Does it matter how we feel about the earth? According to Professor George Handley, respecting the natural world allows us to better feel God’s love.
Those who were raised in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are well acquainted with these words from a familiar primary song: “I’m glad that I live in this beautiful world / Heavenly Father created for me.” The Church’s theology celebrates God’s creation of the earth, as well as His creation of humankind, as a symbol of His divine love.
In a Wonder of Scripture Lecture titled “The Spiritual Creation,” Professor George Handley (Literature of the Americas, Ecotheology) discussed this essential piece of doctrine and how gaining a greater appreciation of nature’s divinity allows individuals to better understand their Heavenly Father’s love for them.
Connecting with Our Creator
Understanding humankind’s connection to the Creation allows individuals to further understand God’s nature. Handley explained that God is “a God whose love and creative power made and sustains us individually but also sustains the heavens and the earth.”
Handley himself experienced a meaningful connection to the Creation while watching a worker prune a large tree in his front yard. He jokingly remarked, “I did not ever consider myself a tree hugger,” but he felt an inexplicable bond with the plant, continuing, “the tree is clearly a part of me, and I am part of the tree.” The connection that Handley felt to his tree displays our innate relationship with nature—we share a Creator.
This doctrine is important, Handley shared, because understanding the Creation “invites us to love all people and all things as God does.” Put simply, loving nature demonstrates a love for God and His creations.
The Paradox
While nature can help individuals find greater faith and connection with God, its paradoxical disposition can make it difficult to love—nature brings both life and death, joy and suffering. Handley expressed that “we cannot claim to love life if we do not accept nature as both the source of our life and the source of our inevitable death and physical disintegration, and . . . the main source of much of our suffering.”
The solution for reconciling the positives and negatives of nature, according to Handley, is to accept this life as a gift from God and feel grateful for the possession of physical bodies—for the “chance to taste, smell, and experience an embodied life, even if only for a short time. And yes,” he continued, “that includes the chance to suffer.” Finding gratitude for all things in life, even the hard things, helps to love everything that God created.
Love One Another
In encouraging individuals to love all of God’s creations, Handley doesn’t recommend they “abandon care for the human family in the interest of caring for the creation.” Instead, he suggested that they “care for the creation in order to better care for one another.”
Caring for the natural world encourages people to look outside themselves and feel more connected to those around them. Handley observed that “finding reverence and compassion for the earth, for every creature, tempers our ego.” He considers the separation and division that exists in society today to cause “blindness to God’s majesty.” The knowledge that God created every living thing on the earth creates an understanding of the divine nature of every living thing and aids in the development of a more loving global community.
At the conclusion of his lecture, Handley promised that finding a balanced love for all of God’s creations will bring us joy: “The love of God is inseparable from all intelligence everywhere. Let us seek such love of intelligence—our deeper joy depends on it.”
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