature, “larger than myself” offers itself to us, all around us, felt inside us.
The city is huge, but still it’s built to a human scale. The crowds of people in a city seem composed of disconnected strangers. The architecture is impressive, and there’s art and music and technology to enjoy and appreciate in a city. But it all bears the stamp of human creation and thus it’s human-sized and feels within our scope.
But when we get outside the city, to the forest, to the desert, to the ocean, we are confronted with something so much more than human. Nature is bigger than we are. And different. We find our proper place, not in control of a little world, but humbled by a world so much greater than ourselves, older than ourselves, both impassively unconcerned with human existence and yet still seemingly arranged for our delight, for our excitement, for our inspiration.
The spiritual includes both a cognitive side: a spiritual content of beliefs and theology and ethics, doctrines and teachings and stories, and so on: the spiritual things that you think about. And spirituality includes an affective side: what it feels like to be spiritual: the spiritual feeling. Stepping out into nature evokes for many of us the most immediate sense of the spiritual feeling.
The hymn we sang as our opening hymn this morning is a perfect description of a sudden, spiritual experience.
It’s number 335, “Once When My Heart Was Passion Free” (Words by John B. Tabb, 1845-1909). Let’s look at it again.
“Once when my heart was passion free to learn of things divine”
The poetry means, “One time when I had no particular interest or thought of having any kind of spiritual experience.” Once when I wasn’t looking to have a spiritual feeling, just walking along minding my own business like any normal day…
“the soul of nature suddenly outpoured itself in mine.”
The soul of nature suddenly, unexpectedly, without my doing anything to make it happen, poured its soul into mine.
Starhawk uses that exact same phrase, “the soul of nature” in the words we used for our Chalice Lighting this morning, and Starhawk defines what that means.
“For I am the soul of nature that gives life to the universe.”
The soul of nature for Starhawk is that shared, animating, power: perhaps consciousness, that runs through all creation. For me, “soul” means the essential truth or essential quality of being that is the thing itself, nature’s soul and my soul, touching. Suddenly, the deepest, truest, reality, of the world around me, not nature as I see it obscured behind a screen of my own thoughts and pre-occupations, but nature, true and whole, revealed itself to my thoughts and feelings in a moment of instant communication.
“I held the secrets of the deep and of the heavens above;
I knew the harmonies of sleep, the mysteries of love.
And for a moment’s interval…”
Meaning the experience happened only briefly and then the feeling was gone again.
“the earth, the sky, the sea –
my soul encompassed each and all, as they encompass me.”
The deepest, truest part of my own nature recognized that I hold all of nature within me, just as nature holds all of me, within it.
That feeling is the feeling that I’ve been calling the “ecstatic” feeling as we’ve talked about spiritual practice for the last several weeks.
Spiritual practice is holistic, intentional, and ecstatic. The ecstatic feeling comes when we recognize the identity of the self and the entirety of existence. The Atman is the Brahman as they say in the Vedanta school of Hinduism. The essence of the individual when you look deeply into the self, is the soul of the whole, the divine essence of everything that exists: “my soul encompassed each and all, as they encompass me.”
That’s the feeling that we have, often, when we are in nature. That’s why many of us say we feel most spiritual in nature.
You don’t have to be in nature to have the ecstatic experience. Some saints and mystics have the ecstatic experience in the form of a religious vision. They might be praying in a chapel, or in their cell at the monastery rather than in nature. And they interpret their experience through imagery from their own faith tradition and in line with their theology.
Here is one of the so-called “Ecstasies” of St. Teresa, a Spanish saint from the 16th century.
