Nature goes Deep

The French artist and Post-Impressionist painter, Paul Cézanne, wrote, "Nature does not exist on the surface, it goes deep."

I had to think about this one... If he had written, "not *only*" on the surface, I would have been with him completely. But to say that "nature does not exist on the surface" is puzzling. Because for me, it permeates the whole of creation. The only places where nature does not exist is in completely sterile human-made environments, and even then, given half a chance, it will make its way in.

But yes, oh yes, it goes deep. A deep reverence for Nature is an important part of my faith. Growing out of the fairy tales and legends of my youth, Elsie Proctor's wonder-full book Looking at Nature, and J.R.R. Tolkien's powerful evocations of Middle Earth, I have always found it easiest to sense the presence of God / the Spirit in the natural world. Yet it was not until fairly recently that this reverence for natural beauty became integrated into the rest of my spiritual life.

This started in early 2009, when I did a module on my second Open University course, called Belief Beyond Boundaries: Wicca, Celtic Spirituality and the New Age. I was particularly fascinated by contemporary Celtic spirituality, and have gone on to learn much more about it. I was introduced to the concept of the Wheel of the Year, and to the notion that we (and all living things) move through life in a cyclical rather than a linear manner, in which the dark side is to be welcomed as an important part of the process.

At around the same time, I also came across A Guide to the Sacraments by Christian theologian, John Macquarrie, which reinforced my belief that the whole of the universe could be sacramental. He explained that rather than God's presence being limited to either two or seven sacraments, God has so arranged matters that the material world can "become a door or channel of communication through which he comes to us and we may go to him." For this reason, "man's spiritual wellbeing demands that he should recognise and cherish the visible things of the world as things that are made by God and that provide access to God."

This way of perceiving the world demands that we believe that God is not only transcendent, the one-time creator of the universe, but also immanent - being in the world and acting through it. In other words, we are always in the presence of the Divine, in whom we live and move and have our being. Macquarrie also writes about material things such as stars, mountains and even cities, as "doors to the sacred."

Then I discovered the Celtic mystic, poet and theologian John O'Donohue, whose love for the Irish landscape of his birth flows richly through all his writings. One of his books in particular, Divine Beauty: the Invisible Embrace, helped me to appreciate with my heart, not just my head, how deeply God is present in the earth, in the sky, in the landscape.

Nature does indeed go deep.