We are meditating with Scott Russell Sanders on our connection to Father Sky. He recalls a particular moment on emerging from his car one night.
I climbed out of the car with a greeting on my lips, but the sky hushed me. From the black bowl of space countless fiery lights shone down, each one a sun or a swirl of suns. The whole brilliant host of them enough to strike me dumb.
He cites D. H. Lawrence about how our “deepest religious need” is to make “direct contact with the elemental life of the cosmos, mountain-life, cloud-life, thunder-life, air-life, earth-life, sun-life. To come into immediate felt contact, and so derive energy, powers, and a dark sort of joy.”
No matter how clever our human works, “they will never satisfy this hunger. Only direct experience of Creation will do.”
And here is where Sanders finds his faith. “Faith in what? In our capacity for decent and loving work, in the healing energy of wildness, in the holiness of Creation.”
He cites Thoreau: “Nature is full of genius, full of the divinity, so that not a snowflake escapes its fashioning hand.”
And Sanders tells us what it means to reconnect with Father Sky:
That the universe exists at all, that it obeys laws, that those laws have brought forth galaxies and stars and planets and—on one planet at least—life, and out of life, consciousness, and out of consciousness these words, this breath, is a chain of wonders. I dangle from that chain and hold on tight.*
A chain of wonders to which we cling and dangle amidst the holiness of creation, the vastness and immensity of it, and to which we belong in a most intimate way, and about which we can write and sing and dance and rhapsodize and thank. Father Sky returns. We learn gratitude.
* Scott Russell Sanders, Hunting for Hope: A Father’s Journeys (Boston: Beacon Press, 1998), pp. 54, 39f.
Adapted from Matthew Fox, The Hidden Spirituality of Men: Ten Metaphors to Awaken the Sacred Masculine, pp. 3, 13f.
Banner image: The glory of the aurora borealis reflected in a lake, in Portage, Indiana. Photo by McKayla Crump on Unsplash
Queries for Contemplation
Do you feel born from a chain of wonders? What follows from that? Are you holding on tight?
4 thoughts on “Sanders on Connecting to Father Sky and the Holiness of Creation”
Yes! Our Eternal Sacred Souls within our Divine Flowing Evolving Diverse LOVING Wholeness~ONENESS in the Sacred Process of the ETERNAL PRESENT MOMENT of Our LOVING COSMOS….
Hold on tight to life’s chain of wonders?
No, let them quietly unveil, introducing themselves to your senses.
Be patient and still, eyes wide
with wise-child astonishment.
Break free from fear
and thought-walls of false certainty.
Fly lightly in the electric-awed tip of inrushing time
and dance into each freshly newborn moment.
Matthew, I appreciate your sharing about D. H. Lawrence, and his sense of Sky and cosmology. Besides his poetry–which I have read his compete works, I was amazed to read his APOCALYPSE in which you can see even more of his cosmology! And I love his quotes as you have shared like: how our “deepest religious need” is to make “direct contact with the elemental life of the cosmos, mountain-life, cloud-life, thunder-life, air-life, earth-life, sun-life. To come into immediate felt contact, and so derive energy, powers, and a dark sort of joy.”
I remember being dazzled by D. H. Lawrence in first year university. I also read his controversial Fantasia of the Unconscious, dismissed by an orthodox reviewer as “highfalutin nonsense.” Minds that slip the bonds of conventional boundaries to enter the mystic realm are often summarily dismissed, until they reappear in open source meditations like those of Matthew Fox (: