​What is Nature?
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We cannot legitimately use the word "natural" as synonomous with the words "unsullied," "pure," or "righteous."  It's not a single entity.  It's not a consistent force that sanctions or condemns behavior, not a god-substitute that we can embrace or blame or escape. It composes the entire, complex myriad of ever-changing events and details, unpredictable, paradoxical, passing and eternal, known and mysterious.  Bach is nature, and so is the Marquis de Sade.  Everything that we name noble is nature, and everything that we name despicable is nature, and our attempt to distinguish between the noble and the despicable is nature. 

                                                                                                                                                            - Pattian Rogers

​All images are from creative commons source: Unsplash: https://unsplash.com/ I am grateful to all of the photographers for offering, collectively, images which invite us to ask, with Pattian Rogers, "What is Nature?" (Jay McDaniel)

Pattian Rogers
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​​Nature is not a single entity.
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"This nature is not a single entity, not a consistent force that sanctions or condemns behavior, not a god-substitute that we can embrace or blame or escape. It composes the entire, complex myriad of ever-changing events and details, unpredictable, paradoxical, passing and eternal, known and mysterious. Nature is the vast expanse of abstractions and multiplicities; it is the void and the concrete presence, an unrestricted inclusiveness. The definition of the word 'nature' even includes its own definition and the maker of its definition. It is self-referential." (Pattian Rogers)

​Divinity is part of nature, too.
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"If we create justice, it exists in nature. If we act so as to bring compassion into existence, it is real within the natural world. Divinity is of the universe, part of nature, when it is observed and noted and imagined and expressed by creatures, born of nature with physical,  blood-beating, light-snapping minds." (Pattian Rogers)
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This Nature
by Pattian Rogers

Bach is nature, and the Marquis de Sade is nature. Florence Nightingale and the Iron Maiden are nature. Michelangelo's Pieta, the swastika, Penthouse magazine and solar flares are nature. Pedophiles and saints equally are nature. Ash pits, boggy graves, nuclear bombs, tubercle bacillus, Yosemite Falls, abortion, the polio vaccine, all are part of the sum total of everything that is and therefore nature. Nothing that is goes against nature, because nature is the way things are. Nature is what is, everything that is, everything that has been, and everything that is possible, including human actions, inventions, creations, and imaginations. This is my definition. This nature is the nature of roaches and cheetahs and honeysuckle, the nature of a Strauss waltz, the nature of the Ice Ages, the Black Plague, the eruption of Krakatoa, the nature of the slaughter of American bison, the nature of human sacrifice and bloody rituals carried out by Aztecs, Celts, Slavs.

Nothing that exists, including language, is outside nature. We do not know an "outside nature," because knowledge itself is an element of nature. Even the word "unnatural" is part of nature (how could it otherwise be here on this page?) and is therefore self-contradictory.

An ice pick through the chest or a soothing hand on the forehead, both are natural, both gestures of nature. Wild curly dock, malaria, exploding stars, continental drift, and the construction of Hoover Dam are natural, part of what is. Violent birth and violent extinction are older than we are and natural. We know a history of both. We have sometimes been involved in the nature of both. We cannot legitimately use the word "natural" as synonomous with the words "unsullied," "pure," or "righteous."
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It is no more against nature for human beings to clearcut a forest than it is against nature for Mt. Vesuvius to erupt and eliminate the town of Herculaneum. Human actions may be judged moral or immoral, wise or unwise, cruel or benevolent, heedless or thoughtful, but those are other terms and other issues. I am speaking of nature. Everything that we name noble is nature, and everything that we name despicable is nature, and our attempt to distinguish between the noble and the despicable is nature.

Calculus, astrophysics, the automobile, the safety pin, and billboards were created by creatures born of the natural world and thus included naturally in the nature of everything that is. If we create justice, it exists in nature. If we act so as to bring compassion into existence, it is real within the natural world. Divinity is of the universe, part of nature, when it is observed and noted and imagined and expressed by creatures born of nature with physical, blood-beating, light-snapping minds. We are thoroughly nature. To claim otherwise is to attempt to place human beings and everything we do in some rare unimaginable realm beyond the universe, thus rendering the power of our origins lost and our obligations vague.

Nature is everything that is. We are not and cannot be "unnatural." Our choices and our actions are never for or against nature. They are always simply of nature. Our decisions then involve determining what it is that we value among this everything-that-is, this nature. What is it we seek to preserve? to eliminate? to modify? to accept? to avoid? to cherish? to respect? to emulate? The decisions we make, how we justify and construct those decisions and the behavior that results, all these become part of the great milieu, and they have their effects in ways we may not always recognize. Our choices and our actions, whether based on aesthetic considerations, moral or spiritual considerations, economic considerations, or rational considerations, must be justified in some way other than by the claim that they are the natural world; for any behavior, even murder, even suicide, even war, even abuse of the young, can be justified by that claim. We may call these particular acts horrors, but they are horrors that are part of nature, part of everything that is, and they cannot be said to go against nature. They are horrors that are part of nature already replete with horrors. Perhaps these particular acts go against our sense of goodness or compassion, morality or beauty or justice, but they do not go against nature. Annihilation and creation are occurring constantly around us now, and they have occurred always, long before human beings came to be. Nature encompasses all contradictions.