“Beside me, on the left, appeared an angel in bodily form…. He was not tall but short, and very beautiful; and his face was so aflame that he appeared to be one of the highest rank of angels, who seem to be all on fire…. In his hands I saw a great golden spear, and at the iron tip there appeared to be a point of fire. This he plunged into my heart several times so that it penetrated to my entrails. When he pulled it out I felt that he took them with it, and left me utterly consumed by the great love of God. The pain was so severe that it made me utter several moans. The sweetness caused by this intense pain is so extreme that one cannot possibly wish it to cease, nor is one’s soul content with anything but God. This is not a physical but a spiritual pain, though the body has some share in it—even a considerable share.”
Teresa’s experience includes this confusion of the inside and the outside, the personal and the cosmic.
The fiery angel pierces Teresa’s body, her heart, and her entrails. The largest existence invades the individual existence. And then the angel destroys the individual identity. Teresa feels “utterly consumed by the great love of God” and it leaves her soul, her individual soul, dissatisfied with anything but God, the something larger than ourselves that both respects our individual self and encourages an expanded sense of self, or “the soul of nature” as Starhawk might say, that encompasses me, as I encompass it.
That’s the feeling I have had, sometimes, while standing in front of a great painting, or sitting listening to a great symphony. Or sometimes at very small moments, seemingly unprompted by anything, feeling love for the universe and feeling loved by the universe. “It’s going to be OK”, I feel. Or, “how beautiful”. Or “what a gift it is to be alive”. But I have felt those experiences most consistently, and most profoundly, standing at an observation point, or having reached the summit of a long hike up, or before the beauty of a lake, or beneath the beauty of a great tree looking up at the branches, touching and dividing the sky.
But, we are, this fall, talking not about spiritual experience, but spiritual practice.
A spiritual experience, like St. Teresa’s, or the one described in our opening hymn, is thrilling, and may be life-changing. They are welcome and memorable. Those are the stories we tell.
The idea of a spiritual practice, is to create the conditions where we can have that ecstatic experience more regularly, and where we can harness the overwhelming power of that kind of awesome, once or twice in a lifetime experience, to the spiritual ends that we need every day.
It can’t be that spiritual truth is something you experience only once every ten years when you’re lucky enough to have a week in Yosemite. We need that spiritual affirmation every day, at the supermarket, at our job, on the freeway. We need to feel powerful and loved, and a necessary part of something bigger, every day, coping with the bad news in the paper, and the sorrow we see on the streets in our neighborhood, and the pain we feel watching a loved one struggle with cancer or addiction.
So the point of a spiritual practice is to build that spiritual muscle we need, so that the spiritual experience doesn’t just come to us, overwhelmingly, and unexpectedly, but that we can call that experience into being as we need it, in a form we can manage and make useful, and that will help us live into that spiritual truth every day.
So a spiritual practice of nature, like any other kind of spiritual practice, has to be a practice. Something regular. Maybe daily, maybe weekly, certainly I would say more often than a once-a-year back-packing trip.
That means a spiritual practice of nature, if one lives in the city, might have to be centered around smaller pieces of nature. Nature more “at-hand”. A backyard garden. Or a vegetable garden at the church. It might mean a regular walk in a local park. Or a hiking group that meets every Saturday morning for a local hike. Or a practice of regular star-gazing, tracking the phases of the moon, or watching the sun lower in the sky each winter and rise in the sky each summer, and celebrating the regular arrivals of solstice and equinox and the mid-points between with ritual and celebration.
Luckily, nature is all, but also very close. Nature is as much at 5450 E. Atherton as at any other address on the globe. We don’t need to go to nature. It comes to us here. Indeed it comes from us. We are nature.
And in any case, if human beings and cities seem too close, and to close in, defeating our expansive spiritual ecstasy, we need only look up.
Emerson, in his great essay called Nature, says this:
“But if a man would be alone, let him look at the stars. The rays that come from those heavenly worlds, will separate between him and what he touches. One might think the atmosphere was made transparent with this design, to give man, in the heavenly bodies, the perpetual presence of the sublime. Seen in the streets of cities, how great they are! If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore; and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown! But every night come out these envoys of beauty, and light the universe with their admonishing smile.”