Human gatherings ALWAYS occur within the larger community of the natural world.

Last weekend, I spent about four hours sitting and having a contemplative retreat by the banks of Medano Creek, which flows right next to a vast landscape of 750-foot dunes. Interestingly, when I'm on retreat, I almost never feel loneliness. For in the landscape around me, I sense a Divine listening, one that elicits my deepest self and the insights that arise spontaneously from it. How could one ever feel lonely in such a context? On this particular retreat, I also had a deeper awareness that I am called specifically to appreciate and bless each element of the landscape, especially when I am the only human present. For that is a major element of our distinct calling as human beings in the cosmos - to serve as the means through which the Earth loves and appreciates herself. In embodying this calling, I feel myself profoundly needed and included in a community of plant, animal and landform subjects. It is this community that I most profoundly experience as my "church."

However, as I gazed to the dunes in the distance and spied a group of hikers standing on a promontory, I realized that even when we gather together in human communities - familial, collegial or religious - we always do so in the context of the larger landscape which surrounds us. This is true even when we meet in a building. After all, buildings can't help but be located in a larger outdoor environment! Thus, even communities that pay no explicit attention to Nature are already situated smack dab in the middle of the natural world! Not only that, but the water of the local rivers cannot help but flow through the blood of each community member, allowing us to think, to reflect, to worship, to communicate, to breathe. The same is true, of course, of the local air we breathe. Nature is not some sort of "hobby" that a select portion of society engages in; rather, the natural world is ALWAYS present as the larger community in which every single instance of human gathering is always and forever located! How could we ever forget such a fundamental truth of our existence?

Photos: Great Sand Dunes National Park, CO, March 29, 2015