We can hear God’s heartbeat in nature

Ten years ago, Pope Francis released Laudato si’, an encyclical exhorting all people of good will to care for the Earth, our common home. Grounded in the reality that all life on the planet is interconnected, he called for an ecological spirituality that is grounded in our Christian faith. He called for a spirituality that has an “interior impulse which encourages, motivates, nourishes and gives meaning to our individual and communal activity.” It is a spirituality that “motivates us to a more passionate protection of our world.”

This is a spirituality that is rooted in prayer for and with creation. It is in prayer that we begin to truly understand the reality that all life is interconnected. We know this intellectually and scientifically, but often the spirituality of knowing this is true is missing.

Do you recall the first time that you felt connected to the Earth? It may have been when you were young, or it may have been during your adult life. You may have been gardening, on a hike, watching the clouds, canoeing, sitting on a beach, swimming in the ocean, having a picnic, sitting under a tree or looking out of a window into nature.

That experience was a spiritual connection of kinship – the web of belonging that defines life on the planet.

Praying for and with creation changes how we understand our relationship with God, with nature and with each other. As John Philip Newell writes in his book Sacred Earth Sacred Soul, it is time to reawaken “to what we know in the depts of our being, that the earth is sacred and that this sacredness is at the heart of every human being and life form. To awaken again to this deep knowing is to be transformed in the ways we choose to live and relate and act.”

This awakening requires restoring humanity’s broken relationship with nature. This is the theme of this year’s ecumenical Season of Creation, “Peace with Creation.” Rooted in Isaiah 32:14, this worldwide movement invites us to see the war that humanity has ravaged on the planet, both on nature and on the most marginalized who bear the brunt of the devastation. And it invites us to work to build peace with creation.

Achieving God’s deep shalom requires praying for the healing of the planet and learning to pray with creation, for it is in praying with creation that we learn to hear God’s heartbeat in nature and are transformed by the experience.

To pray with creation is to become aware that we are not separate from nature; rather we are its kin. We come to know spiritually that we are integrally woven together, and in that knowing we discover the fullness of our humanity. To pray with creation means we seek to deepen our connections with the Earth and to hear deeply both the cry of the Earth and the cry of the poor. Lastly, in praying with creation we are drawn deeper into God and God’s reality.

I would like to offer the words of an embodied prayer with creation that has been part of my spiritual practice for close to 30 years. (The source of this prayer has long left my memory.) While the physical movements are too challenging to explain here, imagine one’s legs as tree roots and one’s arms as swaying branches.

Let us pray.

Standing like a tree with my roots dug deep
Branches wide and open
Down comes the rain
Down comes the sun
Down come the love to the heart that is open to be
Standing like a tree
(repeat, repeat, repeat, and give thanks)
Amen.