Walking early one morning with the cloak of night still around me, I looked up into the sky expecting the familiar and storied orientation of the North Star, Sagittarius, and Scorpius, and saw something that instead stopped me in my tracks: a string of starry pearls moving in formation were stretched out in an evenly straight line over my head. For the two minutes that I observed this celestial sequence I lost the sense of knowing where I was; the stars were shifting and so was I. It wasn鈥檛 until days later that I learned that I had witnessed the 23rd mission of Starlink satellites, a satellite internet constellation being constructed by Elon Musk鈥檚 SpaceX that will consist of over 42,000 satellites that will provide near-global internet coverage of the populated world in 2021.[1] A whole new artificial constellation is being created in the cosmos.

What happens to our deeper sense of knowing when you can no longer distinguish the stars from the satellites? What happens to our storied sense of the sky when it shifts? Will we still see Andromeda chained to a rock or Hercules slaying a lion? Or in North American Indigenous communities, will they still find their bears, sweat lodges, and thunderbirds in the sky? How will we still know who we are when the cosmos converts?

鈥淲e lose our souls if we lose the experience of the forest, the butterflies,
the song of the birds, if we can’t see the stars at night.鈥�
鈥擳homas Berry

The storied stars are part of how Indigenous people all over the world have made sense of the world around them. But more than that, it has provided people a sense of place and a bone-deep knowing of belonging to this Earth and the community of creation. These celestial stories have helped humans make meaning of the natural world and understand its variable features. It is within the night sky that we are reminded of our sacred evolutionary cosmology: that we too are made of stardust!
Stars are our birthright and connect us to a cosmic kinship. Stars that go supernova are responsible for creating many of the elements of the periodic table, including those that make up the human body. Planetary scientist and stardust expert Dr. Ashley King explains: 鈥淚t is totally 100% true: nearly all the elements in the human body were made in a star and many have come through several supernovas.鈥漑2] When we look up at the stars, we are reminded of our stellar ancestry and of our own storied existence, ultimately receiving guidance for our journey through life on this planet.

Star navigation has been used by seafarers for millennia. For thousands upon thousands of years, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples have navigated their way across the seas and lands of Australia using paths called songlines or dreaming tracks.[3] Songlines will often follow on from one another, creating an intricate oral map of place, linking important sites and locations that exist in the outer world to their inner world, their soulscape. The soil and the stars become the medium by which one knows where they are, and when we know where we are, we know who we are.

鈥淭ell me the landscape in which you live, and I will tell you who you are.鈥�
鈥� Jos茅 Ortega y Gasset

In the Hebrew Old Testament scripture of Jeremiah, we encounter a journey that guides Israel back to her city, to her homeland, the place of her belonging. In Jeremiah 31:21 there is a command to set up way marks, collected items from the natural world believed to likely be heaps of stones, or pole-like trees, put upon the path to guide the traveler through wild and spacious landscapes.[4] Here there is a sense that the natural world is coming alongside the pilgrim to provide guidance, wisdom, and a sense of direction towards a place of belonging. Stones, trees, and stars are in place to offer both guidance as well as meaning; they are meaning-makers, subjects that are offering a sense of our storied existence and insight into how we make our way upon this planetary home.

This world, like the night sky, is dramatically changing, however. Trees that once were there to mark our way, have been chopped down; deforestation occurring the world over at a rate of 10 million hectares annually.[5] Stones that sat and offered sacred guidance for millennia in the shapes of mountains are being removed for coal surface mining. With these way-markers gone, people are existing separately from an increasingly degraded world, moving through memories of resplendent places, which are quickly evaporating.

We are forgetting the wonder-filled world that used to guide us and tell us where we are, and why we are. Our sense of our self, along with our imagination of the Sacred, is being desecrated along with the land. With ongoing environmental degradation at local, regional, and global scales, people’s accepted thresholds for environmental conditions are continually being lowered and storied landscapes are being forgotten.

In the absence of oral traditions, nature-based myths, or personal experience with historical environmental conditions, members of each new generation accept the landscapes (and starscapes莾) in which they are raised as being normal. This psychological and sociological phenomenon is termed shifting baseline syndrome (SBS), which is increasingly recognized as one of the fundamental obstacles to addressing a wide range of today’s global environmental issues.[6] I would suggest it has huge implications on our soul formation as well.

