This past Sunday, we launched our summer worship series on Religious Naturalism, which is a relatively new word for an ancient concept. This theme evolved from conversations with our Ministry For Earth Team, who frankly had way too many ideas to fit into a single Earth Day service!

One of our primary inspirations for the flow of our summer series has been Ursula Goodenough(1). Her book The Sacred Depths of Nature presented a lovely framework for allowing our relationship with Nature to go beyond observation and intellectual understanding—to reach a deeper place within our being that one might call religious or spiritual. And she does this without inventing any additional narratives or imposing anything supernatural upon the narrative of Nature itself.

We may not always see a clear line of connection between our spirituality and the knowledge we accumulate about Nature, the environment, and our shared history as part of an interdependent web. Having information doesn’t necessarily lead us down spiritual or religious paths. So, Ursula Goodenough models a deeply personal and intentional to draw those meaningful connections.

Before Goodenough, though, there were abundant proponents of Religious Naturalism, going back at least to early Stoicism, Daoism, and Hinduism. There have been strains of Religious Naturalism in American Unitarianism at least since the mid-1800s.

But The Sacred Depths of Nature really struck the right chord at the right time to inspire a movement. And the book itself was inspired by conversations between Goodenough and Loyal Rue (who wrote Religion Is Not About God). Since the first publication of Goodenough’s volume, the number of people writing about and practicing Religious Naturalism has blossomed.

It’s kind of amazing to think about the life of an idea. How our perspectives need time to grow and evolve, and our ideas are nourished and refined by interacting with other people’s ideas. I wonder what this means for our personal spiritualities. Are we intentional about who and what influences and refines our ideas? Do we give our spiritual ideas time to grow and evolve to their full flourishing?

Religious Naturalism has most likely always been a part of humanity’s relationships with the world we all share. And as we continue to learn more and more about the scientific narrative we share with all of Nature, that narrative offers us new opportunities to engage in spiritual evolution as well.

May this summer series offer you abundant opportunities to explore and evolve, and may we conscientiously refine and nourish one another’s spirits toward mutual flourishing.

(1) Public Domain photo credited to J.Heuser