The Book of Scripture and the Book of Nature: Nature as Great Book

Nature can be read like a book.  The Bible is not the only sacred text available to us for gazing and pondering.

Someone has put up on the Web a compendium of quotations (by Christian authors but also by Muslim authors and authors from other religions and wisdom paths) about this ancient insight and related practices.  It is here.

A lovely, related resource is Robert M. Hamma's Earth's Echo: Sacred Encounters with Nature (Notre Dame, IN: Sorin Books, 2002).

Hamma suggests a practice akin to lectio divina to "read" nature. It involves paying attention, pondering, response, and surrender.

Hamma writes:

Paying attention is hard work; contemplative insight is not like an apple we can pluck from a tree. Adopting the right attitude is a necessary first step. That attitude is not one of goal setting but of patience. It is an attitude that simply being there is enough.

He continues:

Setting goals for maintaining heightened awareness or expecting insights to come can lead to disappointment when the inevitable distractions take over, or when we "get nothing out of it." It helps to know that we are not the first people to ever attempt this, and that there are paths that others have trod before us.

Hamma, Earth's Echo, p. 19