Consequences of SBS include an increased tolerance for progressive environmental degradation, changes in people’s expectations as to what is a desirable (worth protecting) state of the natural and wild world, and the establishment and use of inappropriate baselines for nature conservation, restoration and management. It also creates a general malaise and environmental amnesia for the interconnection between the more than human world and our own human existence. At the same time, for those who are connected to the memory of a place, ecological grief can set in as sacred stories seem to dissipate under the bulldozer鈥檚 blade.

How do we survive wandering in this kind of desolate wilderness? When we re-story our lives, we restore not only ourselves, but the land upon which we live as well. It is a way to quite literally, save ourselves鈥斺�攁nd the more-than-human world. Reverence, interconnectedness, service, and solidarity are the keys that help us unlock the prison of our false sense of separation and fortify our resilience in this world. A flourishing future is possible through recovering a reconnection between people and their place.

Jeremiah offers us insight into the Divine impulse that desires restoration. We can participate in this meant-for-pattern by engaging in rewilding efforts, restoration endeavors that bring landscapes, and soulscapes, back into whole interrelationship with all of creation, including the cosmos. Ecotheologian Thomas Berry wisely stated that, 鈥淭he universe is composed of subjects to be communed with, not objects to be exploited. Everything has its own voice. Thunder and lightning and stars and planets, flowers, birds, animals, trees, all these have voices, and they constitute a community of existence that is profoundly related.鈥�

Our planetary home needs us to remember its wild wonder, to reconnect to the voices that are singing praises all around us, to restore the stars with stories of our sacred ancestry, not satellites. And if we can commit to this rewilding work, we may yet have hope that we will witness the manifestation of the dawn chorus鈥� morning prayer: that humanity will experience peace by finding their belonging here and will join with the choir of creation, singing the lines that lead us all home.

.

Sources

[1] Yan Huang, Michelle, Bob Hunt, and Dave Mosher. 鈥淲hat Elon Musk’s 42,000 Starlink satellites could do for鈥攁nd to鈥攑lanet Earth.鈥� Business Insider, March 4, 2021 https://www.businessinsider.com/how-elon-musk-42000-starlink-satellites-earth-effects-stars-2020-10

[2] Kerry Lotzof, 鈥淎re We Really Made of Stardust?鈥� National History Museum https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/are-we-really-made-of-stardust.html (accessed March 30, 2021).

[3] Beau James, 鈥淪onglines: The Art of Navigating the Indigenous World,鈥� Australian National Maritime Museum, Sydney, Australia, Australian Government, May 31, 2016. https://www.sea.museum/2016/05/31/songlines-the-art-of-navigating-the-indigenous-world (accessed March 30, 2021).

[4] Jeremiah 31:21 (Revised Standard Version)

[5] The State of the World鈥檚 Forests 2020 Report; Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.

[6] Masashi Soga, and Kevin J. Gaston. 鈥淪hifting baseline syndrome: causes, consequences, and implications,鈥� Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, Volume 16, Issue 4 (May 2018), 224.

The post The Dawn Chorus’ Prayer appeared first on 天美视频 of Theology & Psychology.

Join ecotheologian Mary DeJong (MA in ’17) for a cup of sage tea as she suggests that our gardens are the source of sacred visions of the divine. Mary is a contributor at The Other Journal. Housed within 天美视频 of Theology & Psychology, The Other Journal is a bi-annual print and digital journal that aims to create space for Christian interdisciplinary reflection, exploration, and expression at the intersection of theology and culture. This article was originally published on .

Fire of the Holy Spirit,

life of the life of every creature,

holy are you in giving life to forms.

Rivers spring forth from the waters

earth wears her green vigor.

鈥擧ildegard of Bingen

When spring arrives, my Pacific Northwest backyard becomes abloom with more than verdant greens and dazzling flowers. In addition to the stunning red rhododendron, the pollinator-calling pink of the flowering current, and the white-plated blooms of the dogwood, fairy houses built by children begin to appear. At the base of our birch trees my children spontaneously create colorful teas and soups out of herbs from our kitchen garden to heal imaginary ailments. Sage, thyme, oregano, chamomile, and parsley get stirred up; simmered upon blocks of wood, which are the children鈥檚 imaginary stove burners; and served to one another and a present parent in remnant cups upon mismatched saucers. These common herbs, also found in medieval monastic gardens, become the essence of play; they are foundational and inherent elements to the children鈥檚 way of knowing, understanding, and interacting with the natural world.

