Stirring Waters: Thoughts on Mary Oliver

Lewis Connolly August 30, 2017

‘As a deer longs for flowing streams, so my soul longs for you.’ Communing with the sacred in our own lives, having a meaningful encounter with God, has been likened to drinking water from a fresh stream since time immemorial. Like many of you, I know, I am a fan of Mary Oliver’s poetry, being as she is a contemporary example of someone articulating the sacred through Nature – a bearer of that most important transcendental torch. It was not until quite recently though that I learned she is not just a good poet, but also a good writer of essays too. Last year she published a selection of essays in a book titled ‘Upstream’, and, as you would imagine, it is dripping with Nature. Here is an extract:

“Sometimes the desire to be lost again, as long ago, comes over me like a vapor. With growth into adulthood, responsibility claimed me, so many heavy coats. I didn’t choose them, I don’t fault them, but it took time to reject them. Now in the spring I kneel, I put my face into the packets of violets, the dampness, the freshness, the sense of ever-ness. Something is wrong, I know it, if I don’t keep my attention on eternity. May I be the tiniest nail in the house of the universe, tiny but useful. May I stay forever in the stream. May I look down upon the wind-flower and the bull thistle and the coreopsis with the greatest respect. Attention is the beginning of devotion.”

To me, this reads like a prayer, the best kind of prayer there is, the kind of prayer where you just take a deep breath and be still, and notice, and be aware. The kind of prayer in which you indwell place, indwell Nature, and appreciate the flowers, the freshness, the greenness. Mary Oliver’s work starts with a cheerful listening to the world. Its starts with Nature, and then gets to the writing. Nature is the primary concern, writing secondary. Mary Oliver is not using Nature to make her point, rather her work is an outworking of Nature.

Contrast this approach with W. G. Sebald’s ‘The Rings of Saturn’, which we thought about last week. What is Sebald’s relationship to place, to Nature, to Suffolk county? Sebald goes out walking; he comes to what is, for him, a place of note, that place then triggers for him reflections about some other subject matter, and it spirals out from there. Some have speculated that for Sebald these places are not in fact that significant, but rather merely serve a rhetorical purpose. When, for example, someone reads ‘The Rings of Saturn’, a common response is that to enhance your understanding of the book you feel you should go to some of these places Sebald mentions, and do some of the walks. Many have found though that this experience does not enhance their understanding. The reason for this is that ultimately, I think, the subject matter Sebald is exploring (which can be summed up as incomprehensible destruction) is divorced from the places in question. The places in Suffolk act merely as a kind of fishermen’s net, upon which Sebald hangs the ideas he is really interested in. This is so very different to Mary Oliver’s unfolding of Nature. Nature for Oliver is primarily both the concern in question, and the subject, both of her poetry and of ‘Upstream’, her book of essays. Mary Oliver even goes so far as to say she does not think of herself as a poet, but more as a kind of reporter, reporting back to her reader her transcendental experiences before Nature. And of course, this concern for Nature, for Mary Oliver, also ties into an ecological concern: the danger today, in our globalised, capitalist world, that we become increasingly separated from Nature, and subsequently view the fruits of Nature as commodities not intimately bound up with Nature, but oddly detached, and existing solely to be exploited. Because everything is viewed in mechanistic terms, we know how to quantify the value of produce brought forth, because that plays nicely into an economised worldview, but it is exceedingly more difficult for us to quantify harm done, as that is not affecting profit margins today. Therein lies the short-sighted destructive nature of unrestrained capitalism.

Mary Oliver’s strategy of thought for challenging our exploitative propensity towards Nature is not to hound her readers and say ‘Woe to Us, For the End is Nigh’, but rather, to show us the beauty of Nature, and invite us to commune with Nature as she has done. Or as she puts it, “[I] think you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.” She hopes through her poems to remind us of what the Earth is meant to look like, to praise, and wonder, and a rekindling of that sacred connection, that primordial connection with Nature, and through that connection bring about a process of healing. Healing the self, and the land. In Mary Oliver’s book ‘Upstream’, when she is not talking directly about Nature, she is talking about those poets who have most influenced her, the four being: Rumi, the 13th Century Islamic poet, who wrote for example,

‘A lifetime without Love is of no account
Love is the Water of Life
Drink it down with heart and soul!’

