Meeting The Masters: Nature

Showing posts with label Nature. Show all posts

Monday 31 January 2022

A Winter Walk

Yesterday was a beautiful sunny winter afternoon and I walked further than I had intended, going across the local common and on into some woods beyond that I had only visited a few times before. There is supposed to be the remains of a Roman villa somewhere around there but you'd have to be an archaeologist with a trowel to find it. As far as I can tell there is nothing more than some sunken ground where once it might have been. Still, it is nice to think that there was something of the sort there at one time. It reminded me of when I was at a school and we had a Roman tea party during which we were all supposed to speak in Latin (it was that kind of school). There was dormouse and honey on the menu, a Roman delicacy apparently, but I think we had dormouse substitute.

When I came out of the woods it was still light though the sun was about to set. In front of me was a wide stretch of farmland which was all newly sown grass but the farmer had kindly left a path through which you could walk to get back to the common which was my route home. In the middle of the field there was one solitary tree standing rather like a scarecrow. He had lost all his leaves but stood proudly like a sentry on duty. "This is my field", he seemed too say. "You can cross it but don't linger too longer or trample the young grass."

So I began to cross the field and then I saw some deer in the distance at the other side of the field, near to the wood in the photo. Roe deer live on the common but I've only seen them twice in five years. They saw me and scampered away before I could take a picture. I thought of the contrast between the tree and the deer, both aspects of God's creation but completely different. One, strong, immobile, commanding, seemingly ancient. The other, swift, graceful, nervous, youthful, always on the go. What contrasts but both part of God's prodigious self-expression.

I looked behind me and there was the sun on the horizon, shining brightly though with a wisp of cloud over it. I looked ahead of me and my shadow stretched way out into the distance.

I looked back again and saw that the cloud had left the sun. The land had now become a deep orange. I took another photo. There is just a 30 second gap between the two.

What a change. Some of it might be due to how I took the photo though I don't think I did anything differently. To be honest, I wouldn't know how. All I can say is that the second one is an accurate depiction of the rich ochre glow of the early evening light.

However, it didn't last long and when I got to the other side of the field and entered the wood it was starting to get darker. The ground was quite muddy and I knew that if I took the quicker path that went straight through the wood it would be even muddier. But I heard some Canada geese honking furiously from the pond which is on that route and thought I would see what the fuss was all about. There was a stand off between a couple of geese and a heron, for fishing rights perhaps? The geese were very vocal but the heron didn't seem perturbed. Eventually however, he lazily took to the air and drifted away to the other side of the pond. Who needs noisy neighbours?

Walking through woods and open clearings like this field is one of the things that can connect us with our ancestors and the ancient ways. It's one of the few activities we share with them. I go for a walk every day with longer excursions at the weekend. For me it's a time of contemplation when I can look up at the sky envisaging it as the vault of heaven or try to contact the life force that runs throughout nature, expressing itself in a myriad different ways. Even in today's world when both God and the gods have been chased out of our lives we can still go for a walk in the country or, if not that then at least, a park and capture something of the magic of the true reality behind everyday material existence. We need this if we are not to dry up and wither spiritually inside.

Thursday 11 November 2021

Heat and Light

I don't know the truth behind the current anthropogenic global warming scare. Maybe it's based on some kind of reality, maybe it's partly true but not in the way presented or maybe it's just completely hyped up and 'the science', as it often does now, has followed the funding. What I do know, though, is that it is a spiritual distraction.

Let's be clear about one thing first of all. We should obviously respect the environment or, as it should properly be called, the Creation. We should respect our natural environment, we should respect our intellectual environment and, most of all, we should respect our spiritual environment. But the relentless focus on the physical only points to how little we respect the other environments in which we live and move and have our being, and how much we damage them. Chiefly, we damage the spiritual which we either don't acknowledge at all or else see largely in the light of the priorities of this world.