These seen and unseen worlds seem to go together. As many times as I have been served a 鈥渟age tea,鈥� my child鈥檚 head has been turned by an invisible presence, and wondrous stories of the otherworld are told.1 Theirs are the tales of whispers and wings and a wondrous curiosity about creeping and growing things. This 鈥渞egion of delight鈥� was also critical to the great visionary and mystic Hildegard of Bingen, who spent decades investigating natural science, agriculture, herbal remedies, and the sacred spaces of the earth.2 I propose that Hildegard鈥檚 intimate relationship with the natural world was a conduit for sacred revelations and that this relationship provided the very essence from which her ecstasies were shaped and formed.

Although Hildegard鈥檚 visions were no doubt of divine origin, curiosity鈥攁nd a deep sense of God鈥檚 interrelatedness with the more-than-human world鈥攑rompts me to wonder if Hildegard facilitated her visions through exchanges with entheogenic plants, not so unlike my children who come in from the garden often in a state of enthralled kinship with the life that exists beyond the back door.3 As the religious philosopher Huston Smith has shown, such plants have the potential to facilitate a deep and abiding sense of the sacred and ontological wonder, as well as a sacramental use in connecting more fully with the divine.4 Of course, seeing plants as portals isn鈥檛 to be confused with intentionally seeking psychedelic experiences through the use, for instance, of certain mushrooms. Rather, intimately living with and among the natural world invites an attunement to God through an interanimating relationship with the very plants that constitute our places.

For my children, this kind of approach, as illustrated by their extensive play in the garden and fringe forest of our backyard, produces a mysterious paradox of headiness and rootedness. To understand the natural world through this entheogenic lens is to take a step away from religion鈥檚 anthropocentric tendencies and to engage the realms of pneumatology鈥攖he doctrine of the Spirit. Such experiences create conscious connections between humanity and the natural environment within a sacred, scientific cosmology. Hildegard鈥檚 intimacy with her environs thus models how a deep interrelationship with the natural world in our contemporary time can usher in rapturous states of divine wonder, awe, and religious understanding, which can then facilitate change on behalf of the common good.

Hildegard of Bingen was a remarkable female figure in tumultuous twelfth-century Germany whose work as an abbess, visionary, prophet, herbalist, and composer had great impact in her time. Her ethereal experiences, described today as mystical, clairvoyant, or paranormal, are recorded in her Scivias and Book of Divine Works. These mystical impressions began for Hildegard at the young age of three and continued throughout her eighty-one years of life. Hildegard confided in Jutta von Spanheim, her mentor, 鈥淲hen I was three years old, I saw an immense light that shook my soul; but, because of my youth, I could not externalize it.鈥�5 These early visions are believed to have panicked her parents, so she was tucked away into the safekeeping of an anchorage, an enclosed dwelling under the care of her anchoress and mentor, where she had only limited encounters with religious and communities.6

This forced exile by her parents reflected a common fear of that era, specifically the fear of a child鈥檚 unusual visionary gifts. It was an age when healing powers and direct access to God were questioned, especially when embodied by a young female. The role of wise women, midwives, and healers, who practiced plant medicine and perceived the sacred in all of nature, was condemned by church authorities, and there was an emerging conclusion that the mystical and visionary experiences of women in monastic institutions perpetuated the medieval magic of a pre-Christian past.

In spite of these cultural concerns, Hildegard literally dug into the earth. Even her sleep was characterized by proximity to the land, as legends of her life claim that her particular anchorage was cut into a hillside. Living within and tending to the earth produced a heightened sensorial attunement to and a unique understanding of the other-than-human world. This embodied experience of the interrelatedness of the whole of creation gave her insight into nature鈥檚 immanent creativity and rhythms. Nature鈥檚 creative forms, made evident through the biodiversity of Hildegard鈥檚 medieval Germany, were capable of bringing forth a display of magnificence that endlessly provoked her wonder. Forested landscapes, pastures, moors, and countryside monasteries provided the environs for a multiplicity of meaning with wild places and animals, prompting Hildegard to develop a posture of openness and a desire to see the sacred within all of creation.7

