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
Lavish Wisdom 