- picking up the theme of the meaningful spiritual encounter being not unlike drinking water, being nourished, body, spirit, and mind. There are two other poets who we are very familiar with, William Wordsworth, and of course Ralph Waldo Emerson, and finally, and most significantly of all for Mary Oliver, Walt Whitman. Walt Whitman is the poet I have been thinking about most of this week, as he is the one I knew of least well. I really only knew that he was an American; I could picture him as a man with a very weathered look, a long mountainous beard, influenced a great deal by the transcendentalists, and greatly admired by Mary Oliver, and that was extent of my knowledge. I don’t think I had ever read any of his poetry before. So, I had a look, and this was the first poem I came across: ‘Are you the person drawn towards me?’ By Walt Whitman.

‘Are you the person drawn towards me?’
To begin with, take warning, I am surely far different from what you suppose;
Do you suppose you will find in me your ideal?
Do you think it so easy to have me become your lover?
Do you think the friendship of me would be unalloy’d satisfaction?
Do you think I am trusty and faithful?
Do you see no further than this façade, this smooth and tolerant manner of me?
Do you suppose yourself advancing on real ground toward a real heroic man?

This strikes me as being a great introduction to the man. I pictured this rugged, romantic figure, lover of nature, looking straight at me, and declaring right from the offset, ‘I am not what I seem. I am not this two-dimensional façade, there is more to me. There is a secret’. From this briefest of glimpses, it made considerably more sense to me when in Mary Oliver’s essay about Walt Whitman, she described him as the brother she never had growing up. A poet who, when you read him, it was as if he was letting you into a secret. Oliver explains that for Walt Whitman a poem was like a temple, a place to enter, a place to feel. I think this explanation captures it very well. A Whitman poem is not just a collection of well-crafted words on a page, it is much more visceral; you enter the poem, you experience the poem, you feel the poem. It’s much more like being in a physical place, and experiencing something tangible, not just words.

This then begins to explain the profound power Mary Oliver sees in poetry. When she talks about wanting to be that tiny nail of use, she is talking of course about the use she can be to this universe through her poetry. Through her poetry can she convince us to take nature seriously, to find our own transcendental connection to God, to treat nature with the respect it deserves, and so on… Can she have a meaningful impact upon this world, just through the power of poetry? She believes it can, because it did for her. She came from a broken family – a negative and very destructive background, sexual abuse, avoiding home, the whole thing - but through nature and through poetry, in particular Walt Whitman’s poetry, she found a world where she could breath and find herself. Walt Whitman probably appealed so much because he first of all spoke the language of Nature, but secondly, he too was a person who made a great deal out of his life, despite his disadvantaged background. He was only schooled till the age of eleven, despite today being regarded as American poet number one, the father of American poetry. There is a coming together of lament, of pain, of processing all that has happened, but through words there is healing, through nature, there is healing. There is a discovery of that spirit one can tap into, the Spirit of God, of Nature, the deer who longs for the flowing streams.

Amen

Still upon the Shores of Walden

Lewis Connolly July 20, 2017

Picking up from last week, while Emerson was in England meeting his intellectual hero William Wordsworth, a young 18 year-old-man called David Thoreau was taking his entrance exam to get into Harvard University. He was accepted, barely. While at Harvard, Thoreau studied a broad range of subjects. He focused though mostly on languages, learning Latin, Greek, Italian, French, German, and Spanish. In Thoreau’s penultimate year at Harvard, Ralph Waldo Emerson published his seminal work, ‘Nature’. ‘Nature’ contends that society, which takes us away from nature, destroys our sense of wholeness; that our own spiritual well-being is intrinsically wrapped up with nature. We are part of nature. No human being, no matter how much history has elevated them, or even deified them, is above nature. Take the genteel Wordsworth we met last week. The temptation is to read his poetry, and elevate him in our minds; imagining his verse being of such splendour - coming forth from the mind of a profound genius - the temptation is to imbue Wordsworth with an almost mythic status. But in truth, the Wordsworth we met last week was a gentle and relatable, kind, man, but he was just a man. Nature then is like a great leveller. Nature is in you and I, just as it was in Wordsworth, Emerson, and Thoreau. We do ourselves a great disservice when we allow the weight of the perceived greatness of our forebears to shut down the possibility of individual originality. We must think for ourselves, and not simply conform to the status quo, or traditions, for their own sake. We must live from within, trusting in our own intuitions, reconnecting afresh with the sublime Nature has on offer. When Emerson’s ‘Nature’ was published in 1836, it was immediately recognised as a masterpiece. Anyone who read it could not help feeling more wide awake to the beauty and meaning of creation. And this was certainly the case for David Thoreau, or as he came to be known, Henry David Thoreau, who was enamoured by the book; it shaped everything which was to follow.

