The Sacramentality of Nature

Annie Dillard, Thoreau, and Scripture

I was about five months pregnant, and our first child was a year and a half, as we started down the trail around Walden Pond. We were on a literary pilgrimage to the site of Henry David Thoreau’s cabin, having already spent the morning in Concord viewing graves as well as the Alcott home. I was in a long flowing skirt, and Mark held our daughter on his hip. We were not prepared for a hike, but a hike it ended up being, for we were young and determined. Towards the end of the hike, we found knee deep water covering the path, and undauntedly removed our shoes and waded through the lake-like waters of Thoreau’s famous “pond.” A few more steps and it was before us, the site of cabin marked out with stone columns and a chain. Our daughter, finally allowed to run, charged about the area, while we read the sign quoting Walden.

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life. And see if I could not learn what it had to teach and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

I have not read Walden since the summer before eleventh grade, and honestly, I found it rather slow at that age, but his intentionality about life shaped me and has stuck with me. It might have been then that I began to see a deeper importance to nature. That was the same year that I first read J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, where Tom Bombadil and the Ents inevitably instill a sense for the importance of nature in the reader.

Walden came again to my mind as I read Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard over the course of this summer by audiobook. Summer proved to be a time when my audiobook reading slowed down quite a bit, but I found snatches of time driving alone or starching altar linens in the convent basement at our church. Because of this slow pace of listening, I found Dillard’s descriptions to be more digestible—words and thoughts coming back to me as I observed the grasshopper in my driveway, the water bugs on a stream during a hike, the multiplicity of leaves on each tree. While Dillard and the other American Nature writers are not usually explicitly Catholic, there is something about their worldview that smacks of sacramentality and, if not of redemption, at least of the need for it.

All of Creation

“In the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth, God created man in his image; God looked at everything he had made and he found it very good” (Genesis 1:1, 27, 31). As one of the priests of our aspiring-oratory prayed the Introit for Holy Mass on Labor Day, I flipped through my missal (for the new Mass). His words did not match those of the day of the liturgical calendar, and as I checked the table of contents, I discovered he was praying from the votive Mass “For the Sanctification of Human Labor.” The verses from Genesis brought into my mind an image of the first man and woman tending to the garden and living in harmony with all of creation, which God found to be “very good.”

One of the things Annie Dillard notes in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is that as soon as humans are present or observe something in nature, it changes—it is very difficult to observe nature without it observing us. She talks about stalking muskrats and how as soon as they notice her, they immediately disappear. One cannot help but think that this is a result of the Fall, a disordering of the original plan for humans and nature. But if she can let go of her consciousness of herself, simply be a part of nature, the muskrat will not notice her and will carry on doing his thing.

We know that God told the first woman and man:

Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth. [. . .] Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit; you shall have them for food. And to every beast of the earth, and to every bird of the air, and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food. (Genesis 1:28-30)

There was meant to be a harmony and order in the hierarchy of being, humans as workers in the garden and caretakers of the lower orders, which would serve us in our needs. This is beautifully illustrated in C.S. Lewis’s Perelandra, when the animals are eagerly at the service of the first woman, their queen. But the same curse of the Fall where humans must now toil to eat of fruit of the ground tells us that the ground will bring forth “thorns and thistles.” And while the serpent is cursed “above all wild animals,” do not the wild animals have some part in the curse?

Our Labor Day homily focused on the redemption of human work, how we were meant to work “in the beginning” and how we can, through a life of participation in grace, experience our work as redeemed. Annie Dillard often highlights the bizarre fallen elements of nature, such as the praying mantis who eats her mate, species that only survive as parasites in parasites, and certain fish that only make it out of early life because they eat their siblings. She even says, “That something is everywhere and always amiss is part of the very stuff of creation” (10.II.). I would argue that the fact that something is everywhere and always amiss is part of the very stuff of our fallenness. However, can we also see something redeemed in nature in this Age of Grace, living after the Redemption?  Can we not see in nature, as Gerard Manly Hopkins does, that “Christ plays in ten thousand places”?

Bless the Lord

Our family took our first epic National Park road trip six years ago. One morning, as we were driving north on Highway 1 in California, I felt an urgent interior prompting to stop along the Big Sur coast and pray the Canticle of the Three Young Men. (For those of you not familiar, this is found in the third chapter of the Book of Daniel in the Catholic Bible.)

I asked Mark to pull the van to a safe spot and had the children exit the car, and we prayed the canticle while watching the stunningly blue waves crash against the rocks.

³⁵Bless the Lord, all works of the Lord,
    sing praise to him and highly exalt him for ever. [. . .]

