People Who Know Nature Know Pantheism
My farmer mothers lessons on spirituality
Yesterday on Facebook, my lovely hippy pastor posted:
What is the best thing your mom taught you about faith? How did she teach you?
I remember being six or seven years old, standing with my mom behind my grandmother’s house. This was the same house my grandfather had built by hand — hauling field stone for the foundation on a sledge pulled by draft horses — the year before my mother was born.
She spread her arms wide, taking in the entire family farm and the woods around. “God is everywhere, in everything,” she said. “You don’t have to seek God out — just pay attention.”
What prompted her to say this at that moment isn’t obvious. Did it relate to a conversation the adults had been having inside the house? Was it in answer to something she’d heard at church — something she agreed, or disagreed with? As for me, the kid — I gazed at the nearby plum tree, trying to imagine what it would mean if God were us, the chickens, the cat…if God were inside each of those fragrant purple plums.
I think we’ve finally located the source of my lifelong Pantheism — which I didn’t realize wasn’t how everyone believed until three years at divinity school taught me otherwise. How could anyone believe differently? I wondered. Isn’t our unity with Source obvious?
For those who haven’t tuned in lately, Pantheism is “the belief in many or all gods, or the belief that God exists in, and is the same as, all things, animals, and people within the universe.”
Though the term was born in the mid-18th century, scientists, philosophers, and theologians from every generation believed this way. The priests of the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita, Lao Tzu, Thales, Heraclitus, Marcus Aurelius, Meister Eckhart, Giordano Bruno (who burned at the stake for his beliefs in 1600), Goethe, Hegel, Rousseau, Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, Emerson & Thoreau, Nietzsche, Sitting Bull, Chief Seattle, Einstein, and good old Stephen Hawking have embraced the concept.
The poet Robinson Jeffers wrote a letter to his friend, Sister Mary James Power in which he summed system of belief up beautifully.
I believe that the universe is one being, all its parts are different expressions of the same energy, and they are all in communication with each other, influencing each other, therefore parts of one organic whole…. I am compelled to love it, and to think of it as divine.
So, how did my mother — who grew up on a farm in rural Alabama — arrive at the same conclusion as did these famous men? The answer seems to be in what she told me as we stood in the afternoon looking across the farmyard.
What was it she said? Oh yes…
“The universe reveals itself to us every moment of the day, every moment of our lives.”
“Just pay attention.”
Submission by Holly Pettit