I am sure the climate is changing somewhat but isn't that always the case? It's reasonable to think that human activity since the Industrial Revolution might have contributed in some way to this, and I would be the first to decry the pollution industrialisation has caused. We do need to change. That is a basic and obvious fact. But what do we need to change? Our cars and boilers and and diet and habits of over-consumption or something more fundamental? Here I should say that I don't have a car, don't bother with heating until the temperature is truly low and am not much of a consumer of stuff. Also, I haven't eaten meat for years but, quite frankly, none of these things mean much. It is obvious that the idea of climate change is being used to advance another purpose. Amongst other things, it is being used as a secular religion to keep people away from developing a proper relationship with God and attending to their salvation. Concern with it eats up energies that should be turned inwards towards God and causes these energies to dissipate into agitation and self-righteousness to no real effect. Great heat but very little light as you might say, given the subject.

Then it is being used to attack basic freedoms, impose control and eventually reduce human beings to lines of data. This is what it is really about. Control. Once you realise that you can free yourself of any worries you might have about climate change. Do you think most people really care? Those at the top are using those at the bottom to advance their own ends. Those activists at the bottom are the ones Yeats described as "the worst - full of passionate intensity", convinced of their righteousness but animated by anger and resentment. Many, no doubt, mean well but they are being manipulated.

This does not mean we should treat our world as a resource to be plundered until there is nothing left of it, but the concern with climate change is tinkering with effects. We need to look at causes and the cause of our disconnect with nature is our disconnect with God. Even if, by some miracle, we got the climate to behave just as we would like it to behave (and what exactly is the ideal temperature?) we would be no better off in terms of our interaction with the world. We live in a state of complete alienation and that will not change until we turn back to God and see ourselves as spiritual beings whose fulfilment and duty lies in loving and serving the Creator.

Climate change, real or exaggerated, is a complete red herring. What we should be aware of is the agenda of control it is being used to advance. We should also know that this is a materialistic preoccupation. That is not to say we can use the world greedily or selfishly for that is even more materialistic. The world is the creation of God, that which he looked upon and saw was good. But don't separate it from its Maker. Use it, we were meant to cultivate the wilderness, but use it with love and respect as a good steward. Then things like climate change fade into insignificance. Get your relationship right with God and your relationship with the world will automatically follow on from that.

Anyone who takes this position must be prepared to be assailed by a barrage of statistics proving he is wrong. I would never say one should ignore reliable data but data is open to interpretation and figures can be selected to serve an agenda. But, there is something more. Those on the spiritual path must be guided by intuition. Now, intuition is very good at the big picture but it sometimes falls short on the details. We don't have to know how and why the climate change agenda is a stalking horse to bring about some other desired end but we can see that is precisely what it is and one of the reasons for that is this. Climate concern is relentlessly pushed as the correct thing to believe for all right-thinking, well-motivated people who have the good of humanity at heart but I have to tell you that nothing that is truly good is promoted by the mainstream nowadays. We are in a spiritual war in which the spiritually harmful is constantly promoted at the expense of the spiritual healthy. It isn't right to defile or exploit our planet. We should reduce our consumption merely as a matter of putting spiritual things first. Our materialism and over-consumption are sins, no doubt about it. But the climate change agenda is just the latest example of deceiving people by leading them into a false good. The precise details behind this operation may be elusive but an obvious effect is the tightening of control and reduction of freedom. We are being coerced into giving up our freedoms on many fronts now. Just as we have recently accepted restrictions in the name of saving our health so we will shortly be required to accept more restrictions in the name of saving the planet. But what is really behind that?

It's not increasing heat we should be worried about but fading light.

Monday 3 May 2021

The Environment vs. The Creation

I have never owned a car. Between 1980 and 2000 I flew on only 3 occasions (admittedly more frequently since). I haven't eaten meat since 1978. I got central heating at home for the first time 20 years after leaving my parents' house. I don't consume much and waste as little as possible. I have always loved the natural world. Theoretically I could be a poster boy for environmentalists but I have absolutely no interest in the environment.

What is the environment? Surely only someone with no real feeling for God's green Earth could call it that. It is a word for technocrats and materialists. I don't believe in the environment, I believe in the creation and this is the difference. The environment has no Creator. It is a soulless place despite efforts to pretend it is sacred in an atheistic kind of way in which Nature exists above humanity. But God made Nature to serve humanity. We are her gardeners not her subordinates because although we are part of Nature we are also above her. That doesn't mean we should exploit or mistreat her which we certainly have. But the solution is not to make ourselves inferior to nature. It is to treat her properly and with respect. However, she is still there for us not vice versa.

