The Natural World

The thoughts below are from a daily meditation that I receive via email each day from Richard Rohr (thank you Betty Cribbs!!). It just makes a lot of sense.  The way that we live, more or less insulated from the natural world and largely believing that we have conquered it, seems logical, and, well, natural to us.  But it's really a very new way of thinking and living in terms of the span of human history.

The modern/post-modern self lives largely  in a world of its own construction and reacts for or against its own  human ideas.  We have disconnected  ourselvesfrom nature, from the givens of life, from the only world that people lived in for most  of human history.   This, as much as anything, may explain  the loss of soul. When you read the writings of Francis of  Assisi, you see he is calling  everything in nature brother  and sister.  Now what would make  a man call the  natural world brother and sister?  Well, it means he learned how to live there  and somehow got  connected with it.  Francis  recognized that the  soul that he had was also over there! Now until you come to that moment,  there is no soul initiation.  You live in what modern psychology and philosophy call the state of alienation, the state of separation.  You don’t  experience yourself as r adically connected or radically belonging to this universe. Adapted from The Soul, The Natural World,  and What Is

: The whole earth is full of God's glory!