Sam’s Big Brother Brian, who still takes him every Tuesday for a few hours, is married to a very funny Southern woman named Diane, who’s bleached fabulously blonde, sober fifteen years, very Eve Ardenish. She says that we’re all so nuts amid so much beauty that it’s like we’re at the circus. In one ring is an amazing array of clowns and bears doing all this great stuff, and in the middle ring is a woman who does breathtaking tricks on horseback, and in the far ring are elephants or seals and maybe more clowns, and above us are trapeze artists, doing these death-defying precision feats, and we’re sitting in our seats looking around crabbily, going, “Where’s that damn peanut vendor? I want my goddamn peanuts!” — even when we’re not particularly hungry.
- Annie Lamott, Traveling Mercies, Some Thoughts on Faith

The universe is a communion of subjects, not a collection of objects. And we have this from our first awakening to the universe. Your first impression when you see a flower or see a tree or see a sunset or see the ocean, or see anything in the natural world, your first impress is a communion experience. How wonderful this is:  to live in the universe where there’s a sun in the heavens; where there’s so many wonderful creatures of Earth; where the song of the birds and the butterflies and the cicada in the evening. What is all this? Obviously, it’s not a collection of objects to be used. Obviously, it’s a world to be venerated. It’s a world to be communed with, to be present, to be delighted in, and together to have a certain experience that might be called ecstatic experience. 

There’s one experience that I think has had a very deep influence on my life. When I was about ten years old I saw a meadow and I saw it first in spring time — in early May is a communion experience. It was filled with wild lilies. And that sight, together with the sounds of the insects — the crickets, the birds — all of this somehow struck me in such a way that ever since then that meadow has become my norm of reality and value. A good economy is what makes that meadow survive. Good politics protects that meadow. A good religion is what enabled me to understand the deep mystery in the meadow.

How wonderful this is:  to live in the universe where there’s a sun in the heavens; where there’s so many wonderful creatures of Earth; where the song of the birds and the butterflies and the cicada in the evening. What is all this? Obviously, it’s not a collection of objects to be used. Obviously, it’s a world to be venerated. It’s a world to be communed with, to be present, to be delighted in, and together to have a certain experience that might be called ecstatic experience.

If we don’t have certain outer experiences, we don’t have certain inner experiences or at least we don’t have them in such a profound way. We need the sun, the moon, the stars, the rivers and the mountains and the trees, the flowers, the birds, the song of the birds, the fish in the sea. All of this evokes something in our inner world, evokes a world of mystery. It evokes a world of Sacred and gives us that sense of awe and mystery.
- Tom Berry, from the video The Great Story. For more from Thomas Berry, including excerpts from my interview of him, visit here.