Love is a Peculiarly Human Calling
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​Bethany Sollereder and Thomas Oord

​Since I think love is the desire for the good of another, that other must be a ‘self’ in order to be properly loved.. When we talk of nature, we usually mean something like “all that surrounds us that is not human or made by humans.” Nature in this sense would include lots of ‘selves’: tardigrades, tigers, and tamarinds. But nature would also include things that I don’t think are selves: rivers, mountains, skies, and stars. I can ‘love’ being around these things (and I do!), but I cannot love them directly because, like our diamond, they do not have a good of their own. 

— Bethany Sollereder, “Loving the Nature that Does Not Love You Back,” in The Love of Nature and the Nature of Love (SacraSage Press, 2026).

As I spend time with birds, spiders, lizards, jackrabbits, deer, beetles, bears, and more, I sometimes struggle to overcome bad habits of thought. Those habits emerged in my youth. I was taught that the family’s farm animals existed only for human good. We had cows, because we needed milk. We own horses to have the pleasure of riding them. We had cats to keep the mice population at a minimum. Our chickens existed to give us eggs to eat. The pigs were ham and bacon resources. And so on. The creatures outside our farm were “bad.” They threatened our good animals. Coyotes were evil, because they might kill our calves and chickens (although I don’t remember that ever happening). Rattlesnakes were bad because they could maim or kill our stock. Rats were evil because of what they might eat from our grain. Over time, I changed my mind about these “bad” animals. I came to believe that all animals have intrinsic value and the capacity to experience well-being. All are subjects, not just objects for human ends. In fact, I was interrelated with them, and they had an interiority I could enhance or undermine. A friend tried to express these truths by saying, “Bugs are people too.”

— Thomas Jay Oord, “Can Creatures Experience our Love?” in The Love of Nature and the Nature of Love (SacraSage Press, 2026)

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Bethany Sollereder on
the Peculiar Call to Love
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"Love is the work of God in the soul, transforming the naturally-evolved desires we are born with into the love that reflects God’s own nature. We are born with natural desires for food, sleep, survival, sex, and so on. These include altruistic desires: to protect those who are like us or who we like. But it also includes the desires to fight, hoard goods, and the will to hold power over others."

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“I think love is a mixture of all the instincts and desires of human nature. It is not just a transformation of the kind and gentle instincts: it also transforms the bitter and harsh instincts into something wonderful. Thinking that love is ‘altruism+’ and evil is ‘selfishness+’ leads us to try to suppress the undesirable parts of ourselves and exaggerate the acceptable parts. Christian discipleship instead invites us to be transformed in our entirety. The fierceness of our envy becomes the strength of our love. Our hatred of others becomes our hatred of injustice. The saltiness of our characters becomes the distinct flavour of our love. Becoming a creature of love is not an abandoning of part of our human selves; it is an enhancement of it into something supernatural. It is this transformation taking place between God and the soul that allows us to love.”

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“As I pointed out at the beginning, nature is not always kind. It does not always portray the values of the kingdom of God. That is not nature’s calling. Nor should we try to turn that into nature’s calling. Humans should show God’s love to other creatures, but it might be a step too far to get them to love one another, or indeed, to get them to love us. We can love the living parts of nature, and care for the non-living parts of nature that support all living things. But we should not expect nature to love us back. Love is a peculiarly human calling.”
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— Bethany Sollereder, “Loving the Nature that Does Not Love You Back,” in The Love of Nature and the Nature of Love (SacraSage Press, 2026).

Above you will find three quotations from Bethany Sollereder’s “Loving the Nature that Does Not Love You Back,” in The Love of Nature and the Nature of Love (SacraSage Press, 2026). They offer several ideas worthy of careful consideration.
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• Only human beings are called to love in the distinctive sense that God calls us to love. Other sentient beings can care and offer affection, but they do not “love” in this theological sense.
• Our capacity to love is “supernatural”—not in the sense that it occurs on another plane of existence or violates natural laws—but in the sense that it represents an elevation or transformation of our basic drives, both selfish and unselfish, which are themselves natural.
• Our growth into God’s love entails a transformation of the soul through cooperative interaction with God. In the language of process theology, we are creatively transformed through divine lures or promptings in concert with human responsiveness.
• Insofar as we are transformed, our love can extend to all living beings—not only fellow humans, but other creatures as well, at least those that have 'selves.'
• We should not attempt to transform other creatures into human-like beings. They do not need to be “converted” to love.
• Nor should we model our ethics directly on nature. We must recognize our distinctive calling.

