The Sacred Depths of Nature
by Ursula Goodenough
1998
New York: Oxford University Press
574.01 GOO
Follows is a collection of quotes I have pulled for future ref. from this most important book:
P. xiv: "I have no need to take on the contradiction or immiscibilities between {religions}, any more than I would quarrel with the fact that Scottish bagpipes coexist with Janese tea ceremonies."
P. xvii: "It is therefore the goal of this book to present an accessible account of our scientific understanding of Nature and then suggest ways that this account can call forth appealing and abiding religious responses — an approach that can be called religious naturalism." (empasis added)
P. xviii: "Being at home with our natural selves is the prelude to ecology, both environmental and cultural, and there are many ways to see human beings as noble and distinctive even as we are inexorably part of the whole."
P. xxi: "Human memory, they say, is like a coat closet: The most enduring outcome of a formal education is that it creates rows of coat hooks so that later on, when you come upon a new piece of information, you have hook to hang it on. Without a hook, the new information falls on the floor."
P. xxi: "The point of hearing a story for the first time is not to remember it but to experience it."
P. 11: "I have come to understand that I can deflect the apparent pointlessness of it all by realizing that I don't have to seek a point. In any of it. Instead, I can see it as the locus of Mystery."
P. 12: "To assign attributes to Mystery is to disenchant it, to take away its luminance."
P. 29-30: "…I once again revert to my covenant with Mystery, and respond to the emergence of Life not with a search for its Design or Purpose but instead with outrageous celebration that it occured at all."
P. 30: "The religious naturalist is provisioned with tales of natural emergence that are, to my mind, far more magical than traditional miracles."
P. 47: "When my awe at how life works gives way to self-pity because it doesn't work the way I would like, I call on assent — the age-old religious response to self-pity, as in "Why, Lord? Why This? Why ME?" and then, "Thy Will Be Done." As a religious naturalist I say, "What Is, Is" with the same bowing of the head, the same bending of the knee. Which then allows me to say "Blessed Be to What Is" with thanksgiving. To give assent is to understand, incorporate, and then let go…Assent is a dignified word. Once it is freely given, one can move fluidly within it."
P. 59: "I have come to understand that the self, my self, is inherently sacred. By virture of its own improbability, its own miracle, its own emergence."
P. 64: "Evolution can be minimally defined as changes in the frequencies of different sets of instructions for making organisms."
P. 75: "Blessed be the tie that binds. It anchors us. We are embedded in the great evolutionary story of planet Earth, the spare, elegant process of mutation and selection and bricolage. And this means that we are anything but alone."
P. 114-115: " Once there is empathy, then there can be the feeling we call compassion…And emergent from our sense of compassion, in mortal conflict with our insistent sense that we should win, is our haunting sense that things should be fair."
P. 139: "For me, and probably for all of us, ther concept of a persona, interested god can be appealing, often deply so…When I sing the hymns of faith in Jesus' love, I am drawn by their intimacy, their allure, their poetry. But in the end, such faith is simply not availalbe to be . I can't do it. I lack the resources to render my capacity for love and my need to be love to supernaturla Beings."
P. 140: "…those of us incapable of embracing that dimension {of a relationship with a god} remain flooded with opportunities to open ourselve to human relationship and hence to fill our lives with the religious experience of love."
P. 151: "Does death have any meaning? Well, yes, it does. Sex without death gets you single-celled algae and fungi; sex with a mortal soma gets you the rest of the eukaryotic creatures. Death is the price paid to have trees and clams and birds and grasshoppers, and death is the price paid to have human consciousness, to be aware of all that shimmering awareness and all that love. My somatic life is the wondrous gift wrought by my forthcoming death." (emphasis added - I love that quote!!!)
P. 171: "And so, I profess my Faith. For me, the existence of all this complexity and awareness and intent and beauty, and my ability to apprehend it, serves as the ultimate meaning and the ultimate value."
