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By Root 491 0

for the person whom they were born to love. I spent close to two searching for the land where I was meant to live. After scores of failed blind dates, I decided to marry the land that day, before I had walked ten steps past the oak—before I had found the trillium and the jewelweed, before the elderberry had produced its tiny purple clusters or the persimmon had dropped its plump fruit on the ground. I fell in love before I ever plucked a ripe muscadine from the vine or made a pie from the blackberries that grow along the path to the river. The milkweed was still in its pod that day, but even if I had seen it spilling its white silk on the air, my heart needed no more convincing. I had found my place on earth.

I know plenty of people who find God most reliably in books, in buildings, and even in other people. I have found God in all of these places too, but the most reliable meeting place for me has always been creation. Since I first became aware of the Divine Presence in that lit-up field in Kansas, I have known where to go when my own flame is guttering. To lie with my back flat on the fragrant ground is to receive a transfusion of the same power that makes the green blade rise. To remember that I am dirt and to dirt I shall return is to be given my life back again, if only for one present moment at a time. Where other people see acreage, timber, soil, and river frontage, I see God’s body, or at least as much of it as I am able to see. In the only wisdom I have at my disposal, the Creator does not live apart from creation but spans and suffuses it. When I take a breath, God’s Holy Spirit enters me. When a cricket speaks to me, I talk back. Like everything else on earth, I am an embodied soul, who leaps to life when I recognize my kin. If this makes me a pagan, then I am a grateful one.

I know I am Irish, which may explain a lot. When I first visited the Emerald Isle several years ago, my gene pool told me I was home. It was not just the freckles and the fondness for potatoes that convinced me, but the natural reverence for creation that I found in that blessed land. From the Dingle Peninsula to the Skellig Islands, I encountered holy rocks, holy caves, holy pools, and holy groves. I learned the proper name for those places on earth where the Presence is so strong that they serve as portals between this world and another. “Thin places,” the Irish call them, which turn out to include not only the famous places such as Croagh Patrick and Glendalough but also the ordinary places that people walk right by if they are not paying attention.

On our first day in Ireland, Ed and I discovered a thin place in a cow pasture. We were not looking for it. We were just taking a walk down a country lane after supper when we saw a break in the hedges off to our left, like a hole in a garden wall. Curious, we followed the well-worn footpath a couple of hundred feet to where it ended at a little mossy hole full of crystal clear water. If not for the tidy bank of stones set into its side, we might have mistaken it for an ordinary watering hole, but someone had clearly taken pains to hallow the place.

“Do you feel that?” Ed said.

“I do,” I said. Freshness was pouring from that spring, drenching me as thoroughly as a shower. I felt as peaceful and alive as I had felt in ages. My jet lag was all gone. How it worked was a complete mystery to me, but there was no denying the effect. Simply to stand near that spring was to experience living water.

Later I would find the Celtic theology that went with the experience, in which God’s “big book” of creation is revered alongside God’s “little book” of sacred scripture. I would also find Christian mystics such as Bernard of Clairvaux and Julian of Norwich, who found heaven on earth in union with the Divine. “I have had no other masters than the beeches and the oaks,” Bernard wrote in the twelfth century, while Julian recognized the love of God in a hazel nut in her hand. Hildegard of Bingen coined the word viriditas (“green power”) to describe the divine power of creation, while Francis of Assisi