This wild landscape and rural lifestyle meant that older practices, such as cultivating plant medicine, survived despite the growth of Christendom, and Hildegard joined in that thousand-year legacy of growing herbs.8 As abbess, Hildegard was responsible for tending to the neighboring sick at the monastery, and in this role, she became intimately acquainted with the healing properties of trees and plants. Hildegard鈥檚 Physica, the first German herbal treatise, and Materia Medica, in which she catalogs the properties of plants, trees, birds, fish, and stones, attest to her knowledge, competence, and concern for the physical world. Her Causae et Curae echoes this conscious awareness wherein she discusses the physical processes for the human body and its interrelatedness to the natural world. Moreover, her holistic healing abilities allow us to conjecture that she likely practiced a Middle Age version of biodynamic farming, an approach to agriculture in which the esoteric value of plants is considered within agricultural practices to create a diversified and balanced regenerative ecosystem; this practice most likely also encompassed planetary and spiritual components of horticulture.9

For Hildegard, herbs often had powers beyond the symptomatic relief of irritations. Take lavender, for example: 鈥淲hoever cooks lavender with wine, or if the person has no wine, with honey and water, and drinks it often lukewarm, it will alleviate the pain in the liver and in the lungs and the steam in his chest. Lavender wine will provide the person with pure knowledge and a clear understanding.鈥�10 This integrative approach demonstrates Hildegard鈥檚 principle of viriditas, translated as 鈥済reenness鈥� or 鈥済reening power鈥� and interpreted as meaningful growth or life. This greening power is similar to what we now call photosynthesis. That is, Hildegard saw that there was a readiness in plants to receive the sun and to transform it into energy and life, and she recognized this as the inherent connection between the physical world and the divine presence.

The inherent greening energy of viriditas was foundational to Hildegard鈥檚 understanding of the Holy Spirit, the vivifying breath that animates all living things (Gen. 1:2, Ps. 104:29鈥�30). She fostered a nature-centered pneumatology that allowed for a vibrant and immanent earthly Spirit, enfleshed, embodied, and encountered in forest, field, and flower. The garden and the whole of the great, green earth was understood to be the place where God鈥檚 Spirit and our spirit meet to produce fecundity: holistic wellness for the person and a profound mutual relationship with the natural world.

An understanding of the sacred interconnectedness within the natural world has existed for millennia within indigenous cultures that have developed a deep respect for plants, regarding many of them as sacred couriers of well-being, health, and wisdom. Indeed, a deep love and mutuality for plants, animals, and fish both grounds and elevates the inherent web of relationships that are seen as mirrored throughout the cosmos. Hildegard鈥檚 medicinal understanding of the plant world reflected these cosmic connections, and her practice with plants was made more palpable to the Germanic population of the time through her spiritualization of the proposed cure, as rational, scientific explanations were more enduring for ordinary people if offered with a heavy dose of faith.

One example of Hildegard鈥檚 magical blend of the rational mind with Christian cosmology is found in her belief concerning the mandrake root, which she identified as composed of the earth from which Adam was created. A sad man might obtain a mandrake root that had been purified in a fountain for a day and night immediately after being dug from the earth. He would take the root to bed with him, warm it next to his body, and recite these words: 鈥淕od, who madest man from the dust of the earth without grief, I now place next to me that earth which has never transgressed in order that my clay may feel that peace just as Thou didst create it.鈥�11 This particular plant, and indeed the whole of the natural world, becomes both metaphor and milieu for how the sacred manifests itself. Anna Minore argues that Hildegard recognizes that the connection between the 鈥渄ivine and its earthly hierophanies . . . plunges one into the necessity of the symbol for accessing the divine, and thus the realm where the ecological preservation of the trees and mountains has something to do with spirituality.鈥�12 Like the cultural understandings of indigenous tribal healers, this responsive respect cultivates a posture of care and concern for the other, a much needed expression that fosters an interrelated sense of health and well-being.