This nature is not a single entity, not a consistent force that sanctions or condemns behavior, not a god-substitute that we can embrace or blame or escape. It composes the entire, complex myriad of ever-changing events and details, unpredictable, paradoxical, passing and eternal, known and mysterious. Nature is the vast expanse of abstractions and multiplicities; it is the void and the concrete presence, an unrestricted inclusiveness. The definition of the word "nature" even includes its own definition and the maker of its definition. It is self-referential.

I deliberately seek out the specific aspects of everything that is that I find ennobling, affirming, that engender in me hope, faith, action, and health, the chaos choose to value and praise them. Just a few of these aspects, for me, are the words of Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky, Whitman, Melville, Twain, Faulkner, Roethke, Jacob Bronowski, Jesus Christ; the music of Chopin, Beethoven, Bruckner, Anne-Sophie Mutter, the Takacs Quartet; the very existence of the body of preserved art, music, and literature that is my culture; the Magna Carta, the Constitution of the United States and the Bill of Rights; arches, domes, and columns; the grace and order of an NBA basketball game; Jeremy Brett as Sherlock Holmes; the curiosity, facility, and complexity of the human mind that results in the revelations of science; the way sunlight appears shifting its illuminations and colors on roofs and gardens and fields, making shadows of trees on the curtains-throughout the gradual coming of morning, throughout the patterns of evening, everyday, the gift of morning and evening; snow, that amazement; the surrounding great buffer of stars in which we are immersed; life in its unrelenting, ruthless, self-absorbed, tenacious grasp on being.
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We are fortunate as human beings to have the opportunity to discern and to act, to recognize and experience ourselves in this welter of terror and beauty, to add our praise, gratitude, and testimony to the totality of everything that is, to place them as if we were placing seeds in soil into the flux and form of this nature.

* Reposted from Partnership for Earth Spirituality: http://www.earthspirituality.org/archive/ford_seminar.htm

"Pattiann Rogers is a poet of nature—but also a profoundly theological poet. “Everything I see of heaven,” she writes, “I know by the earth.” Hers is a theology grounded in the hard particulars of the natural world, an anagogic way of knowing that, as she demonstrates in a poem called “Whence and the Keeper,” finds in the images of horses and rivers, glaciers and plankton, a vocabulary for understanding a thing as cosmic and distant as the Milky Way. With the power of sustained attention and persistent observation, she brings to her writing a field biologist’s eye for the details of species and phenomena. Alive to the earth’s scents, moods, and variety, her gaze reveals nature’s power and terror, but also its grace and comedy. Like God’s answer to Job from the whirlwind, Rogers’ work locates in the animal, vegetable, and mineral world a theology more profound than abstract systematics could ever offer."

-- description from Image Journal, 11/10/2015

​Further Commentary: What about God?

Nature is everything that exists and happens in the universe: cockroaches and cheetahs, porpoises and pedophiles, earthquakes and summer rain, solar flares and exploding stars, Bach and the Marquis de Sade, cruelty and compassion.  Nature is both beautiful and terrifying, embracing all contradictions.  When we awaken to it, our first emotion is not trust or faith but rather awe and bewilderment.  Always we are within this larger web of life we call Nature and even our attempts to understand it are within it.  

Somehow, within this welter of terror and beauty, some of us feel a divine presence -- a lure toward justice and compassion -- which beckons us to bring about goodness in the world.  We speak of this spiritual presence as God: the spirit from whom energy and guidance we want to live our lives.  We see God as the counter-entropic lure by which the whole of the universe comes into being in a continuous way, evolving various forms of order and novelty; and we see God's lure within each and every creature on our planet.  It is that spark inside each living being prompting it to enjoy its own existence relative to the circumstances at hand.  It is the lure to live, to live well, and to live better -- says the philosopher Whitehead.  You might call it God's Breathing.   ​

Some of us sense further that this Breathing is also an encompassing love beyond each creature: a Life who shares in the joys and sufferings of all living beings. We say God is Love.  And yet we know that this Love is not the whole of Nature.  At best it is the ultimate receptacle for all that exists and happens, the place where even terror becomes beauty, if possible.  God doesn't control everything but God redeems everything. The title of a book by Thomas Oord -- The Uncontrolling Love of God -- speaks for many of us.  The God who is Love is a companion to life, not a puppeteer.

So does the title of a book by Rabbi Bradley Artson -- The God of Becoming and Relationship.  We see the Love in whose horizons the universe unfolds as an ongoing process of becoming not a settled and changeless fact.  It is not the sole creator of things but rather a co-creator of things, along with the rest of nature which likewise has its creative capacities.  Nothing is "solely" created by a single cause.  All things are created by others and also by their responses to others.
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If someone asks us if nature transcends God we must say "Yes," because we know that there are things that happen in our world that even God cannot prevent.  And if someone asks if God transcends nature we will again say "Yes," because we trust that God is the most inclusive environment for nature: the divine milieu.  We cannot not be loved by God, even if we wanted otherwise. The same goes for the cheetah and cockroach.  This, then, is that it means to be a theistic naturalist.  It is know that God and nature are inside each other and more than each other, and that God is uncontrolling love.   It is to live with a sense respect and care, creativity and hope, awe and trust.  That's enough.  (Jay McDaniel)