​One aspect that particularly strikes me is her use of the word “supernatural.” Some within the open and relational (process) tradition would prefer to retire the term, since it often suggests a violation of the laws of physics or chemistry. Yet her usage seems quite different. It resonates with what process theologians call creative transformation. The love into which we are invited is indeed distinctive—unnatural, in a sense, when compared with what we observe in the rest of creation—but not because it breaks natural law. Rather, it represents a new level of participation in divine life, a deepening of what nature already makes possible.

Importantly, this does not deny that other creatures have callings. On the contrary, every living being with a self has a calling—“tardigrades, tigers, and tamarinds,” as she beautifully puts it. Their vocation, however, is not to love in the specifically human and theological sense. They are not called to cooperate with God toward a creative transformation of all their desires. They have a God-given task to be themselves, and they fulfill this in manifold ways. Our calling is different: we are invited to become creatures who consciously embody God’s love.

What might this look like? Here she draws upon Aquinas. Love is “the desire for the good of another, and the desire for appropriate union with another.” On this account, we can love one another—and other creatures—in precisely this way: by seeking their good making use of all our desires as transformed by divine love, and by seeking forms of communion appropriate to who and what they are.

It may seem that recognizing other creatures as having callings, but not necessarily the calling to love, diminishes their value. Perhaps, in one sense, it does, since for Christians love is indeed the highest vocation. According to the Bible, we humans - and we humans alone - are made in the image of God.

The Flourishing of all Sentient Beings

Yet I am inclined to see her approach differently. It directs us toward an aspirational ideal, divine in nature, which seeks the flourishing of all sentient beings. This ideal is akin to the Bodhisattva ideal in Buddhism. It is not at peace until all sentient beings are saved, and promises never to enter final blessedness until they, too, can partake of it. This, is, as Sollederer puts it, a 'peculiar' aim indeed. And wonderfully so.

In its peculiarity, then, inclusive love is one form of flourishing—an especially elevated and demanding form—but it is not the whole of flourishing. Other creatures flourish in other ways. And what God seeks, for them and for us, is flourishing appropriate to the kind of creature at issue. What it means for a human person to flourish will differ from what it means for tardigrade to flourish.

Flourishing as Harmony and Intensity in Experience

What, then, is flourishing? What does it mean for tardigrades, tigers, and tamarinds to flourish?

Whitehead proposes that every living being seeks satisfaction (Whitehead's word in Process and Reality) relative to the situation at hand and, when possible, the enjoyment of novelty. He suggests further that satisfaction consists of two qualities in combination: harmony and intensity; and in Adventures of Ideas he speaks of this combination as strength of beauty. Beauty here is not a name for objects perceived, but rather for the subjective experience of being in a world. To be alive is to experience, and to experience is to seek some richness of feeling appropriate to one’s form of life. Flourishing, in this sense, is the achievement of a satisfying experience—a lived harmony with some degree of intensity.

Perhaps, then, to love other creatures is not to expect them to love us back, or even to love at all, but to recognize and appreciate whatever richness of experience is possible for them—and, where we can, to act on their behalf so that such richness is not needlessly diminished. Love may mean protecting habitats, preventing cruelty, resisting wanton destruction, and cultivating reverence for forms of life whose interiority we can only dimly imagine.

Why Can't All Beings Flourish Together?

Yet this reflection inevitably leads to harder questions. What does it mean to “love” the fox as it chases the rabbit, and to “love” the rabbit as it flees the fox? Here we confront incompatible goods, incompatible forms of flourishing. The fox’s vitality depends upon the rabbit’s vulnerability. The rabbit’s flourishing requires escape; the fox’s flourishing requires capture. There is no simple moral symmetry and no sentimental resolution.

There is a tragic dimension here. To love nature fully is not to romanticize it. It is to acknowledge that flourishing often unfolds within structures of collision and loss. The fox and the rabbit are not moral failures; they are participants in a world where goods sometimes conflict and where one life is sustained at the cost of another. Any serious love of nature must include a willingness to face this tragedy without denial.

To love in such a world is to recognize that we inhabit a creation where incompatible goods are woven into its fabric. Compassion does not erase this structure; it responds within it. We reduce suffering where we can. We refrain from adding needless cruelty. We cultivate habitats where diverse forms of life can thrive. But we do not imagine that we can remove tragedy from the structure of earthly existence.

Might there come a time when All Beings Flourish Together?​

Perhaps there will come a time when love is all in all, when collisions cease and no life is nourished by another’s diminishment. Many religious traditions hold such hope before us. But this we cannot know. We live now within a world where beauty and loss are intertwined.

