Church of the Wild: The Movement and the Experience

Church of the Wild: The Movement and the Experience

Thomas Berry famously named the spiritual problem underlying ecological degeneration:  “We are talking only to ourselves. We are not talking to the rivers, we are not listening to the wind and stars. We have broken the great conversation.”  Spirit and Nature are not separate but centuries of Empire have led to a tragic severance that underlies not only the climate crisis but our own spiritual emptiness.  A movement on the edges of religious institutions has been drawing people back into intimate and particular relationship with the rest of the living world, and calling it church.  Church of the Wild is an opportunity for divine encounter, experiencing God rather than talking about God, through simple spiritual practices that invite people into the wild world (aka “nature”) to listen for the holy, to engage in intimate conversation with the sacred by re-membering ourselves back into the interconnected web of reality.

This two hour session will begin in the Loder Dining Room with a half hour introduction to the contours of the Wild Church movement and then we will gather outside on the Library Terrace for a Church of the Wild experience.