The subsequent year, in 1837, Thoreau graduated from Harvard University. That year’s commencement speech was given by none other than Ralph Waldo Emerson. In his speech, titled ‘The American Scholar’, Emerson restates the central ideas of ‘Nature’, emphasising the need for America to throw off its reverential attitude to European intellectual culture. It was time for America to forge its own literary destiny; to read books, yes, but to no longer mimic them. To find its true inspiration within the immensity of Nature. Inspired by Emerson’s work and address, Thoreau began to keep a journal, in which he recorded his daily life, thoughts, and observations of nature. This journal was the basis for everything Thoreau is now notable for - all his subsequent lectures and published works were first drafted in his journal. For next few years, Thoreau helped his father in his business as a pencil maker, and set up a small school he ran with his brother. But increasingly he was becoming active within Emerson’s Transcendental Club, becoming good friends with Emerson, despite being 14 years his junior. And in 1841 he was invited to move into Emerson’s household in Concord, Massachusetts, where he lived off and on for the next decade, officially as the ‘live-in handyman’, but evidently the real purpose was for Thoreau to benefit from Emerson’s support and advice, focusing, as he was, more and more on his writing. There were times when Emerson and Thoreau’s relationship became a bit strained, the primary cause of this tension though seems to have arisen due to the extent to which they idealised one another. They thought so highly of one another that they could not help falling short of each other’s expectations. To Emerson, Henry David Thoreau was a man of such potential, any idle moment was an insult to that potential. Indeed, at times the intellectual intensity between the two men must have been unbearable.

It was during this period that Emerson purchased the land around Walden Pond, and in March of 1845 Thoreau began building himself a small cabin there. As he most famously put it “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms...” And so began the two year, two month, two day, Walden pond experiment. As I mentioned last week, the Romanticism movement was in reaction against the industrial revolution, against applying a mechanistic, cold logic to life, working to a clock, in which you measured productivity by the hour, and divided labour into delineated tasks. Was society, and industry, and the clock, and maximising productivity, not diminishing our humanity? Thoreau, in going to the pond, was able in a small way to step back in time, to worry less about everyday affairs, and so devote more time to his writing. It also of course gave him the opportunity to put Emerson’s words to the test, to live in closer proximity to the divine, closer proximity to nature, to live to the rhythm of nature. In his actions we find a model of how to live simpler lives, free of excess, living sustainably, in an environmentally conscious way. Thoreau has been regarded as the first modern environmentalist. In 1847 Thoreau left the pond, going back to live in Emerson’s household, and then a year later moved back to his parent’s home. However, it is worth pointing out that all these places around the town of Concord, Massachusetts, are within small area. The walk from Emerson’s home to Walden pond is only 30 minutes, and similarly the walk from Emerson’s house to Thoreau’s parents’ house was about 40 minutes.

A box of pencils from J. Thoreau & Company.

In this period then, after the Walden experiment, when Thoreau was in his early 30s, he once again began working in the production of pencils. Thoreau’s pencils are actually very notable. At this time, his pencils were considered the best. The reason for that was that his pencils did not merely contain graphite, but rather a combination of New England graphite and clay, making them stronger. The combining of graphite and clay in pencils was invented, or at least reinvented, by Thoreau, and is still used to this day. When he wasn’t making pencils, he was working on his most notable book, ‘Walden’, about his time by Walden Pond. Unlike Emerson’s ‘Nature’, which was a big success on publication, when Thoreau’s ‘Walden’ eventually came out, it was a flop. Despite being a more notable book today, at the time it was met with indifference. As Thoreau moved into his late 30s, he had to come to terms with the fact that he would not be the major proponent of transcendentalism he longed to be. And so, disheartened, he turned his attention towards more practical matters, political issues of justice in his own day, most importantly the abolitionist cause. He wrote his second most notable work, ‘Essays on Civil Disobedience’, in which Thoreau advocated for a non-violent, passive resistance approach to slavery. He wrote this essay against the backdrop of America’s 11th president, James K. Polk, who believed strongly in the necessity of slavery. His was a strongly militaristic presidency; he declared war on Mexico to secure the Texas border, and came close to launching the states into a third war with Britain. Thoreau defined himself politically in opposition to Polk. At the heart of this essay, Thoreau asks the question, which again seems exceedingly pertinent to now, what should citizens do when confronted with a president they wholly disagree with? After all, the president was elected, and therefore he was the rightly and democratically appointed man for the job. The prevailing sentiment was that as the majority had spoken, everyone in opposition was obliged to keep silent and respect the will of the majority. Thoreau wanted to challenge this kind of thinking. He believed people should not be blind nationalists following obediently the authority structures in place, but rather be individual thinkers, directed by their own conscience - not just on polling day, but every day. And as such, as individuals directed by our own conscience, we should, when confronted with political authority we disagree with, find our own ways of resisting said authority by non-violent means. To sing our opposition, to march in opposition, to speak in opposition. In 1908, a lawyer from India read Thoreau’s essay ‘On Civil Disobedience’. It was to have a lasting impact on him, and ultimately upon his country of India. His name was Mahatma Gandhi.

