Spring, 2008

To celebrate Springtime, I share with you a slightly abbreviated chapter
from my new book,
Grounded in Love: Ecology, Faith, and Action.

Ecstasy

The trees of the Holy One are full of sap,
The cedars of Lebanon which God planted,
In which the birds build their nests,
And in whose tops the storks make their dwellings....
O Holy One, how manifold are your works!
in wisdom you have made them all;
The earth is full of your creatures.
Psalm 104: 17-18, 25

I suppose that my love for birds was inspired by both my mother and my third-grade teacher, Miss Robinson.  Even during World War II, when many foodstuffs were rationed, the cardinals, nuthatches, and chickadees could count on a daily banquet in our back yard, due to the stash of birdseed my mother kept in the garage.  The feeder was placed outside the dining room window, in a direct line of vision from my assigned place at the dinner table. When I was six, Mother bought me a bright yellow canary, who used to sing whenever I practiced the piano. I named him Bing Crosby.  We would release him every so often, giving him the freedom of the kitchen, but only much later would I begin to feel a twinge of sadness that he never knew life in the wild.

Miss Robinson made sure that all of the students in her classroom enrolled in the Junior Audubon Society.  From then on, in addition to daily sessions dedicated to such academic pursuits as spelling, arithmetic, and geography, we spent part of each day studying two very large Audubon Society charts that hung on the classroom wall. We looked forward to the game of trying to identify each species.  Robins we knew already, and cardinals.  But we also learned to discover -- nestled among the trees and undergrowth painted on the charts -- nuthatches, chickadees, goldfinches, wrens, and other species we didn’t even have in our yards.  One of the easiest to find was the bright orange male oriole, which I had never seen “in person,” although once my mother had pointed out its distinctive nest hanging from the limb of a tall tree.

Years later, when my husband and I moved into a house of our own, we followed the family tradition by purchasing a bird feeder.  Many of the birds whose names I learned from the third-grade bird charts have flown into our back yard, the way they did in my childhood. We try to satisfy each avian taste by providing sunflower, safflower, thistle seeds, and suet cakes.

From time to time, I have also attached a wedge of orange to the feeder, hoping to attract a Baltimore oriole.  The only result of my efforts was a series of dehydrated oranges, taken down with regret when, uneaten by any oriole, they became covered with ants.

But then, one day, he appeared, like a vision. The exquisite orange and black bird from Miss Robinson’s bird chart was perched on the orange. I could hardly get out the words to my husband: “Bob...look!”  The effect of that beauty on me was like an electrical charge, as if I had inadvertently come into contact with the household current or been struck by a bolt of lightning.  But it was not only my body that was affected.  The oriole, one of the loveliest of God’s creatures, “charged” my psyche as well, like a visitation of the Spirit. The word that came to my mind was “ecstasy.”

Ecstasy was the title that Bruce Wilshire, a professor of philosophy at Rutgers University, was considering for his book about the innate human need for contact with the natural world.  He finally called it Wild Hunger: the Primal Roots of Modern Addiction. “Human life,” he says, “was formed through millions of years in which our human and prehuman ancestors survived only by coping with wild Nature....Even when terrified at times, they probably did not feel emotionally empty.  I strongly suspect that on one level we still hunger for primal excitement, but the hunger is partially suppressed and confused by overlayings of later agricultural, industrial, and now electronic life.”

  
The gratifications we try to substitute for this experience of nature can never be sufficient.  These substitutes, repeated slavishly, become addictions.  What is the solution?  Wilshire sums it up: “Awe undermines addictions.”  Awe undermines addictions!

The Greek roots of the word ecstasy mean a standing out from the space that one’s body occupies, as if our very being were caught up in the surrounding world.  For Wilshire, experiences of ecstasy serve a primal need: “to be fully through time...to progressively discover our being in the wide world, not just to have it, as if it were a possession.”

 
Discovering our being in the wild world brings us the pleasure of moving outside of ourselves, through awe or through – even more potent  – ecstasy.  For Wilshire, this experience is found through our connection with nature.  Theologians would say it is found through our connection with God, which is why the best-known artistic depiction of ek-stasis is Bernini’s statue of St. Teresa of Avila, dissolving  in joy.

I would say it is not a question of “either/or,” but of “both/and,” for the natural world is an expression of God.  “O Holy One, how manifold are your works!  In wisdom you have made them all; the earth is full of your creatures.”        

                                                                      
When we can sing with all our hearts “O Holy One, how manifold are your works!” it will be the beginning of healing not only for our world, but for ourselves.

Ponder and Pray
Find a quiet, comfortable place in which to spend some time praying Psalm 104.  Read each verse of the psalm slowly.  Pause and close your eyes after each verse.  Try to picture the image that you have just read, as if you were actually seeing it.  “See” God wrapped with light as with a cloak, the mountain goats on the high hills, the lions roaring after their prey, the Leviathan “made for the sport of it.”

Now go outdoors – or, if the weather does not cooperate, look out your window at the world outside.  (Even in a city, there is the sky.  And you can include the people you see: We go forth to our work and to our labor until the evening.) Either silently or aloud, say the Psalm in your own way, naming what you see.  For example, “O Holy One, how manifold are your works!  In wisdom you have made them all; the earth is full of your creatures.  There is the soft-falling snow, creating a blanket for the garden.  Yonder is the small grey squirrel, leaping from branch to branch of the oak.There is the faithful mail deliverer, making his daily visit to our house in every kind of weather.....”

Nancy is also a regular contributor of articles in Talking Leaves.