Indeed, Whitehead develops the idea that God has a "consequent nature" that receives all beings into the divine life immediately after each experience occurs, and weaves them into a kind of divine flourishing in an everlasting here-and-now. This is God, not as a lure or calling presence, but as a companion: a fellow sufferer who understands and who, as poet of the universe, weaves their experiences into a tragic beauty, again and again, forever. It is possible that, at least in this ways, all beings 'flourish' together even now, albeit in a kingdom of God - a holy Love - not exactly of this world. Whether they dwell in God's life as memories, or a subjects with experiences of their own, is uncertain. Still, in some way, they are not lost to oblivion.

For the present, then, to love nature is to love it truthfully: to celebrate its vitality, to grieve its violence, to seek the good of each creature as best we can, and to remain humble before mysteries we cannot resolve. Sollereder writes that love is a "peculiarly human calling." Part of its peculiarity may indeed be to embrace the mysteries we cannot solve and to hope, in some way that we cannot understand, that love will be all in all.

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Thomas Oord on Bewelling
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“For us to ‘love nature,’ including the simplest creatures, they must be capable of experiencing well-being. Even the simpler entities must have a measure of interiority, which means they must be capable of a rudimentary level of experience. These capacities are likely tiny in tiny entities and complex in complex creatures. But to enjoy the flourishing that love promotes, even the simplest need to experience an iota of well-being.”

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“Bewelling” is a word I made up. I was seeking a word to describe intentional actions that enhance the flourishing of others. My favorite word for this is “love,” of course. After all, to love is to act intentionally, in response to God and others, to promote overall well-being. “Bewelling” doesn’t have the many meanings of “love,” so I sometimes use it. Bewelling isn’t well-wishing from afar, however. It doesn’t say, “be well,” and then do nothing. Bewelling is purposive and active in seeking what’s helpful. It requires imagination and education to act in ways that wisely promote flourishing. To use a more common phrase, bewelling tries to “make the world a better place.” And when I’m in the wilderness, I have non-humans in mind when trying to make the world better.

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So . . . this is what I mean when I say, “I love nature.” I find the material-mental monism framework helpful for making sense of my love for creation. I need a conceptual framework because I’m not attracted to acting in ways I find irrational, inconsequential, or meaningless. Loving nature is active and practical. If loving creation means acting to promote flourishing, it’s something we do. Sometimes, love is possible as a quick one-off, but it usually involves lengths of time, intentional focus, and repetition. The practice of beholding, befriending, and bewelling helps in my attempts to love nature.

— Thomas Jay Oord, “Can Creatures Experience our Love?” in The Love of Nature and the Nature of Love (SacraSage Press, 2026)

​In her essay, Sollereder distinguishes between creatures that have selves and creatures that do not, suggesting that loving “nature” properly speaking means loving creatures with selves—creatures who possess an identifiable center of experience and agency. She uses the example of single fly, with a self, to make her point:

In another essay in the same volume, “Can Creatures Experience our Love? Beholding, Befriending, and Bewelling,” Thomas Jay Oord approaches the issue from a different angle. He develops what he calls a material-monist ontology. On this view, the truly actual entities of the universe all possess some minimal form of subjectivity or interiority. Reality is not composed of utterly inert stuff. At its most basic level, there is always something it is like to be an entity, however faintly.

At the same time, Oord insists on an important distinction between inanimate objects—such as “dust particles, minerals, desks, computers, and stars”—and animate beings—“birds, spiders, lizards, jackrabbits, deer, beetles, bears, and more.” The difference is not that the former lack all interiority while the latter possess it. Rather, the difference concerns organization and integration.

Inanimate objects are aggregates: collections of submicroscopic entities that may each possess some minimal interiority, but which do not together form a living whole. A desk or a star does not receive influence from its component parts as a unified subject and then initiate responses as a single center of experience. It is a structured composite, not an experiencing whole.

Animate beings, by contrast, exhibit what Oord calls inclusive experience. They “act more or less as a whole.” They integrate influences from their bodily parts and environment into a unified experiential field and initiate responses aimed at their own well-being. In this sense, birds, spiders, and lizards possess something akin to what Sollereder calls a self: an organized, goal-directed center of experience that seeks flourishing.
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Thus, while Oord’s ontology affirms a universal minimal interiority, it nonetheless preserves a morally and existentially significant distinction between mere aggregates and living subjects. Love, in its fullest sense, is directed toward those beings capable of inclusive experience—those who can flourish, suffer, respond, and in some measure receive what we offer.

Bewelling

The question remains, for Oord as for Sollereder, what “bewelling” means in practical terms in relation to animals who do not love us back and who are not “called to love” as we are—tardigrades and lizards, for example. 

At the very least, it means beholding and befriending them as best we can, as Oord himself models on his walks. This is to behold an animal without possessiveness, to delight in its aliveness without seeking to control it, to allow its presence to register as meaningful in its own right. These are ways of dwelling alongside rather than dominating.

