Natural Spirituality: Recovering the Wisdom Tradition in Christianity » (2ND)

JOYCE ROCKWOOD HUDSON is the founder and director of the Natural Spirituality Program at Emmanuel Episcopal Church in Athens, Georgia. She is the author of five previous books, including the award-winning novel To Spoil the Sun and a new novel, Apalachee, about a Native American wise woman in the early colonial South.

This book is meant to help Christians, Protestant and Catholic, claim for themselves the natural spirit of God that comes to them every day and night through the meaningful events of their waking lives and through their dreams. The holy men and women of biblical times recognized the natural spirit and were guided by it. Their theologians called it wisdom. The recognition of natural spirituality was also carried by the people of the early Church, who knew very well that all of life, waking and sleeping, unfolds with divine wisdom in it. It is only in recent centuries that the natural spirit of God has been lost to our awareness. Now in our day it wants to be known again, and it is springing up in many contexts, more often outside established religion than within it. But in order for the natural spirit to be received in the safest and most effective way, it needs the context of a traditional, God-centered, religious life.

Natural spirituality is in no way antithetical to the traditional Christian life of prayer, praise, and caring community. It is a complement to it, a room to one side of the main room, available to those who need it and seek it, a place for deepening and centering, for refining the energies of life and turning them ever more toward God and the service of the greater good.