Hildegard was also revered for her contemplative visions. She related that these visions did not come to her in dreams, ecstasies, or through exterior senses. Rather, by opening herself up to the will of God, she received her impressions in full consciousness with her interior senses. This was Hildegard鈥檚 epistemology, a way of knowing that involved integrating the soul and soil in such a way that her perceptions were finely attuned to the symbolic spheres of divinity and humanity. The earth became the medium by which she encountered and understood God. This way of Hildegard鈥檚 hearing is both ancient and universal鈥攖he sacred has often been presented through complex symbols, stories, and dreams, most of which can be found in basic patterns across a vast array of traditions.13

Moreover, the landscape of the soul has been revealed through a variety of rites and rituals, many of which utilized plants to heighten the experience of the holy.14 These kinds of practices are examples of what Lynn Hume calls 鈥渟ensory syntactics,鈥� practices that provide a somatic stimulus to access heightened awareness and divine realities beyond the physical body via some sort of portal or passage that leads to a significant spiritual encounter (e.g., mandalas, olfactory stimuli, and oral consumption). Apart from the wine used in Christian Communion services, the instances closest to us in time and space are the sacramental role of peyote within the Native American Church and the Mazatec people鈥檚 two-thousand-year-old tradition of using mushrooms in ancient rituals.15 These plants were sacramental and treated with respect due to their potent medicine and relation to mysterious theophanies.16 Thus, like the wise elders of many other traditions, Hildegard cultivated a sacramental understanding of landscape, particularly plant life; entheogenic plants were expressive and sentient, and they provided a constructive, life-giving addition to ceremonies and the soul-discovery process.

Ecophilosopher David Abram believes that the primeval functions of a traditional healer acted as an intermediary between the human community and the larger ecological field, ensuring a mutuality between the provisions offered from the landscape to the human, and also from the human community back to the earth. He states that 鈥渂y the [healer鈥檚] constant rituals, trances, ecstasies, and 鈥榡ourneys,鈥� [s]he ensures that the relation between human society and the larger society of beings is balanced and reciprocal, and that the village never takes more from the living land than it returns to it鈥攏ot just materially but with prayers, propitiations, and praise.鈥�17 Likewise, Hildegard鈥檚 notion of viriditas placed her in relationship with the plant community and tapped her into an ancient wisdom that bolstered her divine visions and ecstasies and promoted a prophetic call for ecological social reform.

Population growth and increasingly destructive agricultural practices were causing the deforestation of Hildegard鈥檚 homeland. As trees were relentlessly felled, she had an intuitive sense of the environmental impact these human-centered behaviors would have on the whole of the natural world. Her intimate practice with plants provided her with a prescient voice that told of an immanent God that was present within all of creation; this divine presence required mutual care and cultivation of the natural world that was strikingly different than theologies that imagined a transcendent God who was no longer concerned with the minutiae of planetary life.

In Hildegard鈥檚 expansive range of knowing, there exists a profound connection to and affinity with biodiversity, a life-way that ceases disconnection and disease. In her interrelational understanding of life, separation is erased between the seer and the seen. Hildegard says of the Spirit, 鈥淵ou are the mighty way in which every / thing that is in the heavens, / on the earth, / and under the earth, / is penetrated with connectedness, / penetrated with relatedness.鈥�18 Her contemplative visions uphold a truly Trinitarian universe, with all things spiraling toward one another, interanimating one another very much like a mandala.

However, unlike the spiraling form of the transcendent mandala, which has no perceptible starting place for the viewer, Hildegard鈥檚 rich visionary experience was in part a response to her particular position and station in life, a revelatory reaction to being rooted and of a place. Indeed, depth psychologist Bill Plotkin鈥檚 extensive research on human development leads him to propose that we each are meant to occupy one particular place on this planet, a place in which our relationship with the greater community of life, including plants, successfully accesses the soul and its connection to the divine by serving as a personal doorway to the world of the unseen.19 A unique and authentic relationship with our particular place within our bioregion thus becomes a portal by which the soul communes with God. At home and closely connected with the land, the soul and the soil become nearly indistinguishable. Hildegard exemplifies the power that exists in a deep knowing of one鈥檚 place through her intimate relationship with her homescape and the sense of belonging it instilled.

Similarly, David Abram tells us that 鈥渨e are situated in the land in much the same way that characters are situated in a story . . . along with the other animals, plants, stones, trees, and the clouds, we ourselves are characters on a huge stage that is visibly unfolding all around us, participants within the vast imagination, or Dreaming, of the world.鈥�20 He finds that the natural world that most Europeans regard as merely a pleasant backdrop to more pressing everyday concerns consists of 鈥渄eeply mysterious powers and entities with whom the healer enters into rapport.鈥� Abram affirms that there are 鈥渕ultiple nonhuman sensibilities that animate the landscape,鈥� powers in the land that avail themselves to us if only we remember that our human consciousness is one form of awareness among many.21 If we can bespeak the wisdom of the more-than-human world, engaging the plant life, forests, and wind as mysterious powers and entities, we can achieve an intimacy with nonhuman nature that can take us back to what has been lost: ancestral reciprocity with the animate earth that cultivates a culture of belonging.

