DID YOU KNOW?
If I am a beginner at the 12-step program who is regarding nature itself as my Higher Power it can only work if I learn to see nature as filled with beauty and life, and as something enormously grand and awe-inspiring, which was already there long before I came, and will be there after I am gone, and is for the most part totally out of my control. I cannot make the spring flowers bloom, nor control bird migrations, tides, planets, sunrises, etc. But I can view them with delight and feel the troubled waters of my life being calmed when I behold their beauty. I need to learn that my job in life is to enjoy it, not control it. Furthermore, if I can begin to understand that nature is filled with the power of life itself, I will be able to enter into a deeper kind of healing. There is an enormous healing power in nature, but the only way I can learn how to obtain its benefits is to learn how to quit standing in the way, so to speak. The source of all life and beauty will not be able to restore my soul if I am continually blocking its healing power by trying to control everything all the time. It will not be able to revive my spirit as long as I refuse to stop and look at the world outside myself because of my obsessive self-pre-occupation, where all I am ever really thinking about is me, me, me, me.
After we have made more progress in the twelve-step program and are no longer just raw beginners, we will eventually begin to understand that nature (paradoxically) both is and is not God. We cannot, any of us, know God in his essential reality—that is a fundamental article of faith among the orthodox teachers of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all three—but nature itself is God’s glory, God-as-he-makes-himself-known-to-us, the light of beauty which surrounds his throne. In the Jewish tradition, it is called the Shekinah, the visible manifestation of the divine presence.
As St. Gregory of Nyssa put it in the fourth century, nature is not the essential core of the Godhead itself (the divine ousia), but is God’s temporal energy (energia), the power of the divine creativity as it is played out in the realm of space and time. Or to put it another way, God is the singer and nature is the song, God is the dancer and nature is the dance, God is the artist and nature is the art, God is the weaver and nature is the tapestry, God is the story—teller and the universe is the story being told—where all of us are necessary threads among the tapestry of great beauty which is being woven, or essential characters in the plot of the great tale which is being told, or however we wish to construe this. When we are beginners in the twelve-step program it does us no harm at all if we take the song of nature as our higher power, for if we listen to the divine song for long enough, we will come to know what lies in the heart of the singer of the song.
John Wesley at one point discussed the biblical passage which instructs us to “pray without ceasing.” He pondered deeply about what this prayer should be. In the Eastern Orthodox hesychast tradition, for example, the prayer without ceasing is an adaptation of the prayer in Jesus’ parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector: “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me a sinner.” Wesley decided however that the best kind of prayer without ceasing was the prayer of Moses, “I pray you, O God, show me your glory.”
We should go about at all times looking with awe at the beauty and goodness in the world around us, and seeing the grandeur, glory and creation of the universe as God’s garment. This is traditional evangelical theory which goes all the way back to the 1730s and the founding figures of the modern evangelical movement. To be continued.
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