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Earth’s Echo:
Sacred Encounters with Nature
by Robert M. Hamma
Sorin Books, 2002
Reviewed by Anthony F. Chiffolo
“The trees and stone will teach you what you never learn from the masters.” So spoke Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, and so echoes Robert M. Hamma in his gracefully written Earth’s Echo: Sacred Encounters with Nature. In this book, Hamma resurrects the sacred practice of finding God in the natural world, showing us that “the experiences of awe, beauty, and harmony that are so much a part of my appreciation of nature are spiritual in their own right.” In other words, “nature is not simply the setting in which the presence of God is encountered, it is, in itself, a form of divine presence.”
“The song of the cardinal at dawn is a word of God spoken to me,” Hamma writes. “A plunge into the ocean is an exhilarating immersion into life, and God is in the sea.” Hamma professes to “have arrived at these convictions in a simple way: by spending time in the natural world and by paying attention,” but he has also studied the observations of men and women whom God has blessed with a profound understanding of the sacredness of Creation. For example, Hamma invokes the psalmist, who sang, “I lift up my eyes to the mountains, from whence comes my help” and Hildegard of Bingen, to whom God revealed, “I am that living and fiery essence of the divine substance. . . . I shine in the water, I burn in the sun and the moon and the stars.”
Like the Desert Father Antony, who is reputed to have said, “My book . . . is the nature of created things, and it is always on hand when I wish to read it,” Hamma believes that Nature is the most basic of the living scriptures, and he reads that scripture in five settings -- at the shore, in the forest, within the desert, alongside rivers and streams, and high in the mountains -- offering for each a week-long exploration of how the natural world incorporates the abiding presence of the Creator. At the beach, for example, we begin by “encountering the shore,” then move on to “sensing the shore’s beauty,” “standing in awe,” “moving in the shore’s rhythm,” and, finally, “carrying the shore within you.” These explorations evoke the striking observations of such noted writers as Ansel Adams, Thomas Berry, Wendell Berry, Bill Bryson, Rachel Carson, Emily Dickinson, Loren Eiseley, Mark Helprin, Hermann Hesse, Tony Hillerman, T. E. Lawrence, Ursula K. Le Guin, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Barry Lopez, Peter Matthiessen, John Muir, Sigurd F. Olson, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman, but they also include Hamma’s own beautiful meditations -- which are partly reminiscences and partly reflections on the meaning of experience:
I remember a summer afternoon in late August. The waves rolled gently toward the shore as I swam toward the sun. It hung low in the pale haze of the coming evening. Doing an easy breaststroke, I moved slowly, in no hurry. The light shimmered and danced on the smooth surface of the water. Without the focus of my glasses, it looked to me like a scene from a Monet painting. . . . Why do I remember that moment now, almost four decades later? Why have I always remembered it and sought to re-create it each time I go for a late afternoon swim? Perhaps it was a moment when, as Whitman says, the ocean and I “really absorb’d each other.” I know I sensed myself a part of something bigger, something both gentle and powerful, something that would carry me and draw me always toward the light. It was not a moment of insight or understanding; it was rather a moment filled with longing and peace, strangely coexisting side by side. . . . that sense of being at home in the ocean, and yet being filled with longing for something more is a gift that the sea has blessed me with time and again. I know that in that gracious moment I grasp the truth that I am one with the world, yet always longing for more.
And his explorations also include his moving prayers, such as
In the dance of the shore
that ebbs and flows within me
there is a time to hold on,
and a time to let go,
a time to come far,
and a time to hold back[,]
a rising of hope,
and a falling into acceptance.
There is the struggle to preserve life,
and the willingness to hold it in memory,
the effort to resist,
and the inclination to defer
to the pull of the tide,
and the rising of the rainbow.
If only I could learn to dance
and move more smoothly with your rhythm.
Through Hamma’s meditations, we can begin to perceive the world we inhabit as “a sacred reality, a divine presence.” And we can pray, along with him, for God’s blessings, that we might rediscover how to dance to God’s rhythm and to incorporate -- that is, to make part of our own being -- the divine Spirit that we encounter in Nature.
(Earth’s Echo is the perfect vacation companion, pocket-sized to fit easily into a beach bag or backpack, and divided into short meditations that even the busiest vacation schedule can accommodate.)
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