2023 Freed Contemporary Christian Lecture – Barbara Mahany

Barbara Mahany addresses the Book of Nature as an ancient and timeless theology embraced by sacred traditions the world over. Metaphorical in name, it holds that creation, the kaleidoscope of heaven and earth and all in between, is God’s first sacred text, spelled out in the alphabet letters of every leaf on every tree, in the sound and silence of every creaturely utterance, unfurled from the tiniest of caterpillars to the dome of heaven through which the planets whirl. For thousands of years, it’s been seen as a lens through which to catch a glimpse of the Creator, a volume that came into focus long before words were inscribed in the Bible. Yet it’s a text too long ignored, and it’s time to open its pages. Here on this imperiled globe, it’s not just nature that’s being trampled, but our very relationship with the Divine. If we can once again learn to read the text that is nature––to deep read in the very way we engage with any sacred text––to expose ourselves not just to its aesthetic wonders but to its role as a place of encounter with the sacred, we might comprehend more profoundly the insistent need to save this holy earth under siege. And we might well find ourselves embraced by a God as present as the stars that salt the night sky, and the birdsong that heralds the dawn. For what are we waiting? Barbara Mahany is an award-winning author, essayist, and longtime journalist, who worked as a staff writer at the Chicago Tribune for nearly 30 years, and who writes these days about stumbling on the sacred amid the cacophony of the modern-day domestic melee, and in the quietudes of nature. She is the author of five books, the most recent of which, The Book of Nature: The Astonishing Beauty of God’s First Sacred Text (Broadleaf Books), was published in March 2023, and the first of which, Slowing Time, was selected by Publishers Weekly as one of its Top Ten religion books for Fall, 2014. She is also a former pediatric oncology nurse who worked at Chicago’s Children’s Memorial Hospital before becoming a newspaper writer.