Sabbath Devotional :: Nature as Love

Every night before bed, my youngest kids ask me to sing “The Nature Song,” by which they mean “My Heavenly Father Loves Me.” I sing it mindlessly, tired after a long day of juggling all the things and with my attention already turned to what needs to be done by the next morning. My kids find comfort in being reminded of something I usually take for granted: that the world we live in is the literal manifestation of love. That beauty is the literal manifestation of love.

Whenever I hear the song of a bird

Or look at the blue, blue sky,

Whenever I feel the rain on my face

Or the wind as it rushes by,

Whenever I touch a velvet rose

Or walk by our lilac tree,

I’m glad that I live in this beautiful world

Heav’nly Father created for me.

Clara McMaster, © 1989 IRI

We’ve been redoing our front yard to be more water efficient, and in focusing my attention there, I’ve completely ignored my backyard, including the garden boxes, flower beds, and lawn. The garden boxes haven’t been planted, weeded, or fertilized, and only very haphazardly watered, in almost two years. I recently went out to take account of my fallow garden boxes, and I saw that my old strawberry plants were full of fruit and starting to ripen. Strawberries don’t grow wildly where I live, but it made me think of “Braiding Sweetgrass,” where the author, Indigenous author and scholar Robin Wall Kimmerer, writes about finding wild strawberries and thinking about them as a gift of love from the earth. She writes, “Knowing that you love the earth changes you, activates you to defend and protect and celebrate. But when you feel that the earth loves you in return, that feeling transforms the relationship from a one-way street into a sacred bond.”

I loved deliberately fostering my connection with nature this week through Simply Connect. I’m MWEG’s advocacy director for caring for creation, so I already spend a lot of my time thinking about the environmental and related policy. But I’ve loved seeing everyone’s pictures and hearing their personal experiences on social media and through video conversations. I love that the natural world is something that we can all share and use to connect with each other, and also something that is intimate and personal.

I’ll leave you with a poem by Mary Oliver, who always writes so insightfully about the natural world.

Praying

It doesn’t have to be

the blue iris, it could be

weeds in a vacant lot, or a few

small stones; just

pay attention, then patch

a few words together and don’t try

to make them elaborate, this isn’t a contest

but the doorway

into thanks, and a silence in which

another voice may speak.

© Beacon Press, 2007