Extracts from a reflection by Fr. Richard Rohr published on March 3rd, 2024

In this reflection Fr. Richard Rohr considers how the soul of nature mirrors the human soul. Losing touch with the natural world, the author says, is losing touch with our own souls.

Extracts:

I believe we can’t access our full intelligence and wisdom without some real connection to nature.

My spiritual father Francis of Assisi… became intimately connected with non-human living things and came to recognize that the natural world was also imbued with soul.

Without a visceral connection to the soul of nature, we will not know how to love or respect our own soul… We are naturally healed in the world when we know things centre to centre, subject to subject, soul to soul.

Soul is the blueprint inside every created thing telling it what it is and what it can become. When we meet anything at that level, we will respect, protect, and love it.

Many human beings simply haven’t found their own blueprint or soul, so they cannot see it anywhere else… We clergy would have done much better to encourage Christians to discover their souls instead of “save” them.

While everything has a soul, in many people it seems to be dormant, disconnected and ungrounded. They are not aware of the inherent truth, goodness, and beauty shining through everything.

If God is as great, glorious and wonderful as religious claim, then wouldn’t such a God make such “wonderfulness” universally available?  Surely, such connection and presence are as freely available as the air we breathe and the water we drink.

To read the reflection in full, please click here.

Communications