By Thoreau’s late 30s he had begun to sufferer from tuberculosis. He grew weaker, and died in 1862, when he was only 44 years old. His death was not widely reported. Despite today being regarded as one of America's greatest literary artists, he died practically unknown. Thoreau's funeral eulogy was given by Ralph Waldo Emerson, a eulogy which focused almost entirely on all that was worst about the man. Emerson painted a picture of a man who was cold, brittle, and anti-social, a picture which tainted Thoreau’s reputation, and resulted in his work not being read for a century. Thoreau's work was never about building a linear or logical argument, it was about one’s personal experience in the face of nature, it was about those isolated moments of sudden awareness. Thoreau’s work differs from Emerson’s in a number of ways, most obviously in being far more grounded, and practical. Thoreau invites us afresh to consider our relationship to Nature, one another, and also to the state.

‘Mist’ - a poem by Henry David Thoreau

Low-anchored cloud,
Newfoundland air,
Fountain-head and source of rivers,
Dew-cloth, dream-drapery,
And napkin spread by fays;
Drifting meadow of the air,
Where bloom the daisied banks and violets,
And in whose fenny labyrinth
The bittern booms and heron wades;
Spirit of lakes and seas and rivers,—
Bear only perfumes and the scent
Of healing herbs to just men’s fields.

Amen.

Sitting with Emerson by the Fire

Lewis Connolly July 10, 2017

In 1832, the architect of American intellectual culture, Ralph Waldo Emerson, was going through a dark patch in his life. He had just lost his first wife to tuberculosis, and he was only 29 – same age as me; he was, at the time, the Unitarian minister of a prominent Boston church, and his ministry was suffering as a result. Full of grief, and feeling lost for purpose, he took to his pulpit each Sunday to berate his congregation. His sermons were becoming increasingly gloomy and stern. He was burning bridges fast, falling out with parishioners left, right, and centre. Ralph Waldo Emerson may well be the most important Unitarian to ever have lived, and yet here we find him in a very destructive mode of being, embittered at the world. It’s always interesting I think to read about great people of history at their darkest moments. From our historical omniscient vantage point, we know that things get a lot better for Emerson; we know he has about fifty years ahead of him being a very successful writer and speaker, but in this moment he does not know that. For Emerson, in the light of his pain and uncertainty, the world seems to be closing in. He felt unrooted, lonely, and his job seemed uncertain, and so he threw in the towel, packed his bags, and on Christmas day 1832 embarked for England. In the early 1800s getting from Boston to England would have meant six gruelling weeks at sea. When he eventually arrived in England in 1833 he visited both Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth. I don’t think we can underestimate the significance this voyage has had upon Unitarianism, and even upon the world. Without this journey, the world is unimaginably different. That may seem like an over exaggerated assertion, but given the shift this pilgrimage prompted in Emerson, and the subsequent impact he had upon religious philosophy, literature, national identity, politics, and the Unitarian movement itself, it is not an unreasonable claim. Without this voyage, what worship looks like each Sunday here in the meeting house would be very different; indeed we may not even be here at all.

By the time Emerson did arrive in England, Coleridge and Wordsworth were both in their 60s, and well established on the literary scene. The poem ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud’, or ‘Daffodils’ as it is more popularly known, was already a celebrated English poem. Coleridge and Wordsworth were both leading lights of British Romanticism. Romanticism was an artistic and literary movement of this period, the early 1800s. It was basically a reaction against the industrial revolution, and the hard-headed rationalism of people like John Locke, David Hume, and Adam Smith. In other words, it was resisting the kind of cold rationalism that reduced us to being merely cogs in a machine, or numbers on a screen to be manipulated. Romanticism wanted to elevate the value of our subjective sense of things. It’s a conflict society and organisations repeatedly knock up against when making decisions - should we be basing them solely on what makes most economic or business sense, or should we be allowing our intuitive sense, or other more metaphysical claims like the inherent value of humanity, or the inherent value of sentient life, to have a bearing on our decision-making process also? Since the industrial revolution these kinds of questions have never not been pertinent, but in recent months, in light of the Grenfell tower fire for instance, societal consciousness in this area seems to have risen.

