Reading scripture through the lens of nature

Several years ago, I started walking three miles each morning with my English lab, no matter the weather. There is something good about closing the gap between oneself and the environment—getting soaked by the rain, feeling winter’s cold embrace, breathing the humid air of a midsummer morning.

In Speak with the Earth and It Will Teach You, Daniel Cooperrider closes the gap between God’s two books, the book of the Bible and the book of nature. Like Wendell Berry before him, Cooperrider understands the Bible as an outdoor book, open to the sky.

Cooperrider’s book bears the mark of the landscape of Vermont “with its blazing maples, dark green moss and fern-floored mountains, cold trout streams, big east-west skies, and fertile valleys,” the bulk of it having been written while Cooperrider was pastor of Weybridge Congregational Church. Educated in the ancient and venerable tradition of searching for God and meaning in the written word, Cooperrider learned from his Vermont congregation another way of reading for God and meaning: in the landscape and the events of the earth. “They taught me that the church was not just a place to read and interpret the written scriptures of God, but a place to read and interpret the expressions of God that emanate constantly and from every corner of God’s creation.”