In 'The Book of Nature' Marquette alum Barbara Mahany finds the divine in the outdoors
Barbara Mahany is Catholic, but the words that prompted her new book came from a rabbi.
In talking with Mahany about an earlier volume of her outdoor-focused spiritual essays, he said it "reads like midrash to the Book of Nature."
That capitalization is deliberate. The rabbi was alluding to an ancient trope across the world's religions that the divine created the natural world as a book to read, study and ponder, just like the sacred texts that came later. Mahany traces the threads of that powerful concept through close reading and observation in her volume, "The Book of Nature: The Astonishing Beauty of God's First Sacred Text" (Broadleaf Books). She'll talk about the book during a June 20 visit to Milwaukee's Boswell Books.
A Marquette University graduate, Mahany in these pages is an ecstatic mystic, but not a naive one. She is both a former pediatric oncology nurse and a longtime Chicago Tribune reporter and essayist. No doubt she understands Tennyson's famous line about Nature being "red in tooth and claw." But, to quote Gerard Manley Hopkins, she is keenly attuned to evidence that "the world is charged with the grandeur of God."
Here's a representative passage from her essay on "Wind":
"Breath, the Almighty's first sigh, is wind's most intimate essence. It's ever been holy: Jesus breathes on his disciples, and, poof, the Holy Spirit is upon them. Avalokiteshvara, the Buddha-to-be of Compassion, breathes out the gift of living kindness, and suddenly everyone can feel each other's pain. Elijah in the wilderness encounters God, not in 'a mighty wind that tore mountains and shattered the rocks,' but in 'the sound of a gentle breeze.' The Russian wanderer in 'The Way of a Pilgrim,' the nineteenth-century spiritual classic that blew off the steppes, learns to pray ceaselessly by braiding his words with his breath, coming to believe that he and God are breathing together. To Celts, a sudden gust of air — thought to be a mischievous fairy wind — awakens a deep-down stirring, and the pious would make the sign of the cross whenever the wind blew."
As this passage suggests, Mahany seems to have read all the books, and I am only slightly exaggerating. The usual spiritual suspects can be found in her "Book of Nature": Annie Dillard, Robert Macfarlane, Thomas Merton, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Thoreau, Mary Oliver, as well as powerful older writers less remembered today. But she also turns up unexpected sages, such as H.A. Rey — yes, the co-creator of the Curious George books — whose children's book "The Stars: A New Way to See Them" (1952) reconnects the dots in the night sky in a friendlier way than traditional constellations.
Her book is deeply ecumenical, drawing on Christian, Jewish, Islamic, Buddhist, Celtic and Indigenous traditions and texts, and on writers such as Wisconsin's Aldo Leopold who can't be considered conventionally religious.
Her meditative essays on "Woods," "Birds," "Gentle Rain, Thrashing Storm," "Dusk" and other topics are packed with sensory impressions as well as references to other authors. This is definitely a read slowly kind of book. Happily for those of us who identify more as empirical than mystical, the former nurse writes that knowing scientific explanations for what she observes enhances rather than diminishes her awe.
While this is a reverently upbeat book, Mahany does not ignore the impacts of climate change and human destructiveness. Her epilogue of lamentations begins with a terse jeremiad from Wendell Barry: "There are no unsacred places; / there are only sacred places / and desecrated places."
If you go
Barbara Mahany will speak about "The Book of Nature" in conversation with the Journal Sentinel's Jim Higgins at 6:30 p.m. June 20 at Boswell Books, 2559 N. Downer Ave. Admission is free but registration is requested. Visit boswellbooks.com/upcoming-events.
This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: In 'The Book of Nature' Barbara Mahany finds the divine outside
