WEBVTT

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My own journey away
from fundamentalism,

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as I'm calling it
tonight, has led me

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to what Thoreau called
"the unroofed church

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of the natural world."

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It's led me from a communal
religious experience

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to a solitary one and from a god
of history to a god of nature.

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I completely embrace the idea
of the stoics and Spinoza,

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that creation is
indistinguishable

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from the creator.

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For me, then, it follows
that the search for God

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is first and foremost an
ecological enterprise.

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In the Gospel of Thomas,
Jesus said to his followers,

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"The kingdom of God is within
you and it is without you."

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One way I understand
that saying is to mean we

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can only find God,
we can only know God,

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through the internal
landscape of the heart

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and the external landscape
of the natural world.

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One is the path of
intuition, the other,

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the path of the naturalist.

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I'd like to just
read a short journal

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entry I wrote that I think
kind of gets at this idea,

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and I hope it acts as a
sequel to what I just read.

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I live in a beautiful, wooded
part of central Kentucky

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on a very, very beautiful creek.

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I'm very lucky to live there.

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"Up above the treetops,
I hear the cheerful zree

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of pine siskins.

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That's followed by
the whirring wings

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of the season's first
hummingbird, a male that

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flashes his sequined red throat
for a second at my feeder

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and then is gone.

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The hummingbird's
arrival signals

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that the pine siskins will soon
be departing, and moving North.

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They've been good
winter companions,

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and I'll be sorry
to see them go.

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On one arm of my
Adirondack chair,

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a translation of the
Upanishads sits inadvertently

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on top of my field guide
to Kentucky wildflowers.

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They are each, I
realized, guides

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to two worlds, two landscapes--

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one inner, one outer.

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Each points to the
oldest scriptures,

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one that writes itself into
being through what Thoreau

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called 'the poem of creation,'
and one that tries to capture

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through pictographic Sanskrit
what is perceived in that poem.

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Swami Vivekananda, the man who
introduced Vedanta religion

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to the United States at the
end of the 19th century,

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warned that, quote, 'books
never make religions,

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but religions make books.'

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The problem is that within
books, religions usually

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ossify into doctrines and dogma.

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The search for the
god within oneself

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becomes too often a campaign
to impose one's religious views

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on others.

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But for Vivekananda,
all religions

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are manifestations of one
fundamental religious impulse--

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what he calls 'the realization
of God in the soul.'

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In this view, all of
the world's religions

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are branches of the same
tree, different articulations

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of the original
voice that whispers

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to us of our own divine,
though hidden, nature.

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My grandfather was
indeed convinced

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of his own superior
religion, and he

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spent his whole adult
life trying to impose

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that vision on others.

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He once told me
that the Jews who

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converted to Christianity
in the concentration camps

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were spared the gas chamber.

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His dogma, his church,
his oppressive certainty

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eventually made my
father's life unbearable.

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So now when I read
Vivekananda's words--

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'It is good to be
born in a church,

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but it is bad to die there'--

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I find myself in deep agreement.

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'The ceremonies and symbols
of a church are good

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for children,' he
wrote, 'but as we grow,

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we must become our own
individual churches.'

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In the uncertain terrain
of the human heart,

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we must light our own
candles, burn our own incense,

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find our own salvation.

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In the Baptist tradition, when
you decide to leave one church

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and attend a new one, it's
called moving your membership.

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I've moved my membership
to this unroofed church

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in the woods of Kentucky beside
a beautiful body of water

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called Clear Creek.

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There are, I have come to
believe, only two paths to God.

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One is through the natural
landscape of his creation.

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The other is through the
inner landscape of the heart.

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They are like facing mirrors,
each infinitely reflecting

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the other so that what
Vivekananda called

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'the realization of God in the
soul' is also a recognition

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that the world is utterly
infused with the sacred,

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that it is what Walt Whitman
called 'a realm of budding

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bibles.'"

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So I hope that's sort of a
happy ending to my sad story.

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