There seem to be two sorts of environmentalists. The materialists who worry about depleting the planet's resources and the spiritualists who have a vaguely pagan attitude to Nature, seeing her as the earth mother. I don't necessarily disagree with either of them but their view of the picture is incomplete and therefore wrong. We should cultivate our garden with care, attention and respect for its needs, and we would do well to honour Nature as the source of our material self. But above the natural man is the spiritual man. Above the earth mother of Nature is her Creator who is God, and God gave us this planet for us to act as his regent here. Nature is ours in the same way as our body is ours. We treat both well seeing them as the earthly temple of God but ultimately they are there to act as the vessels for spirit to manifest and express itself and it is the spirit that truly matters.

Nature is not the environment. It is the Creation.

Sunday 18 August 2019

Environmentalism

What a long and unsympathetic sounding word for something that should be very simple, namely a love of nature centred on the understanding that it is the creation of a Creator. The environment? Is that a word that conjures up in your mind birds, trees, plants, flowers, animals, fish? Does it speak of mountains, rivers, valleys, hills, fields and hedgerows? Are the wind or the sky or the sea or the desert the environment? Of course, in one sense they are but the point is that something real, life-giving, even alive in a way, and beautiful is often reduced to an object of science, and not just in the minds of professional scientists who analyse and dissect either. It is so too for activists (another terrible word speaking of aggressive ideology) who are supposed to be fighting (again, note the word) for its preservation.

There was a time when people who spoke out against the destruction of what we now call the environment did so from love of nature and a strong awareness of its beauty. Often, on some level at least even if that was only because they came from a world in which a divine reality had long been accepted, they were conscious that it was a gift, a garden to be tended, and though we were workers in the garden we were not the head gardener. Now the situation seems to have changed. Now, many people who would call themselves environmentalists don't believe in God and don't see nature as a creation. Sometimes their approach is purely pragmatic which is to say they want to preserve nature so that human beings can continue to exploit it only more sustainably, the utilitarian attitude. But sometimes much of their motivation seems to come not from love of God but a kind of hatred of mankind and this hatred they can best express by attacking mankind for what it is doing to the environment. They want human beings to take a hit because they don't like human beings or certain sectors of humanity anyway who are perceived as rich and powerful. Not because they love nature. Granted this is a simplification because motives are often mixed, but it is clearly a factor and sometimes a major one.

In the spiritual world (which is the real world) motivation is all-important. Why you do what you do matters much more than what you do though, clearly, the two are interlinked. And fundamentally the only good motivation to do anything is love of God. In the final analysis, what is not inspired by this is not well motivated. Trying to preserve nature or make a 'sustainable environment' if you do not know what (or who) created this is still all part of the rebellion against God. It is part of evil. When all is said and done, good can only flow from love of God. There is no good, none whatsoever, without God.

I have loved the natural world all my life. To begin with, just for itself but even then I felt there was this aspect of a veil to it and that behind it there was something more real and truer, the response to which is where this love came from. I never learnt how to drive a car, partly because of the noise and stink they made, partly because I suspect I am not really someone who can focus on mechanical things (this is not meant as a badge of honour, I see it as a defect), but very largely because I hated what roads had done to the countryside and the town. To nature. Don't get me wrong. I like roads as in tracks and paths that lead to new places and join separated people. But I hate them as metalled scars that deface the environment (appropriate use I would say) and don't blend in to their surroundings. And that take far too many vehicles on them which travel far too fast.

So I would regard myself as a lover of nature, as is any sane and normally constituted person, though now I see it as a creation. Which doesn't lessen it in itself. To see a saint as a person through whom God works doesn't lessen the individuality of that saint. It actually augments it and so it is with regard to nature as creation.

I love nature but I don't like the environmental lobby who often, not all but many and the most vociferous, use nature to advance a political agenda or an ideology that, when looked at clearly, denies God. If you deny the Creator of nature your understanding and appreciation of the natural world is much diminished, whatever wonders you may claim to find in it. And you are not on the side of the angels, not the good ones anyway.