Photographer Sharon Johnstone
This past semester in my American Fantasy course I taught Tom Robbins’s Jitterbug Perfume which, among other things, sees Christianity at war with nature. In the whacky story of a medieval tribal king who determines not to give in to death, we watch his centuries-long relationship with the Greek god Pan, who declines with the rise of first Christianity and then Cartesian science. As Robbins sees it, Christianity devalues the body and the Age of Reason (“I think, therefore I am”) seeks to subjugate the natural world.
Christianity doesn’t have to turn its back on nature, however, and there is a tradition of Christian poetry that finds natural beauty to be an expression of God’s love for the world. One sees this in Milton’s description of Eden in Paradise Lost and in the verse of Henry Vaughan, William Blake, and Gerard Manley Hopkins.
Irish poetry is particularly rich in nature imagery, perhaps because Christianity in Ireland didn’t entirely displace the Celtic connection with nature but rather drew on its deep vein of spiritual power. Here’s a beautiful poem by Eva Gore-Booth, Irish nationalist and suffragette from the time of Yeats. While it’s not overtly Christian, Christian mystics will embrace its vision of divinity making itself known in a dewdrop here, a glimmer of light there.
The Quest
By Eva Gore-Booth
For years I sought the Many in the One,
I thought to find lost waves and broken rays,
The rainbow’s faded colors in the sun–
The dawns and twilights of forgotten days.
But now I seek the One in every form,
Scorning no vision that a dewdrop holds,
The gentle Light that shines behind the storm,
The Dream that many a twilight hour enfolds.
A note on the photographer: Sharon Johnstone‘s amazing photos of dewdrops can be found at http://www.lostateminor.com/2012/02/17/stunning-macro-photographs-of-dew-drops/