This reciprocity for Hildegard is her vision of the universe as God鈥檚 body. 鈥淚 flame above the beauty of the fields,鈥� she hears God declare, 鈥淚 shine in the waters; in the sun, the moon and the stars, I burn.鈥� She experiences the 鈥渁iry wind鈥� flourishing in all 鈥渋ts green power and its blossoming.鈥� For Hildegard, God thunderously emanates from it all: 鈥淚, the fiery power, lie hidden in these things and they blaze from me.鈥�22 What Hildegard describes as God, divine spirits, or angelic messengers, Abram would suggest to be modes of intelligence or awareness that simply do not possess a human form, and he would presumably echo Hildegard鈥檚 insight that if one observes these natural, nonhuman existents, one opens oneself to 鈥渁 world all alive, awake, and aware.鈥�23 German theologian and mystic Meister Eckhart says something of the same: 鈥淚f humankind could have known God without the world, God would never have created the world.鈥�24

Creation is not a scenic backdrop designed only so humans can take the stage. Creation is in fact a full participant in human transformation, as the outer world is absolutely needed to mirror the true inner world; the world itself is a sacrament. Thomas Berry believes that 鈥渙ur most urgent need at the present time is for a reorientation of the human venture toward an intimate experience of the world around us.鈥�25 Berry and Hildegard were prophetic healers, voices calling us to our collective, numinous relationship with nature. The land models mutuality and sustainability, but to come to know these values, one must be in renewed communication with other species鈥攁n occurrence inherent to inter-being in the natural world.

Hildegard as healer and mystic poses a challenge for us today. We have much to learn from the wisdom expressed in her visionary theology, which makes ecology a spiritual and social task. Hildegard lived in a right relationship with the natural world. She embodied a mutual meant-for-ness, and as a result of her sense of belonging to a place, she became a channel: the imminent sacred and the transcendent communicated to and through her. We each have this potentiality. If we could recover her ancient ways and methods of communing with the divine through our local lands, perhaps we too could develop a stronger prophetic voice and political agency to confront the destructive forces operating in our world today. If we could return to our childhood responses to the natural world鈥攖he wonder at hearing a robin sing, the calming effect of breathing in the sweet scent of lavender, the heightened perception following a drink of 鈥渟age tea鈥濃�攚e would recognize that our immediate response to any of these experiences is one that establishes deep contemplation, intimate connection to the land to which one belongs, and openness to Spirit. By going into the backyards of our lives to intentionally engage鈥攅ven play!鈥攚ith the soil, sage, and songbirds, we open ourselves up to numinous encounters. Herein is wonderment, awe, and a deep knowing of mystery and magic that allows us to rekindle and remember a vast terrain to our own existence: the greening power of God runs in and through us all, affirming the interconnections between all members of the biosphere. In the wake of such modes of engagement we might be able to receive Hildegard鈥檚 prescription for physical and spiritual health and well-being: live in mutual exchange with what is the other, and then we will begin to heal ourselves and live holistically as intended with our partnered places and planet.

