When the Veil of Disconnection Drops
We Cannot Always Put It Into Words, But It is There Nevertheless
It is my experience that most people have stories of a mystical encounter in nature — a time in which the veil of disconnection dropped and they were able to experience their deep belonging to an interconnected and sacred Earth. But those of us caught in the dominant Western worldview do not have enough of a cultural context or a language to know what to do with those encounters. — Victoria Loorz
My wife and I have a magnet on our refrigerator that says, “I believe in God, only I spell it ‘Nature.’” A relic from our neopagan days, the quote is attributed to Frank Lloyd Wright, and I have no idea if he actually said that or anything like it. But there’s no doubt about Victoria Loorz, a founder of a community called the Church of the Wild; she is herself a voice for the mystical wisdom that calls us back into the forest to restore the health of our souls and the wisdom of our bodies.
She points out what strikes me as an all-too-common problem: so many of us are brought to the threshold of mystery when we are in the forest or wilderness settings, but we lack “the language” or “cultural context” to share this sacred encounter with others, or even to make sense of it ourselves. On one level, this is the challenge of mystical experience in any setting: when we meet the mystery in silence, we often experience it as ineffable (beyond what can be put into words). But Loorz reminds us that, at least sometimes, ineffability is the consequence of living in a culture that tries to regulate our experience of mysticism, especially when it meets us in places that are “wild” — beyond our control (like the outdoors).
What are we to do, then? Perhaps we can invite our hearts, minds, spirits and bodies to be simply open to all possibilities. Maybe, sometimes, it’s worth a try: we can put the mystical into words, or even find a conceptual framework to make sense of it. But to encounter that which is ineffable (or even unthinkable) can be seen as an invitation into the cloud of unknowing, the dark night of the soul, the desert of silence. The more we answer this call, and accept this invitation, the more our souls and our tongues will begin to find ways to give this mystery a voice, if for no other reason than to connect our mysteries together. We will be like babies, beginning with babble. But if we persevere, eloquence will surely follow.
Quotation Source: Victoria Loorz, Church of the Wild: How Nature Invites Us into the Sacred (Kindle Edition), p. 17).