The Book of Nature: The Astonishing Beauty of God’s First Sacred Text

By Barbara Mahany. Broadleaf Books, 2023. 191 pages. $27.99/hardcover; $25.99/eBook.

The Book of Nature spoke directly and deeply to my spiritual journey, resonating with truths that would feel familiar to any Friend, even as it was written by a woman with a syncretic Irish Catholic and Jewish identity who draws thoughtfully from both traditions. Our spiritual growth, she counsels, is best served by the combination of paying close attention to the natural world and reading Scripture and other enlightened books.

Mahany opens with a broad history of the “Two-Book theology” from which her title derives. Drawing support from the third-century monk Antony the Great and later Catholic thinkers like Thomas Aquinas and Catherine of Siena, she explains that the idea that God is found in both creation and holy texts has been influential in Christianity, even as the popularity of the idea has ebbed and flowed, having particular impact on Celtic Christianity. But almost immediately, she is also calling on other sages: poets (John Keats and Robinson Jeffers), nature writers (Annie Dillard and John Burroughs), theologians (rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel and Meister Eckhart), and scientists (Robin Wall Kimmerer and David George Haskell), among others.

One of the strengths and real joys of The Book of Nature stems from Mahany’s wide reading and the way she brings her breadth of knowledge into the reader’s experience. She includes not only an extensive bibliography but a final section where she calls the reader’s attention to specific books that were particularly important for each chapter. Her intent is to encourage what she dubs “the Russian-doll method of reading, one writerly work opening into another, following citations and mentions from title to title.”

Between the early chapters sharing the intellectual context and the recommendations for further reading at the end are twelve chapters Mahany calls “pages from the Book of Nature.” Mahany contemplates four examples each of the earthly, the liminal, and the heavenly, sharing both loving descriptions of the natural world and the reflections those observations inspire. Throughout all of the chapters, Mahany draws connections to various spiritual traditions she has found enriching, in turn providing readers with new perspectives and practices for their own lives.

In gardening, for example, Mahany sees God in the intricacies of plants and insects. In the woods, she learns to slow down and embrace not knowing the way. Rain demands attention and is the language of a “God of endless eloquence,” while wind reminds her that there is a force much bigger than us. The season’s first snow provides a metaphor for how the same divinity settles on all of us but takes on our shapes, providing everyone with the specific grace they need. The stars are simultaneously guideposts and reminders of how much we can never know; the moon, in its powerful reflection of the sun’s radiance, a call for us to reflect God’s Light.

“In many ways, these meditations are paeans to the astonishments of all creation and to the Creator. Beneath their ponderings each is a prayer,” Mahany writes. “The radical proposition is this: to notice, to offer our apt gaze and even our goosebumps, is to begin to partake of the holy work, to answer the call not merely to dance in the whirl of creation but to work toward its salvation.”

Mahany’s book, and the actual Book of Nature it honors, both serve as calls to prayer. Attention to the natural world, she tells us, provides evidence for God’s immanence in our world. Even more consequentially, that attention is how we find and restore “shards of holiness” infused throughout creation. In a section about birds, Mahany writes of the transformation this attention can bring:

I grew up with my eyes on the sky. I knew the red cardinal from the scarlet tanager nearly as early as I knew A from E. What stirs me now is the way the red bird scythes through the otherwise two-toned tableau of winter’s drab. How the shock of crimson wing can stir me. Like monastery bells calling postulants to prayer, the sudden swoop of cardinal is as if a tap to the heart, a solemn bow of the head, a bending of the knees, a short sweet inkling that God is near. It’s the eruption of red on the washed-out tableau that ignites in me a call to attention, and marveling soon opens into quiet whispered prayer.

Reading The Book of Nature felt like having an affirming companion on a path of exuberant study. Mahany is relatable and inspiring. Upon finishing the book, I immediately took two more down from my bookshelf to delve deeper into the connections between the holy world and holy books. And I attended meeting for worship the next First Day ready to hear the lessons of the cicadas and catbirds, the oaks and pines outside the meetinghouse windows.

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Mark Jolly-Van Bodegraven came to the Religious Society of Friends through the lived witness of peace activists and other Quakers; the space that Friends hold for unprogrammed worship and universalism; and Quakers’ literary traditions of journals, pamphlets, and this magazine. He works in higher education communications, lives in Newark, Del., and attends Newark Meeting.