1. Derived from the Latin salvere (鈥渢o save鈥�), Hildegard of Bingen described of sage, 鈥淚 save and I heal.鈥� She had a sage tea that she recommended to members of her order and surrounding countryside to be useful against all ill humors. Salvia divinorum, or 鈥渄iviner鈥檚 sage,鈥� is possibly the most psychedelic plant when ingested as smoke or tea. See Deirdre Larkin, 鈥淪alvia, Save Us,鈥� The Medieval Garden Enclosed, September 7, 2010, http://blog.metmuseum.org/cloistersgardens/2010/09/07/salvia-save-us/.
   See Thomas Berry, foreword to Meditations with Hildegard of Bingen, by Gabrielle Uhlein (Santa Fe, NM: Bear and Company, 1983), 14.
2. The term entheogenic describes psychic effects similar to those related by the terms hallucinogenic or psychedelic, but it has a different emphasis: whereas psychedelic means 鈥渕ind-(psyche) manifesting (delic),鈥� entheogenic means 鈥渆ngendering (genic) god (theo) within (en).鈥�
3. Smith, Cleansing the Doors to Perception: The Religious Significance of Entheogenic Plants and Chemicals (New York, NY: Jeremy P. Tarcher, 2000).
4. Hildegard of Bingen quoted in Carolyn Worman Sur, The Feminine Images of God in the Visions of Saint Hildegard of Bingen鈥檚 Scivias (New York, NY: Mellen, 1993), 26.
5. Ranate Craine, Hildegard: Prophet of the Cosmic Christ (New York, NY: Crossroad, 1998), 23.
6. Jame Schaefer, Theological Foundations for Environmental Ethics: Reconstructing Patristic and Medieval Concepts (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2009), 149.
7. Plants and herbs have been used for culinary, medicinal, and religious purposes. See Frances Hutchison, ed., Garden Herbs (New York, NY: Barnes and Noble Books, 2003), 12.
8. The nineteenth-century philosopher Rudolf Steiner, founder of the biodynamic approach, brought forth both a unique and ancient integrated understanding of soil, plant, animal, and human health that recognized the importance of the healthy interplay of cosmic and earthly influences. See Hilmar Moore, 鈥淩udolf Steiner: A Biographical Introduction for Farmers,鈥� Biodynamics 214 (November/December 1997): 29鈥�32.
9. Wighard Strehlow and Gottfried Hertzka, Hildegard of Bingen鈥檚 Medicine (Santa Fe, NM: Bear and Company, 1987), 72.
10. Joyce Suellentrop, 鈥淗ildegard of Bingen: Medieval Healer of the Rhine: How Healers Used Herbal Remedies during Medieval Times,鈥� Mother Earth Living (June/July 1995), http://www.motherearthliving.com/health-and-wellness/hildegard-of-bingen.aspx?PageId=3#ArticleContent.
11. Anna Minore, 鈥淗ildegard of Bingen: Symbols of Creation,鈥� American Benedictine Review 64, no. 1 (March 2013): 24.
12. 鈥淢any of Hildegard鈥檚 visionary images were given to us in mandala form. Mandalas function as patterns of order and as centering symbols that transform the confusion of the individual psyche into part of a larger order鈥�; Craine, Hildegard, 42.
13. Crystal Addey looks at the divination practices of the ancient Near East, which utilized plants, animals, and aromatic substances as means to connect to their godlike counterpart; see Divination and Theurgy in Neoplatonism: Oracles of the Gods (Burlington, UK: Routledge, 2014).
14. Richard J. Miller, 鈥淩eligion as a Product of Psychotropic Drug Use: How Much of Religious History Was Influenced by Mind-altering Substances?鈥� Atlantic, December 27, 2013, https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/12/religion-as-a-product-of-psychotropic-drug-use/282484/.
15. Of important note here is the ontological difference between entheogenic plants and psychedelic pathogens. Features of experiences with the latter degrade into antisocial, political, communal behaviors whereas entheogenic experiences have a sustaining impact on religious practice and lead to pro-social, political, and communal engagement. More on these studied comparisons can be found in Smith, Cleansing the Doors of Perception.
16. David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World (New York, NY: Vintage, 1996), 7.
17. Hildegard as translated in Uhlein, Meditations, 41.
18. Plotkin, Nature and the Human Soul: Cultivating Wholeness and Community in a Fragmented World (Novato, CA: New World Library, 2008), 339.
19. Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous, 167, also quoted in Plotkin鈥檚 Nature and the Human Soul, 339.
20. Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous, 9.
21. Hildegard, The Book of Divine Works, in Hildegard of Bingen: Mystical Writings, ed. Fiona Bower and
22. Oliver Davies (New York, NY: Crossroad, 1992), 91鈥�92.
23. Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous, 19.
24. Eckhart, 鈥淪ermon Fifty-Seven,鈥� in The Complete Mystical Works of Meister Eckhart, ed. Maurice O鈥機onnell Walshe, 3rd ed. (New York, NY: Crossroad, 2009), 275.
25. Berry, The Sacred Universe: Earth, Spirituality, and Religion in the Twenty-First Century (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2009), 132.

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We each accepted the call to come here, and with this acceptance in many ways we disappeared from the world, descending into the mysterious, archetypal dark wood. This is the stage of the journey where the epic work of self-reflection takes place with the purpose of renewal and discovery.

