Daily Meditation | Tuesday, Nov 24, 2020

Welcome to Tuesday and our feature on nature as a window into the divine with a reflection based on the writing of Carl Safina, this time from The View from Lazy Point.

The Sarum Prayer

God be in my head—and in my understanding God be in my eyes—and in my looking God be in my mouth—and in my speaking God be in my heart—and in my thinking God be at my end—and at my departing

Wisdom of Jesus Portion

Matthew 7: 12

“In everything do to others as you would have them do to you; for this is the law and the prophets.”

Reflection Based on The View from Lazy Point

In his fourth book, The View from Lazy Point, Carl Safina’s spiritual take on nature emerges with heightened clarity. The book opens with a quote from Howard’s End, by E. M. Forrester: “Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon… Live in fragments no longer. Only connect.”

Toward the end of the book, Safina writes of his understanding of what it means to be religious in the best sense. “Religare,” he writes, using the Latin, “means to re-tie, or to gather to bind…thus the word “religation”—reconnection—is one root of the word, “religion.” Albert Einstein said our task is to “widen our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”

Now Safina gets right to his point: “So what I guess I’m trying to say is that, though I’m a secular person and a scientist, I believe that our relationship with the living world must be mainly religious. But I don’t mean theological. I mean religious in the sense of reverent, revolutionary, spiritual, and inspired. Reverent because the world is unique, thus holy. Revolutionary in making a break with the drift and downdraft of outdated, maladaptive modes of thought. Spiritual in seeking attainment of a higher realm of human being. Inspired in the aspiration to connect crucial truths with wider communities. Religious in precisely this way: connection, with a sense of purpose” (The View from Lazy Point, 324–225).

This is a sense of “religious” that I can embrace. And it seems to comport with the great religious figures of the ages, including my personal favorite, the teacher of the Sermon on the Mount. In this midrash on Torah, he called for a radical embrace of non-rivalrous love with these words—the words, not of a Hallmark Card, but of his narrow path that leads to life, in contrast with the wide path that leads to destruction: “In everything do to others as you would have them do to you; for this is the law and the prophets.”

This phrase, “the law and the prophets” referred to the Bible that Jesus knew. In other words, if our reading of sacred text violates the rule of empathy-love, then it is a bad reading of sacred text. Worse than that, it violates the crucial meaning of religion: “Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon.” And his.

And Safina’s religious love of the wild and its inhabitants enhances my reading of this rule for reading the law and the prophets (his bible) aright: in everything do to others as you would have them do to you. Others, that’s an important word. In the Abrahamic faiths, God is the ultimate Other. That is, God is “set apart” from all else, uncreated, unique. Just as Safina defines holy as “unique.” To love the ultimate other, we must love the proximate others. And who is to say that this word, “others” is limited to human others? Could it not refer as well to “others than us humans”—that is to all living creatures? Albert Einstein’s expanding circle of compassion is one that embraces compassion toward ourselves, our loved ones, our groups, our nation and the others of our species with whom we don’t identify in these ways. But it doesn’t end there. It encompasses “all living c