Nature as a Holy Place

Gardens offer endless scope for budding mystics! They are safe places, places of life, abounding in beauty. Where there is a garden, there will be water and living things with their varied beauty. Charles Darwin, although remembered as the great proponent of evolution, saw himself primarily as a beholder of the natural world. He spent much of his life contemplating the simplest things, and he ends his great work, The Origin of Species, by noting: ‘It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank …’. This humble bank he studied is clothed with many plants, with birds singing, insects flitting about and worms crawling through the damp earth. It leads him to reflect that ‘these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other and dependent on each other … have all been produced by laws acting around us.’

So, find your entangled bank, contemplate it, muse on its long history and reflect on what it is trying to say to you. Let this be your holy place where you fall in love with the natural world and with its maker. Let the tapestry of life come alive under your gaze. Perhaps you may exclaim, like Darwin, ‘It has been for me a glorious day, like giving to a blind man eyes.’
Brian Grogan SJ, Finding God in a Leaf: The Mysticism of Laudato Si’