Â鶹Éç

In this summer heat, I have been reading a memoir called ‘A Vision of Eden’ by Marianne North- a painter and explorer in the late 1800’s. In her long skirt, petticoats and cobbled walking boots, she travelled into the forests and mountains of places such as Chile, India and Brazil in search of what she called ‘sacred plants’. Her paintings and descriptions are vivid. In a Brazilian forest near Rio she wrote:

‘ There was a coarse marigold-looking bloom with the sweetest scent of vanilla, and a large purple bell big-Nonia creeper with the strongest smell of garlic. (and) A lovely velvet-leaved
eye-pomea with large white blossom and a dark eye.’

Dorothy and William Wordsworth were travelling and writing around the same time. Disturbed by how the industrial revolution was taking us away from nature, William tried to show the expression of divinity within it.

He wrote:
‘One impulse from a vernal wood
May teach you more of man,
Of moral evil and of good,
Than all the sages can.’

This week we mourn the loss of journalist Dom Philips, and Bruno Pereira, an expert on indigenous peoples who, together, were trying to protect communities in the Amazon and save their culture from extinction. They were also trying to stop illegal logging and fishing that is destroying the forests.

But at the heart of their battle was what Dom’s wife describes as a ‘deep love, a respect, a fascination and need to understand [the Amazon’s] complexity.’
What Dom Philips, Bruno Pereira, Marianne North and William Wordsworth have in common is they show us that being ‘good stewards’ of nature is not enough. Shaping the future of land, sea and nature around our own needs, or believing that we have a full understanding is arrogant and dangerously ignorant.

Whilst we affirm that God is within every human and therefore everyone equally deserves dignity, we must also affirm that divinity is in nature too, in God’s creation, and afford it the same.

We can take on battle after battle for the Amazon or Congo rainforest, but if our understanding of nature does not include the sacred, we may never hear what nature has to tell us. Without this, we’ll not only lose our own dignity, but also lose the love and nurture of the sacred home we have been given.

Show less