We lose our souls if we lose the experience of the forest, the butterflies, the song of the birds, if we can't see the stars at night.
Interpretation
Experiencing nature is essential for maintaining our humanity and connection to the world.
Thomas Berry emphasizes the importance of connecting with nature and how essential experiences like observing forests, butterflies, and the night sky are for our spiritual well-being. He suggests that losing touch with these natural wonders diminishes our souls, highlighting the integral relationship between human beings and the natural environment.
In practice
In a speech about environmental conservation, one might say, 'As Thomas Berry reminds us, we lose our souls if we lose the experience of the forest.'
If the religious experience were simply some naive impression of the uninformed it would not have resulted in such intellectual insight, such spiritual exaltation, such spectacular religious ritual, or in the immense volume of song and poetry and literature and dance that humans have produced.
We might sometimes reflect and recall that the purpose of all our science, technology, industry, manufacturing, commerce, and finance is celebration, planetary celebration. This is what moves the stars through the heavens and the earth through its seasons. The final norm of judgment concerning the success or failure of our technologies is the extent to which they enable us to participate more fully in this grand festival.
Diversity is the magic. It is the first manifestation, the first beginning of the differentiation of a thing and of simple identity. The greater the diversity, the greater the perfection.
Both education and religion need to ground themselves within the story of the universe as we now understand this story through empirical knowledge. Within this functional cosmology, we can overcome our alienation and begin the renewal of life on a sustainable basis. This story is a numinous revelatory story that could evoke the vision and the energy required to bring not only ourselves but the entire planet into a new order of magnificence.
The historical mission of our times is to re-invent the humanβat the species level, with critical reflection, within the community of life-systems, in a time-developmental context, by means of story and shared dream experience.
If the outer world is diminished in its grandeur, then the emotional, imaginative, intellectual, and spiritual life of the human is diminished or extinguished. Without the soaring birds, the great forests, the sounds and coloration of the insects, the free-flowing streams, the flowering fields, the sight of clouds by day and the stars at night, we become impoverished in all that makes us human.
The Fur Company may be called the exterminating medium of these wild and almost uninhabitable regions, which cupidity or the love of money alone would induce man to venture into. Where can I now go and find nature undisturbed?
Today, the first & last of every Tree/ Speaks to humankind. Come to me, here beside the River.
Here I came to the very edge where nothing at all needs saying, everything is absorbed through weather and the sea, and the moon swam back, its rays all silvered, and time and again the darkness would be broken by the crash of a wave, and every day on the balcony of the sea, wings open, fire is born, and everything is blue again like morning.
With no mind, flowers lure the butterfly; With no mind, the butterfly visits the blossoms. Yet when flowers bloom, the butterfly comes; When the butterfly comes, the flowers bloom.
Just as our forefathers saved and invested to build what we, the current generation, are enjoying today, so, too, we must plant trees so that our sons and daughters, and their sons and daughters, can enjoy the shade.
Touch the earth, love the earth, honour the earth, her plains, her valleys, her hills, and her seas; rest your spirit in her solitary places.
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