Nature is Scripture

Last night, I was arrested by a sight of extra-ordinary beauty.

I write “extra-ordinary” in this particular manner because from most people’s perspective the sight was ordinary.

But it so arrested me that I stopped and snapped a picture. (See below)

I think you will agree that the scene appears ordinary, but there was something about how the setting sun lit the trees along the shore of the lake that touched something deep within me.

The particular angle of the sunlight contrasted with the steel, gray clouds of a thunderstorm which had rolled over the lake a half hour earlier and somehow worked to release from the leaves of the trees a silverish-green hue that I’d previously never witnessed.

Still, the beauty was so ordinary that I understood why others walking around the lake paid no attention. The trees looked mostly as they always did but, somehow, they were different to me.

I didn’t understand why this might be the case until I read this post yesterday, “People are Trees, and Trees are Scripture” that I understood that maybe I am slowly learning how to decipher and read nature. (And, if that’s not the case, I am at least learning to slow down and pay closer attention to nature.)

Thomas Aquinas said that the Divine reveals itself in two books: Nature (general revelation) and scripture (special revelation).

He is right, but what he should have added is that nature is scripture written in living matter.

Our challenge in these fast moving times is to put down our smartphones and make the time to get out in nature so that we might begin relearning how to read the divine beauty and mystery that is all around us.