Richard Rohr's Daily Meditation
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The Laas Geel cave paintings (detail), Laas Geel, Somalia, Horn of Africa (9,000-3,000 BCE)
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Nature as the First Bible
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Bearing the Divine Fingerprint
Wednesday, January 21, 2015
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If you would learn more, ask the cattle,
Seek information from the birds of the air.
The creeping things of earth will give you lessons,
And the fishes of the sea will tell you all.
There is not a single creature that does not know
That everything is of God's making.
God holds in power the soul of every living thing,
And the breath of every human body.
-Book of Job 12:7-10 It is strange that we should have to write, assert, or try to prove what should be obvious: everything bears the divine fingerprint, footprint, and "similitude." The people from the three monotheistic religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam should have been the first to enjoy this shared truth, beauty, and goodness. These are the ones who assert that "there is one Creator God who made all things"! Yet it has usually been the Native religions, the Hindus, the Jains, and the Buddhists who have more honored the other creatures and the natural world. The monotheistic religions (also known as the Religions of the Book), each in their own way, overly intellectualized those very books. They became fodder for scholars and sectarians instead of opening paths to transformation for everybody. We usually gutted them of cosmic significance, reflecting their time in history, and used scriptures to assert our tribal superiority over other religions and certainly over all other creatures, so much so that they could not really see what should have been clear, obvious, and compelling. Some have called it an idolatry of words. Rest of the article HERE |
