The divine communicates to us primarily through the language of the natural world. Not to hear the natural world is not to hear the divine.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the importance of nature as a medium through which the divine communicates with humanity.
Thomas Berry suggests that the natural world is the primary way in which divine messages are conveyed to us. Ignoring nature equates to missing out on these divine communications, highlighting the intrinsic connection between spirituality and the environment. By appreciating and understanding the natural world, one can more fully engage with and hear the divine presence in life.
In practice
During a speech on environmental conservation, one could use this quote to emphasize the spiritual significance of protecting nature.
If the religious experience were simply some naive impression of the uninformed it would not have resulted in such intellectual insight, such spiritual exaltation, such spectacular religious ritual, or in the immense volume of song and poetry and literature and dance that humans have produced.
We might sometimes reflect and recall that the purpose of all our science, technology, industry, manufacturing, commerce, and finance is celebration, planetary celebration. This is what moves the stars through the heavens and the earth through its seasons. The final norm of judgment concerning the success or failure of our technologies is the extent to which they enable us to participate more fully in this grand festival.
Diversity is the magic. It is the first manifestation, the first beginning of the differentiation of a thing and of simple identity. The greater the diversity, the greater the perfection.
Both education and religion need to ground themselves within the story of the universe as we now understand this story through empirical knowledge. Within this functional cosmology, we can overcome our alienation and begin the renewal of life on a sustainable basis. This story is a numinous revelatory story that could evoke the vision and the energy required to bring not only ourselves but the entire planet into a new order of magnificence.
The historical mission of our times is to re-invent the humanβat the species level, with critical reflection, within the community of life-systems, in a time-developmental context, by means of story and shared dream experience.
If the outer world is diminished in its grandeur, then the emotional, imaginative, intellectual, and spiritual life of the human is diminished or extinguished. Without the soaring birds, the great forests, the sounds and coloration of the insects, the free-flowing streams, the flowering fields, the sight of clouds by day and the stars at night, we become impoverished in all that makes us human.
I describe myself as an environmentalist not because I'm marching in the street with placards but because I like to be in the woods by myself.
So fine was the morning except for a streak of wind here and there that the sea and sky looked all one fabric, as if sails were stuck high up in the sky, or the clouds had dropped down into the sea.
Our present ecological crisis, the biggest single practical threat to our human existence in the middle to long term, has, religious people would say, a great deal to do with our failure to think of the world as existing in relation to the mystery of God, not just as a huge warehouse of stuff to be used for our convenience.
As a child, I used to have a secret dread - and a recurring nightmare - of the whole world becoming city, being covered with cement and buildings and streets. No more country. No more woods.
My garden, with its silence and pulses of fragrance that come and go on the airy undulations, affects me like sweet music. Care stops at the gates, and gazes at me wistfully through the bars.
I think people had somehow gotten the sense that we have explored everything, when that isn't the case. We so know so little about the ocean, and so much of it is being destroyed.
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