This is the time of tests and trials, which serve as fortifiers as we learn to rely upon companions as well as our own developing abilities to move to and through suffering. This requisite stage brings one into the darkest chamber of the heart, a place filled with trauma and treasure, a place through which one must trod to manifest the deeply held desire for transformation.

This is the stumbling along the hard, dark path-time. The descent is disorienting, destabilizing, and in a word: deconstructing. This isn鈥檛 just the stuff of legends. This is life well-lived, and it is a quest of meaning-making and discovery. And like any good transformative adventure, there are dragons.

Joseph Campbell would say that this is the part of the journey when dragons emerge from the shadowy wood and must be slain鈥ut this isn’t the way at 天美视频. Here we have gained knowledge and tools to encounter the dragon. How will we engage its various forms, listen to its terrifying tales, and learn from its fiery fury? For only when we begin to reconstruct together new ways of being through the recovery and discovery of lost pieces of ourselves will we find that the dragon actually becomes a vehicle towards our well-being: here we learn how to train, and ride, dragons.

But first we must find the unknown path, an endeavor that requires much. 聽聽This is the way of walking through the woods鈥攁n arduous journey winding through unfamiliar territory, trying to find the way through, all of which requires endurance, stamina…and inevitably, brokenness. Our brokenness becomes the path back into being.

Here in the dark woods, we trip and fall鈥攕craping, breaking, bruising our way through the requisite phase of finding.

This is the sacred Holy Saturday time where the woods keep silence and watch.

I thought that I met my dragon when I began the work of confronting my story four years ago in the first year foundational course Faith, Hope and Love…the thing that I would primarily fight and wrest鈥nd while that did indeed occur, it proved itself to be more of an entrance to an even darker wood, a longer labyrinth, and one that demanded that I find out who I truly am when the demands of the journey turn treacherous. This is what I now know: the forest forms you.

In the dark of my winter term of my first year at 天美视频, I became pregnant with our fourth child. This pregnancy proved near fatal for both me and my then-baby who, born too early, was dangerously close to death. As I lay in my own liminal life-shadow, he needed resuscitation, and was placed in NICU for weeks.

We lose much of ourselves during our passage through the dark鈥攊n many ways this must occur for the gifts of the transformation to have space to become. 80% of my blood was lost during the emergency birth and replaced with other people鈥檚 blood during my reconstructive surgery, creating a much longer and more wearisome journey back to health.

Shortly after I was learning to live with my new wounds, my husband got mono and could barely get out of bed for a month. Then he lost his job and the security of our family鈥檚 primary income. By now I remember wondering when this wandering would end鈥攅very hard and painful path seemed to be dropping out from underneath us to reveal yet another rocky road.

One dark summer night, with only the street lamp assisting with light, I was harvesting my lavender, hustling it to help put food on the table. While wielding a brand new scythe鈥攁nd not fully present to its power鈥擨 cut a significant portion of my finger off and ended up back in the ER only to begin another long, slow and painful journey to healing. This pain, this part of the dark woods, taught me deep truths about regenerativity鈥攅specially as I witnessed my finger literally grow back. Hope indeed is forged in the forest.

I have had to ask the question and face the answer of who would I become after facing such fierce dragons who seemed to cut and jeer in the face of my becoming. How could I befriend the foe and their fire?

It has been said that the wise one limps. You will know wisdom not by one who walks upright, whole, and strong, but one who walks humped and slumped, scarred by the trials and trails that wound.

We gather today, robed with honor, distinction, and wisdom. These robes would say to the world that we are now wisdom-bearers. Ones who have risked much for priceless gain. These robes become your story to steward, not to hoard. May these hoods continue to call forth courage, for this dress required a fight with dragons that will forever remind us of what we have been through, the deep woods through which we have come.

Keep alive the memory of the woods for they have proven to be the greatest of teachers. For deep roots are reached through the forest. And don鈥檛 forget the dragon鈥檚 fire, fashioned now into foresight. Don鈥檛 let it slip from your heart, for that which wounded us has also healed us.

Lest this become a tale forgotten, finger your scars as a reminder of your journey in the case the limp you now bear does not.

May you learn to love your limp and see your scars as sacred as you leave this place, wise from your time in the woods.

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