⁴⁰ Bless the Lord, sun and moon,
    sing praise to him and highly exalt him for ever.
⁴¹ Bless the Lord, stars of heaven,
    sing praise to him and highly exalt him for ever.
⁴² Bless the Lord, all rain and dew,
    sing praise to him and highly exalt him for ever.
⁴³ Bless the Lord, all winds,
    sing praise to him and highly exalt him for ever.
⁴⁴ Bless the Lord, fire and heat,
    sing praise to him and highly exalt him for ever.
⁴⁵ Bless the Lord, winter cold and summer heat,
    sing praise to him and highly exalt him for ever.
⁴⁶ Bless the Lord, dews and snows,
    sing praise to him and highly exalt him for ever.
⁴⁷ Bless the Lord, nights and days,
    sing praise to him and highly exalt him for ever.
⁴⁸ Bless the Lord, light and darkness,
    sing praise to him and highly exalt him for ever.
⁴⁹ Bless the Lord, ice and cold,
    sing praise to him and highly exalt him for ever.
⁵⁰ Bless the Lord, frosts and snows,
    sing praise to him and highly exalt him for ever.
⁵¹ Bless the Lord, lightnings and clouds,
    sing praise to him and highly exalt him for ever.
⁵² Let the earth bless the Lord;
    let it sing praise to him and highly exalt him for ever.
⁵³ Bless the Lord, mountains and hills,
    sing praise to him and highly exalt him for ever.
⁵⁴ Bless the Lord, all things that grow on the earth,
    sing praise to him and highly exalt him for ever.
⁵⁵ Bless the Lord, you springs,
    sing praise to him and highly exalt him for ever.
⁵⁶ Bless the Lord, seas and rivers,
    sing praise to him and highly exalt him for ever.
⁵⁷ Bless the Lord, you whales and all creatures that move in the waters,
    sing praise to him and highly exalt him for ever.
⁵⁸ Bless the Lord, all birds of the air,
    sing praise to him and highly exalt him for ever.
⁵⁹ Bless the Lord, all beasts and cattle,
    sing praise to him and highly exalt him for ever.
⁶⁰ Bless the Lord, you sons of men,
    sing praise to him and highly exalt him for ever.

Gazing on the waves while praying these words transforms one’s heart to see how the earth in its fecundity, intricacy, and excess is praising our Creator. One can see it in the beauty of a flower garden, in the ripe red-ness of a tomato, in the green sunlight penetrating the aspen grove.

Along a similar line, Dillard, while considering the excessive numbers of species in the world, asks:

Why so many forms? Why not just one hydrogen atom? The creator goes off on one wild specific tangent after another, or millions simultaneously, with an exuberance that would seem to be unwarranted, and with an abandoned energy sprung from an unfathomable font. What is going on here? The point of the dragonfly’s terrible lip, the giant water bug, birdsong, or the beautiful dazzle and flash of sunlighted minnows, is not that it all fits together like clockwork—for it doesn’t, particularly, not even inside the goldfish bowl—but that it all flows so freely wild, like the creek, that it all surges in a such a free, fringed tangle. Freedom is the world’s water and weather, the world’s nourishment freely given, its soil and sap: and the creator loves pizzazz. (8.I)

The excessive natural world points to an excessive supernatural world. The morning glory seedlings that pop up all over my yard reveal to me the seeds of grace in my heart that are ready to sprout if only I allow the Lord to bear His fruit within me. Grace is packed down and overflowing in this world, we are swimming in it. Do we have the ears to hear, the eyes to see, the receptivity to feel it?

Value of Creation

But nature and creation are not here merely to point us to God. They exist as God’s pizzazz, as Annie Dillard puts it. He did not have to create, but He did. It does not add anything to who He is, nor make Him more Himself. Creation flowed out of an abundance of His love. And because of that, it is valuable in itself. The beautiful flower in the middle of the prairie, that no human every sees, has a value. The sunset over the arctic, where no one lives or can see it, has value simply because it is part of God’s creation. That star so far away that no human eye will ever see it, even through a telescope, exists for no one but God Himself, and thus is valuable.

Before we took this first trip, we watched Ken Burns’ documentary on the National Parks, learning how the writer John Muir was very influential in bringing about the establishment of the National Park system. He saw the natural world as beautiful and worth preserving in its found state. I am thankful to Muir and his work, the way in which he has helped us see the value of the natural world in its wildness. There are even stories of him, in a St. Francis of Assisi-like manner, amicably encountering a bear in the wild. There is a deep truth that people like Dillard, Muir, and Thoreau were getting at. Because they were drawn to nature, they were also drawn to God. And in reading them, while seeing their limitations, we can also grow in our own understanding of truth that creation is important. Let us remember what St. Paul tells us: “For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God; for the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will but by the will of him who subjected it in hope;  because the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and obtain the glorious liberty of the children of God.” (Romans 8:19-21)