In the introductory pages of this book Karen Armstrong quotes the poetic words of Wordsworth, to portray the underlying spiritual malaise that bedevils us now in relation to our deteriorating environment.
"There hath passed away a glory from the earth......
Whither is fled the visionary gleam?
Where is it now the glory and the dream?"
Wordsworth was aware with heightened sensitivity, that his easy childhood connection with the natural world had once been synchronous with a sense for the sacred, of the Godly within all life. Something which in his growing into adulthood he'd lost. Like many of the Romantics, in the midst of the consequences of The Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution he felt like a soul bereft. He strove through his poetry to reconnect himself and us with a sensory relationship with nature and through it the divine. That he felt his younger self had failed in this respect, led him to be a much broken and hardened man in later life, living off his past reputation.
Karen Armstrong wrote in her autobiographies of her own struggles with faith and our religious institutions. For a while she fell out of love with them. Her many subsequent books on the major faiths of the world, the nature of God, the common themes of our human religious institutions, have been rightly lauded for their clarity and insightfulness. Through them she has reconnected herself and us with the many ways in which a sense for the sacred remains important to our humanity, not just to us individually, but collectively as a civilised society.
With Sacred Nature she takes a closer look at source materials, the early years of a faith's development, and finds within them shared themes of the importance of a responsible and respectful attitude toward the environment upon which we depend. Though some faiths may have moved away from such a sense for our interconnectedness. Even within the Judeo-Christian world view, so often seen as giving Godly encouragement to seeing the world as ours to exploit, there are opposing Christian narratives to that self serving viewpoint.
And so she also takes us through Confucianism, Daoism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam and finds similar texts that tell of the need for human kind to live in harmony with nature, to use its bounty with care, to not be careless in our actions. She makes the case for an urgent need to restore our relationship with nature, to view this as being symbiotically entwined with a sense for the sacred. She does not proselytise for any one particular religion, but makes clear that without a complete transformation of our underlying mode of being, of thinking, feeling and acting in relation to the world, we will inevitably be dooming ourselves to oblivion.
She concludes by returning to the Romantic poets, this time to Samuel Taylor Coleridge and The Rhyme of The Ancient Mariner. A poem that can be interpreted as a metaphor for our current predicament. The albatross which saves the Mariner from dying, he then chooses to shoot, and it all goes downhill from there. The Mariner much too late has a vision of a better way forward for future travellers, whilst realising he must continue to suffer the consequences of his own actions. That is now his fate, and ours. We must change our hearts and minds. But what's done, is still done, and we will have to learn to live with the consequences of that.
"Within the shadow of the ship
I watched with rich attire.
Blue, glossy green, and velvet black,
They coiled and swam, and every track
Was a flash of golden fire.
O happy living things! No tongue
their beauty might declare
A spring of love gushed from my heart.
And I blessed them unaware."
CARROT REVIEW - 6/8
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