we should apprentice to Nature

 

nature, and revelations

many people view The Bible as God's Word,

proclamations of Truth, truth without error,

so full of what is right

that all we have to do is read in it

and thus find the answers 

as to how all came to be,

as to how we should act upon the world,

we should deny the primary source of our experience

and embrace what has been revealed in its pages,

no matter how many different humans

wrote down the words therein,

doing their best to follow the messages they received,

no matter the different human languages used,

with the different nuances of the wordings,

if it's in The Bible, it is right,

and we should deny our common sense,

our God-given understanding of what makes sense, 

of what doesn't,

meanwhile another book written by God has been open to us,

so that we might marvel, and learn,

it is the book called Nature, 

the world of rock, of plant and animal,

of the impulse toward greater order,

within which we have been born and live,

we should seek the insights, the rules Nature's world lives by,

how does it manifest the way of the Creator?

Ken Burns has told a story of Leonardo da Vinci,

in his documentary da Vinci sings the praise of the Creator,

as he studies, draws, creates meaning with what he learns,

I also celebrate Charles Darwin,

Darwin had the courage to see true and notice the "seeing,"

The Bible did not allow for dinosaurs,

for humans to have a past more than for a few thousand years,

for the idea that we are different from the vision of having burst forth,

full-blown, from God's forehead into Eden,

some of Darwin's last work was of plants,

he observed, noted, and speculated on the agency of the root of a plant,

now we start to fathom that all is connected within God's plan,

that underneath us is consciousness

that works to hold all together,

far better than The Bible's charge to us,

for it says we are in charge, 

that we are all that counts,

Nature begs to differ,

we should listen to God,

not just in the words of The Bible,

but also in the words of the Creation all around us,

that wholeness that we call Nature,

that which should elder us into apprenticing to a Creation,

that, like God, is far larger than us.

by Henry H. Walker

November 26, ‘24