I have friends who say, "Jana, I don't need to go to church because I find God in nature."  It's a common statement, especially among those who identify as "spiritual but not religious."  I have some sympathy for this view because, as I usually tell my friends, I too see God in nature, and I get that religion sometimes seems cold, hard, unforgiving and lifeless.  It's just that I don't find nature (or similar ways of trying to find God) sufficient for finding God or seeing God or knowing God - for that, I do need the whole Body of Christ that I encounter on Sunday mornings and every other day besides.  I do need to be both spiritual AND religious.

Today's scriptures allow for some explanation and reflection on this.  In today's first reading (Wisdom 13:1-8), we read about other groups of people from long ago who also sought God in nature.  Those groups of people are not quite like today's "spiritual but not religious" friends of mine in most respects.  Those long-ago people made idols out of nature because they were so taken with nature's beauty and energy.  I don't think my friends today make idols out of nature, but I do worry that "finding God in nature" - if nature is the only place where we seek God - has some of the specific dangers that the author notes.  The main danger is distraction: we can be so mesmerized by our surroundings, by the beauty of nature, by the goodness of friends, that we think that's all there is and we forget to ask where beauty and goodness come from. We forget God.  Another danger is that we become too busy with our admiration of the world that we forget to rest and remember that not even the world is enough to contain God.

 

Today's gospel (Luke 17:26-37) seems unrelated at first glance.  We often interpret this passage as about being willing to die for the sake of God.  Yet this passage, too, is about people being distracted by worldly things so much that they forget God.  In Jesus' account, the end of time has come - but some of the people in Jesus' story just don't see it.  They don't see that God has come among them because they're distracted by their daily lives.  They're trying to preserve the lives they have (right down to the food they eat and the clothes they wear) - but Jesus starkly says that whoever tries to save his life will lose it.  Whoever is so focused on the details of daily life is likely to be distracted, and may make all the daily comfortable details of life an idol that helps us forget God.

 

So while it is definitely true that God is present to us in nature and in our daily lives, it is also true that nature and the ordinariness of our lives can prevent us from seeing God.  This is why being religious is important.  Attending mass with a whole array of people, and being reminded of our global church, are just two ways of being shaken from ordinariness so that we can recognize God.  I need other people - including people who disagree with me, who are very different from me in terms of race, class, poverty, job, and a whole host of other characteristics, to remind me that I am not God and that my own thoughts and sensibilities about seeing God in nature and in my own life doesn't even begin to measure up to the depth and richness and fullness of God and God's utter love for us.

 

Today, let us pray to be spiritual and religious and to accept the gift of the Body of Christ, the Church, that God gives to us.

 

- Jana M. Bennett