Nature, God, and us

Or: Beyond "pantheism" and "panentheism"; Or: Why we pray

I confess a fondness for Emerson and the American Transcendentalists, one that has persisted since my teenage years. Reading them has usually been a pleasure, sometimes an education, and frequently thought-provoking (although there are also passages that I find tedious, sometimes cloying, or expressing ideas with which I take a contrary view). Recently I was revisiting Emerson’s unquestionably influential essay, Nature (it notably made enough of an impact on his friend, Thoreau, that the latter eventually graced us with Walden), and I was struck again by its display of feeling and intellect, rendered in supple prosody, and certainly redolent of a deeply spiritual acuity. Emerson’s appeal to practicing solitude for the purpose of contemplating the beauty and sublimity of nature can’t, in my opinion, be gainsaid. We need to heed such an exhortation today even more than in his time, when finding a measure of restorative solitude outdoors is not so easily accessible to us. Much of Emerson’s essay strikes me as true. One example: