- Excerpts from "Rumours of another world" by Philip Yancey
"As a start, I aim to make daily life sacramental, which means literally to keep the sacred (sacra) in mind (mental). In other words, I seek a mindfulness- a mind full- of God's presence in the world. I have no desire to escape the natural world, the pattern of gnostics, desert monks, and fundamentalists who flee 'worldliness.' Nor do I deny the supernatural, the error of the reducers. Rather, I want to bring the two together, to reconnect life into the whole that God intended.
This world, all of it, either belongs to God, or it does not...
Blaise Pascal, who achieved renown both for his mathematics and his devotional writings, suggests an approach of seeing the natural world as a foreshadowing of the supernatural. 'He has done in the boundaries of nature what He would do in those of grace, in order that we might judge that He could make the invisible, since He made the visible excellently.' Beauty abounds in nature: a collection of seashells, the castoff excretions of lowly mollusks, is probably the most beautiful artwork in my home. And I need only read the Psalms to realize that God wants us to love and honour him through the creation, not apart from it.
Celtic spirituality speaks of 'thin places' where the natural and supernatural worlds come togeher at their narrowest, with only a thin veil between them. I have visited places where nature's works speak loudly of their Creator: bald eagles and beluga whales in Alaska, coral and tropical fish on the Great Barrier Reef off Australia, exotic birds and butterflies at Angel Falls in Venezuela, seashells on the beaches of Kenya. One day i realized with a start that God 'sees' all the wonders of the earth at all times. Not only does God see them, God is their source, and each reveals something of their Creator.
"Beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will sense them," writes Annie Dillard. "The least we can do is try to be there."
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