Finding the Spiritual in the Natural

 I rather like the words of the 12th century Cistercian abbot (and later, saint) Bernard of Clairvaux. He writes, "For the spiritual does not come first, but the natural." When I googled the quote to check for the accuracy of the translation, I came across another, which underlines it: "What I know of the divine sciences and Holy Scriptures, I learned in woods and fields. I have no other master than the beeches and the oaks."

And I felt like reaching out across the centuries and giving him a high five. Because that has been my route into the spiritual life also. I can remember my father taking me out into the garden when I was young and telling me to look, really look, at a flower. To wonder at the intricacies of the petals, the slenderness of the stalk, which yet supported it, the stamens with their yellow pollen, so attractive to the bees, and the leaves, busy in the work of photosynthesis. And the roots that I knew were beneath the soil, gaining sustenance from it. 

I will never forget his question: "How can we not believe that this has been designed by God? Surely such wonderful intricacy could not occur by random accident."

This is something I have always sensed - this feeling that the natural world is too well-organised to be random, that the complicated inter-relationships between plants, fungi, animals could be accidental. As I wrote in Gems for the Journey, "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."

My grandfather wrote in my autograph book (do you remember the craze for autograph collecting, back in the late sixties?) "One is nearer God's heart in a garden, than anywhere else on earth." This quote, which I later discovered was by Dorothy Frances Gurney, chimed in with what my father had told me, and I accepted it unquestioningly. And have not seen any reason to doubt it since. 

This was brought home to me once again last week, during our time in Pembrokeshire. The place we were staying was near the sea, and outside the village of Solva. It was on the first floor of a converted barn, and one of its features was that all the rooms had sloping walls above a certain height, set with Velux windows. On the first night, I read a comment in the visitors book about the stars through the window, so I deliberately left the blind up, in the hope that if I woke up, I would be able to look up and see the stars in the sky directly above me. And so it proved...

There was hardly any visible night from street lamps, so the stars were vivid points of light in the velvet blackness. And there were so many of them! I had to get up and go through to the balcony outside to see more... And I had never seen so many stars. Not only the brightest ones that we can usually see, but countless fainter ones, filling the gaps inbetween with pinpoints of radiance. I wish I could have taken a photo to share with you, but my phone's camera wasn't good enough.

Seeing them all made me think of the line in Tolkien's poem about Earendil: "the countless stars of heaven's field / were mirrored in his silver shield." A perfect description of what I was seeing. I bowed my head and gave thanks.