Humans are made to engage in life-affirming conversation with the whole, holy web of life. But, this great conversation, as evolutionary theologian Thomas Berry calls it, has been broken: “We are talking only to ourselves. We are not talking to the rivers, we are not listening to the wind and stars.” Breaking this conversation has devastating consequences for the creatures and bio systems of our planet. This disconnection also has severe consequences for our spirituality and vitality as human participants in the interconnected web of life.
Victoria Loorz, your guide for this five part online course, has wrestled with the impacts of this broken conversation as a pastor of indoor churches, a climate activist, a mother and now as a guide who leads people in spiritual practices that reconnect them with the natural world as sacred. She’s discovered something that many of us have known all along but have never had the cultural, religious or even internal permission to embrace: spirituality and nature are not separate. Attempts to keep them apart actually break the world.
In this course, you will learn how to become part of a restored conversation between yourself and the world. Victoria will introduce you to spiritual practices that will allow you to experience the natural world as teacher, companion, and kin and to enter into an actual relationship with specific places and living beings that can provide an embodied, rooted foundation for your transformation and that of the Earth. Change will not come from ivory towers, UN Resolutions, or politician’s promises. It begins with us being in right relationship to ourselves and the world.