Following the enlightenment, the notion of gods sitting on other planes of existence, rewarding the good, and punishing the bad, became intellectually unsatisfying. The danger was, many intellectuals extrapolated that to mean that the world was therefore a soulless place, red in tooth and claw, an ever-unfolding Darwinian battle, a cold machine suited to some cold hard logic. The trouble is, people cannot live in a world like that. Romanticism was an attempt to redress that imbalance, an attempt to hold rationalism in one hand, while at the same time recognising the great value of love and beauty: the value of poetry and words, the value of ‘how it sits with you’, and ‘what your gut sense tells you’, the value of spiritual language, the value of feelings, and hopes, and dreams, and in so doing, elevating the significance of ‘Nature’. Communing with our primordial self through nature, or communing with God through nature; ‘God’ for Wordsworth being a metaphor for mystery, or like Spinoza, a word to be equated with Nature or everything. But again, the line between a ‘belief in God’, and Atheism, is incredibly thin. Coleridge called Wordsworth a ‘Semi-Atheist’. For Wordsworth then, a belief in God was essentially when individual people turn their hearts towards love and the good for no logical reason. That is God.

Okay, back to Emerson’s visit to England. He first visited Samuel Taylor Coleridge in London, and was very disappointed. 60-year-old Coleridge was a large, bombastic man, and Emerson said “the visit was more spectacle rather than a conversation, of no use beyond the satisfaction of my curiosity”. Coleridge merely spouted nonsense for about an hour, before Emerson was able to escape back onto London’s streets. His encounter with Wordsworth was far more satisfying. Finding his way to the lake district, he moved along the picturesque tracks. Feeling inspired and uplifted by the countryside, he walked to Dove Cottage resting in a thickly wooded hillside, where William Wordsworth lived. He knocked unannounced at the door. Wordsworth was a plainly dressed, elderly man with white hair. He was kindly and serene, warm, and generous with his time. Emerson was invited in, and they sat talking by the fire. Their conversations meandered where you would imagine, they talked about Coleridge, and the fact that his poetry was unnecessarily complicated, they talked about politics of course - Wordsworth lamented that America seemed obsessed with money in a very unhealthy way. Wordsworth recited some of his poetry to Emerson, poetry Emerson was very familiar with, and some new poetry, never yet recited. When it was time for Emerson to leave, Wordsworth walked along with him, accompanying him for a mile before turning back ‘with great kindness’.

The Emerson who returned to America later that year was a changed man. Within three years, he had begun giving his lectures, married his second wife, and written his most significant book, ‘Nature’. He was doing the important work of the poet, which Emerson described as ‘that insightful [person], who can pierce this rotten diction, and fasten words again to visible things.’ Weaving new meanings, and new narratives. He formed the Transcendental club, to discuss, in an open and free manner, issues of spirituality and philosophy. Transcendentalism empowered individuals to do no less than weigh religion for themselves, to form their own faith as their conscience led. Ralph Waldo Emerson directly inspired many artists, writers, visionaries, and poets, none more so than Henry David Thoreau. If Emerson was the architect of American intellectual culture, setting forth the theoretical framework, Henry David Thoreau was the man who lived it, and embodied it. But for that chapter, you’ll need to wait till next week…

Amen.

The Colours of the Spirit

Lewis Connolly February 26, 2016

It seems overly cliché to bemoan our increasing, blinding reliance upon technology, our advancing inevitable shift into virtual space. On one hand it is tempting to dream of a world in which we can return to the land, that Jeffersonian vision of the simple rural life, in which we are not tainted and corrupted by urban vices. Lives in which we can be intimately connected to nature, not enslaved to corporations, but rather dictate our own destinies. Many Transcendentalists of the 19th century were quite taken with this notion, and it still endures today as a thread of the environmental movement.

What will cities in the future look like?

