Wedded to the Earth

“Central to an embodied spirituality is the importance of the natural world. Being born on Earth is not a secondary byproduct of spirit, a mistake, or irrelevant. It is profoundly central to who we are. Earth is home. Nature is the source of our nurturing, and the sustainer of our life on Earth. It is the first sacrament. All creations of the cosmos – plants and animals, insects and fish, mountains and waters, and stars and planets – have wisdom. They, too, emit divine energies into creation. They, too, are the home of the spirit in this world.

     In religious traditions, there has been an unfortunate tendency to represent the spirit as an otherworldly state divorced from the body. In many cases the body is denigrated and a dichotomous relationship is established between spirit and matter.”

     Given the front-burner relevance of climate change/global warming, the above seems like a timely reminder to honor the earth, and to live in such a way as to not contribute to its demise. But the point of author Beverly Lanzetta’s message is not so much environmental as it is spiritual. She is reminding us that the natural world and the realm of the spirit are intermingled; our earthy, fleshy, sometimes messy lives are where we encounter the divine. Simply put, matter matters.

     Lanzetta is correct when she states that most religious traditions mistakenly “represent the spirit as an otherworldly state divorced from the body.” This is certainly the case with Christianity, which early on was influenced by the Greek notion that matter and spirit are separate realms, and that matter doesn’t matter. This error has resulted in the negative perception that our physicality is tainted, and that morality, as journalist and curmudgeon H.L. Mencken has stated, is the theory that every human act must be either right or wrong, and that 99 percent of them are wrong!

     Not only morality, but sensuality has been the victim of the denigration of the spirit. Our senses are the way we connect with the nitty-gritty spiritual reality of our existence. There is a deep richness to the sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and feel of life. We commune with the divine depths of matter not by rising above it, but by emersion in its grit. This is why poet Mary Oliver has said “I’m sensual in order to be spiritual.”