THIS SPRING, I moved to California. Nature, culture, family, and work beckoned my partner and me, and once we arrived, we found ourselves immersed in sweetness: picking roses in our friend’s garden so fresh they smelled like citrus; sharing weekly dinners with my brother; and swimming in the Pacific Ocean. In that water, I’ve felt swallowed by mystery. The airborne salt, the bone-cold temperature, and the wild waves refine my ability to listen to the hum of the earth. In the Christian tradition, the ocean’s role in shaping consciousness is robust. Through their writing on “contemplative ecology” and reflections on the Pacific, contemplative theologian Douglas E. Christie, Lutheran scholar Lisa E. Dahill, and mystic Thomas Merton have helped me embrace the ocean as a healing partner.
Christie, author of The Blue Sapphire of the Mind: Notes for a Contemplative Ecology, describes “contemplative ecology” as dual-natured: a spirituality that centers the natural world and “an approach to ecology” that relies on “contemplative awareness.” He posits that connecting contemplation to the environment helps make us more “porous,” more attentive, and clearer about the world as a “sacred [and beautiful] whole.”
It is especially important, and equally challenging, to see the world as sacred and beautiful amid the global climate crisis. Referencing our degraded relationship with nature, Dahill, in Eco-Reformation: Grace and Hope for a Planet in Peril, writes, “We know the staggering dimensions of this alienation: the extent to which our current economic system and worldviews fail to take account of our planet’s limits and our own place in the larger biological world on which our lives depend.” For Dahill, the answer to repairing this relationship, and repairing the planet, lies in a great “rewilding,” which she defines as a “new and re-prioritized physical, spiritual, and intellectual immersion in the natural world.” To rewild Christianity, Dahill argues for “new forms of outdoor Eucharistic life,” namely baptism in freshwater. By allowing nature to reach us, shape us, and splash against our skin, our commitment to the life around us deepens.
Dahill was transformed after swimming in wild, “living waters.” When she followed her urge to embrace the “wildness of the world,” Dahill met a God “who speaks in wild languages I don’t understand: bird languages, drought languages, smells and winds, predation, illness, death, life.” Nature is her “holy book,” teaching her humility, curiosity, and reverence in new, more embodied ways.
Merton, it seems, was as taken by the Pacific Ocean as I am. In The Other Side of the Mountain: The End of the Journey, he writes, “It was a bright day and the sea was calm, and I looked out over the glittering blue water, realizing more and more that this was where I really belonged ... I need the sound of those waves, that desolation, that emptiness.” I am not a mystic, but I feel this way, too: The water empties the incessant stream of chatter (and worries) to reveal calm and clarity. I emerge from the ocean feeling like my skin blurs into the air. This sweet immersion reminds me that I participate in a still mysterious, greater whole: a watery world that needs our protection. In the words of poet Gary Snyder:
“This living flowing land / Is all there is, forever / We are it / It sings through us.”
Sarah James, a biracial Indian American woman of color, is a graduate of Yale Divinity School and founder of Clerestory Magazine.
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