When I was a little girl, my mother told me that God is love. But my first mystical experience came in what, to an adult eye, probably looked like a vacant lot. To me, it was a verdant grove of trees that I entered with awe. Graceful white flowers hung in clusters from the branches. Bees thrummed hypnotically. The blossoms poured out a heavenly scent.

As a young teen, I’d roam the country roads near our suburban home, on my bicycle or bareback on my chestnut filly. I realize now I was seeking those rare moments of wild joy that swept over me, unbidden, at the sound of a distant meadowlark or the ecstatic movement of treetops in the wind. Later still, I sought refuge in Nature from the stressful routines of the day, and I often felt strangely melancholy in the presence of great beauty. Recognition of things I’d always known, momentarily piercing the veil that separates.

American Avocets by James Childress — American Avocets by james childress

I believe that God is Nature—manifest throughout the universe, but most of all in everything that lives, including us, and I worry that God just may be dying. I believe that when we perceive the beauty of Nature with heart-rending clarity, we are perceiving the god that is in everything. We humans are as much a part of the natural order as are the chorus frogs that lulled me to sleep and the bobwhite that whistled me awake in childhood, therefore we also reside in the heart of God.

I believe that as part of nature, people are born with an inherent attitude of curiosity and care toward living things (what the famed ecologist E. O. Wilson calls biophilia). I saw it in my seven-year-old daughter as she oohed and aahed adoringly over a tiny roly poly bug crawling across her fingers, in her protectiveness toward every single tent caterpillar that invaded our yard each spring. I saw it in my high school students trying hard to be hip but unable to conceal their fascination with turtles, deer, seeds, and cicadas.

But what is happening? So many children are now afraid of bugs, so many teens abhor the outdoors. Our lifestyles pollute, our businesses profit, our social feed lies, and our nations bicker.

Intellectually, I know there are many reasons for protecting living things. There are reasons based on self-interest and reasons based on ethics. I know that diverse life forms provide the raw materials for our economic and physical well-being: food crops, powerful drugs, clean water, carbon sequestration. I know that both polar bears and plankton deserve to live. But for me, those arguments have always felt slightly off the mark. My own deeply held sense of the sacredness of our planet and all its abundant, bewildering life forms seemed the most compelling argument.

God whispers to me on the mountaintop, surprises me from within a desert blossom, laughs with me when the Yellow-breasted Chat sings, keeps me company on a moonlit night, gazes at me through the eyes of my beloved, travels with me through the rapids and eddies, thunders the truth to me at ocean’s edge. But the frogs and bobwhite are now gone from my childhood landscape. The treetops no longer shudder so frequently in ecstasy.

If God is dying, then so are we.

Thanks to James Childress for his photos of the Yellow-breasted Chat, American Avocets and White-Tailed Deer.

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