Tag Archives: mystic poets

The book of Nature

I have always been a lover of nature and when I first came across the notion that God in fact wrote 2 books, the first being the book of nature and the second the book of scripture, it made perfect sense to me. So much of my childhood was spent in our remote cottage in the beautiful Forest of Dean which gave me an acute sense of the divine running in and through all of creation; there I discovered, in the silence and the solitude, a relationship with the immanent Presence that no words could even come close to describing. I have to confess that were I allowed to skip chapel on Sundays to stay in my beloved hidey holes in the forest I would have much preferred to do so as sometimes I found the words of the preachers (at lest those with a literal perspective) quite contrary to the God of nature whom I had grown very close to.

All these decades on I am thankful for my mothers insistence on weekly attendance at church because I realise now that this gifted me a really good grounding in the book of scripture, despite my issues with those preachers who read it in ways that I continue to disagree with.

John Keats, one of the great romantic poets, was not a religious man at all but his poetry so often reaches in to me in ways that affirm my own relationship with what I think of as the divine presence of the immanent God. Here is a favourite

O solitude! if I must with thee dwell,
Let it not be among the jumbled heap
Of murky buildings; climb with me the steep,—
Nature’s observatory—whence the dell,
Its flowery slopes, its river’s crystal swell,
May seem a span; let me thy vigils keep
’Mongst boughs pavillion’d, where the deer’s swift leap
Startles the wild bee from the fox-glove bell.
But though I’ll gladly trace these scenes with thee,
Yet the sweet converse of an innocent mind,
Whose words are images of thoughts refin’d,
Is my soul’s pleasure; and it sure must be
Almost the highest bliss of human-kind,
When to thy haunts two kindred spirits flee. ~ John Keats

Where is God

Earth is crammed with heaven. Every bush is aflame with the fire of God, but only those who see take off their shoes. The rest just pick the berries.” – Elizabeth Barrett Browning

One of the issues we come across in mysticism is to do with where we find God. Classical Theism would say God is separate from creation, transcendent and beyond all things. This God, often depicted as the sky god and usually male is yet, in his remoteness, all seeing and all knowing, a view of God that leads often to guilt and shame and does not necessarily fill us with a great longing to seek to be close.

An opposite view from Classical Theism is that of Pantheism this holds that God is everything and that everything is God. This is a view that has been held in philosophy and many religions throughout the world, particularly the eastern traditions and often indigenous traditions. For the Pantheist, the divine is closer to us than our own breathing, is in and through everything and often this view denies that there is a separate God, especially one who is given an identity as a personal, anthropomorphic being.

So this is seemingly problematic for the Christian mystic then who discovers that God is indeed closer to us that our own being, who is the great lover of the soul and yet who is also transcendent and beyond knowing. To solve this conundrum we would use the term Pan-en-theism. This term refers to God who is both in (as opposed to is ) all creation and beyond; that God is both immanent and transcendent. We see both the immanence and the transcendence of God in and through scripture. In essence though the dualism is illusory and in those moments when the sweet spot of union is discovered the boundary between the transcendent and the immanent becomes decidedly fuzzy.

As we journey along the mystic way we will find our selves coming across these questions concerning who we are in relation to God and the more our contemplative prayer deepens so does our knowing; paradoxically though such knowing has no words or fancy theological terms, it is simply known in the silence of being.

Blessings, Jayne