Is Catholicism a Nature Religion?

by Joseph Stoutzenberger

By instinct, we humans are attuned to the rhythms of daylight and nighttime, work and rest, and the seasons of the year. As a teen, I worked the night shift in a steel factory, eleven at night until seven in the morning. We called it the “graveyard shift.” Some workers claimed that they didn’t mind it, but I never quite got acclimated to being awake all night and trying to sleep during the day. What was the meal to be eaten after work—breakfast or supper? How could you convince the world around you to keep quiet during the day so that you could sleep? The factory work and the graveyard shift were great incentives to go to college!

Catholicism has prayers and practices that tap into the differences in the days, weeks, and year. There are formal prayers, called the Liturgy of the Hours, aligned with seven different times during the day. You most likely would only encounter them if you spent time in a monastery or belonged to a group such as Third Order Franciscans, but there are also informal prayers for waking and bedtime and moments in between available for Catholics. Not every ancient culture had the concept of a seven-day week with one day set aside for rest; it ranks up there as one of the great gifts from God. God doesn’t need our praise and worship every sabbath; we need that day to regroup and remember our place in the universe. Our minds and bodies are transformed with each change of season. The seasons are physical, natural phenomena but have an impact on us spiritually as well. We lose touch with ourselves and that which is greater when we do not tap into the ways of nature happening all around us daily, weekly, and yearly.

One of the most striking events of World War I was the “Christmas truce of 1914.” German troops were hunkered down in trenches within ear shot of the British, Scottish, and French troops in their trenches. On Christmas eve, at the risk of exposing their positions, some German soldiers lit candles on Christmas trees and began singing carols. Soon the allied troops began to join in, and then soldiers on both sides braved walking out into the “no man’s land” between them. Someone produced a soccer ball, and a game ensued. A well-known German juggler performed for the English soldiers who knew him from his performances in London. A Scottish barber gave haircuts to German soldiers who requested them. Photos and stories were exchanged between the warring parties. Afterwards, generals on both sides took pains to prevent such gestures of goodwill on Christmas for the remainder of the war.

Christmas, of course, celebrates the birth of Christ; but in the northern hemisphere it comes right in the middle of the darkest days of the year. There’s a natural longing for light to signal hope for a future thaw and increasing sunshine. With or without the stimulus of coffee, hopefully mornings are invigorating and evenings are a time to slow down. As Ecclesiastes reminds us, there is a time to plant and a time to harvest. Catholic liturgy, a word meaning “public work,” reflects the spirit of the changes we experience naturally. Of course, it also references and celebrates the great events of salvation history, especially the events in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. Linking those events with the rhythms of nature does not diminish them but taps into what is happening naturally in our body, psyche, and soul. To put it in theological terms, the same God born in winter and raised from the dead in spring also created night and day and the seasons of the year. 

In the not-too-distant past Catholicism feared what was called pantheism, equating the universe with God. It left Catholics dismissing the earth and our own earthiness as a distraction at best and evil at its worst. Catholics were to set their sights on heaven above, not the muddy, messy natural world. Some theologians then spoke of “panentheism,” meaning that God is an entity separate from the universe but is manifest in the processes of the material world. Others advocated “creation-centered spirituality,” celebrating the holiness of nature. Such sentiments have become such a part of the Catholic worldview today that Pope Francis made care for the environment a central theme of his papacy. The natural world, the rhythms of days and years, and the progression of time are sacramental, a way God speaks to us, not apart from the liturgical year but in tandem with it. When we disregard setting aside time for rest and fail to enter into the spirit of the seasons, we miss the way the divine is present to us. The bible itself starts out by reminding us that all that God has created is good, very good. We celebrate that goodness when we join with the rest of creation in singing the praises of the goodness of the natural flow taking place within us and around us daily and throughout the year.