"Natural Prayers" is highly appropriate for use in the secondary school classroom. Teachers of English, religious studies, and the sciences would find Mr. Raymo’s dexterious weaving of evocative image and scientific precision both informative and deeply engaging of the student’s imaginations. Using the eight fold cycle of the year, from Winter Solstice to Halloween, Mr. Raymo shuttles between the glory of the universe to the use of the color red in the plant world. Cycling through each seasonal division Mr.Raymo uses the phases of the moon to form breaks and shifts in his essay’s topics and emphasis. This use of seasonal and lunar turning is both brilliant and appropriately reinforces notions of change, movement, evolution, large vistas of time within the natural world, and within those realities of change and movement the precarious nature of a human life.
In a thoughtful and profound introduction Mr. Raymo’s explains his current understanding of prayer, how that connects to his scientific understanding, and thus the title of the book.
"Learning to pray, then as I understand it, is learning to listen with the mind and the heart – making oneself attentive to each exquisite detail of the world. It is a fearsome exhilarating task, best suited to solitude and silence. Such prayers are answered not with miracles tagged with our names, or those of our loved ones, but with beauty and terror. For the prayerful listener, the world becomes the sublime scripture, full of stories of structure and chaos, law and chance, complexification and decay, including the story of the human person in whom the universe becomes conscious of itself. All my life has been a relearning to pray – a letting go of incantational magic, petition, and the vain repetition ‘Me, Lord, me,’ instead watching attentively for the light that burns at the center of every star, every cell, every living creature, every human heart (xiv-xv)."
The geographical locale of these "natural prayers" then moves from Exuma in the Bahamas, to New England, then to the Dingle Peninsula in West Ireland, finally returning back to New England. Each location with its specific geography, geology, biology, and botany then offers Mr. Raymo the opportunity to observe the mysterious numinous that comes from paying focused attention (listening with the mind and heart) to the particulars of the natural world.
At first Mr. Raymo’s subjects for reflection and comment may seem random, but they aren’t. The first section of the book, "Exuma" begins with ruminations on observation and that then leads him to discuss the notion of size. He moves from the small size and the counterintuitive strength of ants and moths to the invisible world of protons. The invisible proton leads to a discussion of the awesome power of atomic fusion, to the incredible power of the sun, and then to the unity of matter and energy. Throughout the book, and this chapter is no exception, Mr. Raymo continues to repeat the theme of the interdependent web of all life in which we and all other life forms are connected. He looks at the juxtaposed small and large of cells and stars, ruminates on the poetic beauty of the Milky Way and brings our attention to the power of poetic words.
"Many scientists consider the Gaia hypothesis far-fetched, based more on wishful thinking than observation, and without a causal mechanism to make it work. Others see Gaia as a powerful insight into the way of the world, a new metaphor to replace the "world as machine" metaphor that has guided science for the past four hundred years. All thinking is metaphorical. In science as in poetry, we understand by making analogies. We are always on the lookout for analogies that unify our experience of the world. Is the Earth a clockwork ticking according to the laws of mechanics, as Newton and his successors supposed, or is it a living organism, as the Gaians propose? Is the world best understood by breaking it into its component parts, as one might take apart a clock to see what makes it tick, or as an indivisible unity, a living organism? Of course, the terms of the question are not mutually exclusive; any strategy that engages our attention with the world is likely to be useful. Nevertheless, the organic metaphor has begun to change the way we perceive and understand the world, focusing our attention on fusion, symbiosis, community (11)."
In the first section on New England Mr. Raymo shifts again to the magic of particulars – here place and species. He talk about the beauty and mystery of birds, their intricacies which cannot be understood well without " the knowledge science provides (46)." Here he returns to another major theme throughout the book, "With the knowledge science provides, we are also allowed to participate in an evolutionary drama larger and richer than ourselves, in which the human soul awakens in the course of deep time to a new season of consciousness and intelligence (46)."
In this chapter he moves also into a discussion of the Narikotome Homo Erectus skeleton, to amino acids and the beginning of life, to insects and Virginia Woolf’s spontaneous "moment of being (67)" while looking at a flower. This moment, where she realized her innate connection to all life presents an opportunity for Mr. Raymo to talk about the nature and role of science in the distinctly religious notions of unity "connectedness of things (68)" and its relationship to diversity "breaking connections (68)."
"The scientist is no less sensitive than the writer to the connectedness of things, to the hidden patterns behind the cotton wool. But in practice, science works by breaking connections, by isolating, by fracturing the world into myriad parts like a shattered crystal ball. The laboratory bench is an arena for isolating one thing from another. An experiment is an attempt to reduce the many variables of experience to two – the dependent and the independent. This shattering of the world into fragments has proved fantastically successful as a way of discovering hidden patterns...........Once we have discovered the hidden patterns, then we attempt to weave the world back again into wholeness (68)."
The same type of brilliant and evocative analytical and associative thinking that has characterized Mr. Raymo’s previous chapters continues in the last section of the book. From the feeling of air on our skin to the nature of the atmosphere, to the Gulf Stream and jelly fish, to crops and the Irish patchwork of irregular fields bound by hedgerows.
Mr. Raymo has several continuous prayers: (1) to see the beauty and wonder in the immediate immanence of the particular – a beauty and wonder that scientific inquiry allows us to see, (2) to deeply know the evolutionary truth of the interconnectedness of all life, yet live with the dynamic tension of connectedness and breaking that are equally important, and finally (3) to "build an environmental ethic on the evolving wisdom of technological civilization (207)." He clearly know the difficulties that such an ethic faces "pitching civilized generosity against wild self-interest, scientific ecology against consumerist greed (207)." Yet, he also clearly knows what we have to lose if we do not build and sustain this ethic.
I cannot recommend "Natural Prayers," highly enough. Students, from eighth graders who read sections to Advanced Placement Environmental Students who read the whole book, engage deeply with this and other works by Mr. Raymo. His ability to restore our sense of the beauty and awe embedded in the study of the natural world scientific is both important and timely.
Review ©2003 by Tom Collins and RSiSS
Palmer Trinity School
Miami, Florida