Chap. 10-Making Nature Sacred, Laura Boleyn

This chapter, “Learning to Love Creation,” has seriously helped me understand a lot of themes of the course. It has also helped to answer a question that I have been asking for a large portion of the course: How exactly is Christianity connected to making nature and the wilderness sacred place?
In this chapter, Gatta discusses how “nature” poetry has changed from the nineteenth century to the present. This poetry has changed from nature being loved and praised, and looked at as beautiful and as a sanctuary, to angry poetry that has images of animal predation or of human destruction of landscapes of ecosystems (225). A lot of this new poetry seems to also focus on how people observe the “nonhuman world” with ignorance. People cannot put themselves in the position of an animal or of the landscape. The descriptions and analysis of this new poetry have inspired me to read some of it and compare it to the old, nineteenth century poetry myself.
The chapter also helped to connect to reciprocity through the discussion of ecological spirituality. This section, specifically, on ecological spirituality has helped me to understand a lot of the key points of the course. In terms of reciprocity, it offers a new view, where people, animals, plants and landscape are all responsible and are all at risk for a sustainable world and environment. Gatta mentions one poet, Denise Levertov, and the information he provides on her, helps me to understand how Christianity connects to nature. Levertov was “struck by the idea of God’s silence, the elusiveness of divine presence in an evolving world” and she “expressed hope that within the larger process of evolution, humankind might choose to develop spiritually so as to improve its cognizance of kinship as well as ‘kindness’ toward other species.” These hopes and ideas have influenced me and helped me to understand many of the themes of this chapter. Her words struck me suddenly and I knew and understood what she meant and what she was saying.