Alongsideness is a kind of love. Even when a creature cannot reciprocate our love, it may still receive the effects of our restraint, our care, our protection, and our advocacy. In this way, love becomes less a passing sentiment and more a form of awareness joined to a commitment to the flourishing of fellow creatures whose lives unfold alongside our own.

This awareness and commitment is completed by active “bewelling,” insofar as that is possible. It can mean acting in ways that tangibly benefit the creatures at issue and refraining from actions that harm them. Refraining, too, is a form of action. It can mean shaping our habits—dietary, economic, agricultural, medical—in light of the well-being of other lives, allowing concern for their flourishing to inform the ordinary patterns of our consumption, travel, investment, and care.

Yet here we encounter the tragic dimension. Life feeds on life. We humans must take the lives of others—plants if not animals—in order to eat. We fight disease in order to survive, including the small creatures—viruses and bacteria, for example—that also seek their own well-being. Oord helpfully reminds us that a love of nature includes loving ourselves. And toward this end, for good or ill, we must sometimes kill. Still, there is the reality of incompatible goods. There is the tragic dimension of life.

Gradations of Intrinsic Value

In The Liberation of Life, John B. Cobb Jr. and Charles Birch proposed guidelines for navigating this tragedy. They suggested that organisms exhibit different degrees of intrinsic value relative to their capacities for sentience, and that, all things considered, it is worse to take the life of a highly sentient being such as a cow than one with what appears to be a lower degree of sentience, such as a cabbage: better to eat cabbage than a cow; better to kill a malarial mosquito than the child it might otherwise infect. Not everyone accepts such a hierarchy of value, and the proposal itself raises further questions. Who is to say, and how would we know, that cows suffer less than cabbages? Would it not be better to be honest, and recognize that all living beings have absolute value, at least for themselves?
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In any case, we are faced once again with the irreducible tragedy of existence: that love does not eliminate conflict, and that even a life shaped by “bewelling” cannot escape the fact that flourishing is often entangled with loss. The task is not to purify ourselves of all harm—that is impossible—but to act with as much awareness, restraint, gratitude, and compassion as we can muster, knowing that our participation in the web of life is always morally weighty and never morally simple.

The Divinization of the World in God

It is at this point, it seems to me, that an open and relational understanding of God—particularly as shaped by process theology’s account of the consequent nature of God—proves especially illuminating. In Process and Reality, Whitehead describes the consequent nature as that dimension of God which feels and receives the world in all its concreteness. Nothing is lost. Every joy, every suffering, every ambiguous moral struggle is taken into the divine life and preserved there in transformed form.

On this view, God does not stand above the tragic dimension of existence as a distant supervisor. God understands it from within. The conflicts of life—creature against creature, nourishment entwined with death, love entangled with loss—are felt and integrated into the divine experience itself. The beauty that emerges in the consequent nature is therefore not sentimental or antiseptic. It is tragic beauty: a harmony that includes dissonance, a depth enriched rather than erased by suffering.

Thus the Life in whose life all life unfolds is indeed a beholder and befriender—and, in this deeper sense, a beweller. God “bewells” the world in one way by providing lures for flourishing, but God does it in another way by actively receiving and absorbing the sufferings of the world. We might call it 'receptive bewelling."

The love of God for the world is the divinization - the apotheosis - of the world in God's own life.  It happens not by eliminating loss or canceling tragedy, but by embracing it into a wider and more inclusive beauty. The divine life becomes the everlasting receptacle in which the ambiguities we cannot resolve are nonetheless held, understood, and woven into a pattern whose final character is not annihilation but meaning. In this there is a certain kind of reconciliation that includes the conflicts, even as they might inhibit one another. Let Whitehead have the last, ever so mysterious, word:

Creation achieves the reconciliation of permanence and flux when it has reached its final term which is everlastingness—the Apotheosis of the World. Opposed elements stand to each other in mutual requirement. In their unity, they inhibit or contrast. God and the World stand to each other in this opposed requirement. God is the infinite ground of all mentality, the unity of vision seeking physical multiplicity. The World is the multiplicity.

I cannot pretend that I know what this really means. I do not know what the reconciliation of permanence and flux means for the lizard, or the tardigrade, or the bear, or the human being. What I do know is that they are together in God, in a way that they may not have been together on earth, and that in this togetherness "nature" itself - understood as the totality of finite existents - has been transformed into something divine. I'm not sure why this happens. It seems that God, too, may have a peculiar calling to love and that to whatever degree we can participate in the divine peculiarity, in our small and human way, we have touched the very purpose of our lives.