Where Precious Seeds are Planted
Catholic Free Press
I caught an image of our daughter that brought back so many perfect childhood memories. Tired from swimming in the lake all day and full of roasted hotdogs, she was floating lazily on an inner-tube with her hand held up to the sunlight. As she gazed through illuminated fingers at the clouds, she had an almost supernatural glow of awe and wonder on her face. I remember that feeling – that childlike acceptance that we can know God through creation. I knew that long before I read it as Catholic dogma.
People have asked me if I was an atheist before converting to Catholicism, but the truth is, even in all the years I was so lost, I never stopped believing in God largely because of those memories from childhood, that empirical evidence when I knew and felt the presence of God. Once you experience it, even if you try to forget it, you can never fully deny it.
I also see now that I’ve been afraid to let my children roam much outdoors, and this is not good. Wanting them to be safe, I structured their play time with too little freedom to be outside. (I also feared mountains of laundry.) Glimpsing my daughter has reminded me that it’s absolutely necessary to let children be close to nature. That’s where they are close to God in a way they can see, hear, taste, smell, and feel. It’s where precious seeds are planted in their souls.
Most of my adult years I’ve had a disdain for the messy outdoors, often joking that sipping Cabernet and listening to some lively Mozart by the flip-switch gas fireplace with the windows cracked was as close as I wanted to come to camping. Pretty wimpy. Sure, there’s a beauty and glory in the works of man, but nature is the handiwork of God, the first author of beauty. Part of that beauty is the majesty. Outdoors in God’s glory the forces of nature require you to submit to something greater than yourself, demonstrating that you are a necessary part of a unified whole. Sanity demands we learn that, sanctity allows us to know it through the natural light of reason.
“If they admired their power, and their effects, let them understand by them, that he that made them, is mightier than they: For by the greatness of the beauty, and of the creature, the creator of them may be seen, so as to be known thereby.” Wisdom 13:4-5
Category: Catholic Free Press, Featured, Personal, Science
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So freakin’ cool. If this is any foreshadowing of the posts to come, I may be confessing jealousy next time in the box.
Spiritual, insightful and poetic, as always. A vast inprovement over the blue jean incident.
Being outdoors where you is a wonderful way to get closer to God. The only thing your dauther is missing is maybe a string tied to her toe with a bobber on it, lazy person fishing.
What a wonderful thing that you are going to let your kids live and explore and get dirty … too many of us moms have been willing to sacrifice our kids adventures on the altar of safety (and cleanliness).
While were obviously not going to scale precarious cliffs alone when they are 8 (we cant lose all common sense) we need to let up a little from the hermetically sealed traps that many of our contemporaries have stuck their kids in. Having served my time doing Pediatric Trauma Nursing, my observation is that fun adventures that hurt kids, its the stupid unpredictable crud that you cant protect them from anyway, so they may as well go have some fun. You are right, they may encounter God in the process.
Beautiful imagery.
How do you know that there is a mind responsible for what you see in nature?
What can you tell about this mind?
Since nature has a lot beauty, maybe this hypothetical mind enjoys beauty? But nature has a lot of suffering, too.
I’ve been working on an article about that very thing.
How do we know we have a mind? Because we can know – think.
There are no other animals writing blogs, Ace. Just humans.
I don’t understand this atheistic notion that humans don’t have minds, and instead just do everything as if they were some deterministic blob of matter with no free will. You’d have to concede that you are not an intelligent creature to make that be true.
Ah, more later. This is something very interesting to me, but two bright orange kayaks just arrived in the mail and we have to go try them out.
Have fun!
I wish the weather was nicer here. I’d be sailing on the ocean.
when you mentioned “kayaks” I thought of the picture I saw this morning of the fellow in one off beach in MASS with the ‘big fin’ trailing him. should not have to worry about him in the lake.