HELLO!

On Tuesday, October 13^th at 7 pm, our Faith Study moves into our second session. We will be focused on the second chapter. You don’t need to own the book, to have read the book, to have attended the first session, to attend Tuesday night. Everyone is welcome. My method, to create an equal playing field, is to offer a summary of the chapter at the beginning, then giving those who have read the chapter, time to supplement my offering with their own insights. Once these summaries are shared, we dig in for questions/comments/epiphanies from everyone.

Nature is the title of the second chapter. Karen Armstrong, the author, is a former nun. Later in life she became a scholar of many of the world’s religions, and she leans into other faiths to help us experience the insight a bond with the sacred earth can provide. In chapter one, that focus was Christianity, in chapter two she shares some of Chinese spirituality, namely the philosopher Laozi, the fourth century founder of Daoism. One reason Daoism and other formers of religion like it, spend a lot of time thinking about and practicing silence, is because of how nature engenders a sense of “being beyond the concepts of language, something we cannot define or describe”. The “mother” is the “creator” of all, the world has a “mother” and once you have a mother, “you know the children, and once you know the children, you return to the mother”. We, as “the children” are called to return to the “mother”, the source, for revelation.

When we forget ourselves, and experience the “mother” as creator, we come to moments of transcendence. Armstrong adds, “While we in western Christianity have confined God to the heavens, eastern Christianity and other faiths have continued to empathise sacredness found throughout the world…And if we learn to contemplate nature correctly, we find the tiniest particle of soil can yield a glimpse of the ineffable divine.” Armstrong even offers this simple practice, “Perhaps sitting in a garden or park for ten minutes a day” can offer revelation.

Here Armstrong is drawing on her vast experience as a Christian, as a scholar of world religions and revealed nature’s central place in spirituality across the centuries. In bringing this age-old wisdom to life, Armstrong shows modern readers how to rediscover nature’s potency and form a connection to something greater than ourselves. See you Tuesday.

Peace, Kevin