The world we manipulate with our creative, grasping hands is far more interconnected and mysterious than we can fathom. We understand bits of it with our analytical powers, but only our intuitive and imaginative capacities can truly absorb the vastness, complexity, and interconnectedness of all that science reveals. Truly, the breadth and mystery of the universe is mind-boggling. We can feel, understand, and express the whole through song and story, poem and dance, art and imagination, in nature and in music, and through religion. It is by these that we gain wisdom to guide the work of hands; that we acquire the ability to listen, to discern, and to be in touch with the mysteries that lie beyond our scientific puzzles; that we learn how to sense what the Oglala Sioux holy man Black Elk called “the way the sacred Power of the World lives and moves.”
It is this way that has guided me, through means largely beyond my comprehension, to leave my longtime work as an environmental advocate and become a priest. I had spent my whole working life trying to help the Earth’s places and the people who depend upon them. My first real job was spraying insecticides from airplanes to kill spruce budworms, an insect that in the early 1980s was devouring the balsam fir forests of northern Maine. Along with being an agent of death for the budworms, when flying in the vintage DC-4 airplanes I fell in love with the woods, lakes, and rivers of that remote and wild land, and with the people whose families had lived and worked the land for generations. I ate apple pie with loggers at remote camps, watched paper mills shred and digest trees and refashion them into newsprint, walked in the woods with foresters to see big trees falling and little ones rising, listened to the heartbreak of landowners whose trees were being killed by native insects and of ecologists who saw fecund streams devastated by airborne poison.
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