The problem is that such a romantic notion is hopelessly flawed; who would sacrifice the perpetual engagement the modern world has to offer, to return to some idyllic country life [1] – however edifying spiritually that supposedly is? Furthermore, there’s the environmental cost. It might seem counter-intuitive to you, but the average carbon footprint cost for a city dweller is considerably lower than for someone who lives in the countryside.

It has only been in the last couple of decades that the global population of people living in cities has surpassed that of those living in the country. That ecological time bomb we all hear about, if we overcome it, it will be because people are in cities not despite it. And of course, the city-dwelling population is only going up. I think these facts pose an interesting challenge to our Unitarian Transcendentalist heritage, especially given that communing with the divine through nature has endured as a consistent theme within our movement.

When ‘Nature’ was written by Emerson in the 19th Century and Henry David Thoreau went and lived in his cabin for those two years to get closer to nature and to live ‘deliberately’, the urban population in New England had just tipped over the 50% mark. Now it is north of 80% in the USA as a whole.

Emerson’s book begins by setting out that one simple question: if the great prophets and sages of old beheld God and nature face to face, through their eyes, why should we not also enjoy an original relationship with the universe?

And my rather pessimistic answer is, because we are irrevocably alienated from nature, we could never return to the land in any meaningful way. In fact, to do so would be detrimental to humanity. People can never be any more than nature’s tourists. How then can we know God?

19th Century New England painting by Mary Blood Mellen — 19th Century New England painting by **Mary Blood Mellen**

Because New England urbanisation was so low, Emerson could assume his audience had experienced nature first hand, even if only in a meaningfully intimate way in their youth. We cannot assume that today. If people today are biblically illiterate, then perhaps they are illiterate to the beauty of nature also. Perhaps we assume an innate reverence for nature which the urban dwellers cannot even begin to recognise. Or at least, they may lack the language to recognise it. We may be a community so in touch with the supreme significance of nature’s beauty that it proves an insurmountable hurdle to those that cannot see it.

Take a community that values the biblical narrative; they would not abandon it when faced with the biblically illiterate. But rather they would strive to invite people into that shared conversation, to educate, inculturate, not assume anything. So we might do the same when it comes to the spiritual language of nature’s beauty. And part of that bridge-building process is also to learn cultural languages which are alien to us – as I have suggested before, film, art, and technology, are such languages that perhaps the urban dwellers of today have a more innate grasp upon.

How can we impart the wisdom of nature to a people unfamiliar with nature? Part of that must lie in bringing nature’s beauty into urban spaces. This is most obviously done by encouraging people into their city’s green spaces, but also in smaller ways, such as bringing flowers into the Meeting House. In this way, we might practice the appreciation of Nature.

Part of Nature’s beauty, as Emerson explains, lies in its unattainable nature. You may own this land, but you cannot own the horizon, you cannot own the stars above. This invokes a youth of the heart, and in turn, it offers us a blank slate. The same feeling is invoked in Mary Oliver’s poem: the dance goes on, with no discernable beginning or end, there is only being present. Practicing the presence of Nature then offers us a fresh beginning, recharges us, and offers us the capacity to move forward and accept what has past, shedding the day-to-day stress of life. It further brings our focus off judging ourselves, others, and situations. The more you appreciate, the less you judge.

Some of us have the privilege to find solitude in uninhabited nature, to be there so wholly and intentionally that we surpass mere admiration, and feel it envelop our senses. Perhaps such people have a calling to be nature’s ambassadors, to communicate their appreciation and the wisdom it offers to a people who can never know it to that degree.

The notion often surfaces that the beauty nature has to offer cannot ever be surpassed by the creations of humanity. And I wonder if that is, in fact, true. Perhaps the highest forms of art and beauty are in cities, not outside them. Perhaps Transcendentalist thought has historically missed the true significance of humanity’s creative power. In elevating nature to such a height, and regarding nature as the principal way of communing with the divine, we may blindside ourselves to beauty in its multiplicity of forms – maybe in the cinema, or in art galleries, or restaurants, experiencing the transcendent is just as conceivable, just as valid.

If trends continue as they are, then in my lifetime the population of the entire world will be in cities. No doubt the rate of migration into our cities will level out before then, but none the less our future is squarely in the urban space. What does our movement have to say to a world like that? Do we wish to stand prophetically resistant to such a world? Or do we wish to find our voice in a brave new one?

Amen.

[1] I think this point does deserve a footnote. You might be protesting, “I would sacrifice modern convenience for the idyllic country life”. And that may well be true. My point is that you are therefore part of a dwindling minority.