Can the Earth Heal?

"Earth has no sorrow that earth cannot heal...."

With that succinct declaration, the late 19th-century nature-writer John Muir put his own spin on what had become a conventional aphorism.  Specifically, the saying that "Earth has no sorrow that Heaven cannot heal," which had come from a poem by the Irish romantic poet Thomas Moore writing over half a century earlier.  Grammatically, Muir's substitution of the word "earth" for Moore's word "Heaven" was a simple matter.  But spiritually and theologically, that substitution leads us into complexities:  Does the Earth heal, and if so, how?

I remember as a child being shocked upon first hearing a particular Bible story about Jesus healing a blind man.  Having grown up in a church, I was accustomed to hearing stories about Jesus compassionately healing people, but this story was different.  As the narrative goes, Jesus "spat on the ground and made mud with the saliva and spread the mud on the man's eyes."  (John 9:6).  Jesus's then telling the man to go wash his eyes with water from a pool did not reduce my shock, because I thought Jesus should be smarter than to put such an unsanitary substance as saliva mixed with dirt in a person's eyes.  Even as a child, I had learned not to touch my eyes when my hands were dirty.

Having now more knowledge about symbols in the culture the Bible comes from, I know that earth -- the ground -- was associated with the source of existence itself.  In one of the creation accounts in Genesis, "God formed man from the dust of the ground." (Gen. 2:7)  There is, therefore, the suggestion in the story of the blind man that Jesus's healing is also a creative act -- giving new life to the blind man!

Calypso orchid

John Muir's declaration that the earth can heal all our earthly sorrows gains added significance within his late 19th-century context.  Muir felt that too much of the Christianity of his time had become otherworldly and human-centered.  It often focused on the assurance that a person's individual soul would have a place in the afterlife, instead of rejoicing in the wonder and beauty of the natural world all around.  Muir himself had often experienced how his own spirit could be healed by immersing himself in Nature. One of those occasions occurred during an unsettled time in his life, when he had been traveling on foot for months across part of Canada, meeting very few people.  One day, after wading for hours through a swamp, exhausted and discouraged, he suddenly came upon, as he described it, "the rarest and most beautiful of the flowering plants... a Calypso borealis."  The flower's beauty broke in upon him so unexpectedly that he sat down beside it and wept, relieving a greater burden than just that one day's exhaustion.

Today, there are many people who have also experienced how turning their attention to something in Nature can be restorative, even healing.  And it doesn't require wandering for days in wilderness.  Sometimes it comes in more ordinary settings.

~~~

Has there been, or is there, an occasion on which you are restored by Nature?

(The quote by Muir about the earth, written in 1872, is from John of the Mountains, 1938. p. 99.
The quote about the flower is from his letter to Mrs. Ezra S. Carr in 1866)

(The quote by Thomas Moore [1779-1852] is from his "Come, Ye Disconsolate.")

(The flower photo, by Walter Siegmund, is used under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.)