Tuesday, October 6, 2026: Francis and the Natural World: Rediscovering Our Connection to Nature 

The sacramental nature of the world was largely lost until its more recent rediscovery by seers that we usually think of as “secular,” “mere” nature mystics, poets, and artists: people like Chief Seattle, John Muir, Rachel Carson, Walt Whitman, Wendell Berry, Annie Dillard, and others. 

We Catholics ended up limiting “sacramentals” to things like religious medals, blessed candles, and holy water, instead of honoring the inherent holiness of the earth ores, beeswax, and water that actually formed them. Please think about that! [1]  

We limited the official church sacraments to seven (six for women, subtracting the sacrament of Holy Orders) when “there should be seven hundred,” as an old man once said to me in Tanzania. We ended up actually desacralizing God’s world without realizing it. 

The people we called pagans and animists actually had a head start on us, because they at least saw the world as filled with spirits, whereas our world became empty, foreign, and without any natural balm for the soul. In the modern world, wild was always bad, and domesticated was always good. Yet C.S. Lewis said of God (in the character of the lion, Aslan), “He’s wild, you know!” Domesticated, of course, means subservient to us. We liked our world more than God’s world, it seems. 

For much of Christian history, we preached inside of a disenchanted, small, and lonely universe where there was no natural holiness or inherent goodness in anything non-human or non-Christian. I thought Jesus was “the Savior of the world” (John 4:42), not just human souls. We then tried to fill up the loneliness with books and ideas, since the world beneath us and above us had become boring, merely functional, and not subject to the predictability we wanted. 

We grasped for meaning in merely mental ways when it was all around us in tangible and visible ways. We failed to kiss the ground on which we stood and preferred to fly off into the heavens. “The first level of perception,” according to Bonaventure, “is toward exterior material objects,” and only when we see respectfully and lovingly at that level can we “ascend” to his second and third levels of full spiritual seeing. [2] 

Francis knew and taught that “God does not lose energy by plunging into form,” as Cynthia Bourgeault so forcefully puts it [3], and that true transcendence is to be found in immanence and materiality itself. What a surprise! 

Most of us were trained to be good Platonists, where body and soul are enemies, much more than Christian incarnationalists, where body and soul are friends. And where were we to experience this incarnation? Precisely everywhere and all the time, not just in places defined as sacred, special, churchy, or religious. That is why Paul could confidently tell us we could and should “pray always” (I Thessalonians 5:17).

Father Richard Rohr considers how Christianity throughout history lost touch with the natural world as a place of grace and divine presence: