Church of the Wild Quotes

“I longed for church to be a place where Mystery is experienced, not explained.”
― Victoria Loorz, Church of the Wild: How Nature Invites Us into the Sacred

“Go out in the woods, go out. If you don’t go out in the woods nothing will ever happen and your life will never begin. —Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run with the Wolves 20th century CE”
― Victoria Loorz, Church of the Wild: How Nature Invites Us into the Sacred

“The layers of crises and cruelty we face will not be solved with technological, political, or economic strategies alone. A deeper transformation of heart is necessary to welcome in a new story. Moving away from a worldview and a way of life that treats others as a “collection of objects” toward a new way of being human that participates honorably in a vast “communion of subjects” is what Thomas Berry calls “the Great Work.”4 The Great Work is spiritual at the core. Gus Speth, an environmental attorney, ecologist, and climate advocate, has summarized the problem brilliantly: “I used to think that top global environmental problems were biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse, and climate change. . . . But I was wrong. The top environmental problems are selfishness, greed, and apathy, and to deal with these we need a spiritual and cultural transformation. And we scientists don’t know how to do that.”5”
― Victoria Loorz, Church of the Wild: How Nature Invites Us into the Sacred

“Reading from the “first book of God”—which is what the ancients called nature—the liturgies would include the whole world, not just humans. And instead of sermons from one preacher, we would learn how to enter into conversation with the living world.”
― Victoria Loorz, Church of the Wild: How Nature Invites Us into the Sacred

“We are in trouble because we do not have a good story,” Catholic priest and evolutionary theologian Thomas Berry often said. “We are between stories. The old story is no longer effective. Yet we have not learned ‘the new story.’ We are talking only to ourselves. We are not talking to the rivers, we are not listening to the wind and stars. We have broken the great conversation. By breaking that conversation we have shattered the universe.”2”
― Victoria Loorz, Church of the Wild: How Nature Invites Us into the Sacred

“Appreciating nature is important, but it isn't enough. Working to protect nature is good, but it isn't enough. Writing a book about nature isn't enough. The only way to grasp the conversation of sacred connection is to move beyond caring and risk falling in love.”
― Victoria Loorz, Church of the Wild: How Nature Invites Us into the Sacred

“It's like trying to move a mountain one pebble at a time. Everyone is so busy and overworked and underfunded that we hardly have time to touch the very earth we are working so hard to get people to protect.”
― Victoria Loorz, Church of the Wild: How Nature Invites Us into the Sacred

“It was cool. We got a bunch of signatures. People came. They said it was cool.
But we weren't longing for cool. We wanted tears and anger and genuine wrestling with the disconnect between humans and the world. We wanted authentic transformation.”
― Victoria Loorz, Church of the Wild: How Nature Invites Us into the Sacred

“Every Good Friday for several years I built an elaborate labyrinth in the sanctuary, complete with interactive stations where you could write poems, light candles, and bury lamentations in a wailing wall constructed with at least sixty heavy stones I'd drag up in a wheelbarrow from the river bottom. And candles. Lots of candles. Hildegard chants played overhead. It was cool. I loved it. People came. They said it was cool.
But I wasn't longing for cool. I wanted tears and psalm-ish anger and genuine wrestling with the disconnect we felt in our lives and the world. I wanted authentic. I didn't want formation, which began to feel like trying to tame people into a mold. I wanted transformation: where people's lives and character and values were changed, freed from the domesticating forces of culture and our own internalized limitations. The root prefix trans means "through" or "across," meaning we are formed as we move through the ways life changes us: from life through death to new life. Transformed, metamorphosed to be more like who we truly are meant to be. Which is another way to say more wild.”
― Victoria Loorz, Church of the Wild: How Nature Invites Us into the Sacred

“Every time we eat food, we need to take in the life force from another being—a carrot, a chicken, an apple—for us to stay alive. With every breath we inhale, we must take in oxygen that has been released from the bodies of trees and other beings. And we release atoms of our own carbon when we exhale. This carbon isn’t just some kind of excess from what we’ve inhaled; we actually metabolically give up tiny bits of our own carbon-created bodies. Every cell of life must die in order for the whole being to continue to live.”
― Victoria Loorz, Church of the Wild: How Nature Invites Us into the Sacred

“Morning is glad on the hills. The sky sings in blue tones. Little blue fluers are early blooming now. I do so like blue. It is glad everywhere. . . . The earth sings in green . . . I did stop by some grand fir trees to pray. When one does look looks up at the grand trees growing up almost to the sky, one does always have longings to pray.”
― Victoria Loorz, Church of the Wild: How Nature Invites Us into the Sacred

“O most honored Greening Force, You who roots in the Sun; You who lights up, in shining serenity, within a wheel that earthly excellence fails to comprehend. You are enfolded in the weaving of divine mysteries. You redden like the dawn and you burn: flame of the Sun.”
― Victoria Loorz, Church of the Wild: How Nature Invites Us into the Sacred

“The Great Work is spiritual at the core. Gus Speth, an environmental attorney, ecologist, and climate advocate, has summarized the problem brilliantly: “I used to think that top global environmental problems were biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse, and climate change. . . . But I was wrong. The top environmental problems are selfishness, greed, and apathy, and to deal with these we need a spiritual and cultural transformation. And we scientists don’t know how to do that.”
― Victoria Loorz, Church of the Wild: How Nature Invites Us into the Sacred

“We are in trouble because we do not have a good story,” Catholic priest and evolutionary theologian Thomas Berry often said. “We are between stories. The old story is no longer effective. Yet we have not learned ‘the new story.’ We are talking only to ourselves. We are not talking to the rivers, we are not listening to the wind and stars. We have broken the great conversation. By breaking that conversation we have shattered the universe.”
― Victoria Loorz, Church of the Wild: How Nature Invites Us into the Sacred

“And that’s what we did. After twenty years as a pastor of traditional indoor churches, I walked out the chapel doors and into the sanctuary of the oak trees.”
― Victoria Loorz, Church of the Wild: How Nature Invites Us into the Sacred

“longed for her return every time I went to my Place. In fact, the hope of seeing her again was half the impetus to head out there at least once a week. She only returned once, which was a little disappointing and confusing, until I read about a similar encounter Mary Oliver captured in her poem, “The Place I Want to Get Back To.” The poem, which is about a numinous visit by two does, explains that “such gifts, bestowed, can’t be repeated.”1 They can, however, become beacons to show you the way. Numinous presence through deer became an important beckoning toward the divine for me, a gentle nudge to pay attention.”
― Victoria Loorz, Church of the Wild: How Nature Invites Us into the Sacred

“The divine communicates to us primarily through the language of the natural world. Not to hear the natural world is not to hear the divine. —Thomas Berry, The Sacred Universe 20th century CE”
― Victoria Loorz, Church of the Wild: How Nature Invites Us into the Sacred