Thomas Berry > Quotes

“The destiny of humans cannot be separated from the destiny of earth.”
― Thomas Berry

“We see quite clearly that what happens
to the nonhuman happens to the human.
What happens to the outer world
happens to the inner world.
If the outer world is diminished in its grandeur
then the emotional, imaginative,
intellectual, and spiritual life of the human
is diminished or extinguished.
Without the soaring birds, the great forests,
the sounds and coloration of the insects,
the free-flowing streams, the flowering fields,
the sight of the clouds by day
and the stars at night, we become impoverished
in all that makes us human.”
― Thomas Berry

“We might summarize our present human situation by the simple statement: that in the 20th century, the glory of the human has become the desolation of the Earth and now the desolation of the Earth is becoming the destiny of the human.

From here on, the primary judgment of all human institutions, professions, programs and activities will be determined by the extent to which they inhibit, ignore, or foster a mutually-enhancing human/Earth relationship.”
― Thomas Berry

“The universe is the primary revelation of the divine, the primary scripture, the primary locus of divine-human communication.”
― Thomas Berry

“Tell me a story, a story that will be my story as well as the story of everyone and everything about me, the story that brings us together in a valley community, a story that brings together the human community with every living being in the valley, a story that brings us together under the arc of the great blue sky in the day and the starry heavens at night, a story that will drench us with rain and dry us in the wind, a story told by humans to one another that will also be the story that the wood thrush sings in the thicket, the story that the river recites in its downward journey, the story that Storm King Mountain images forth in the fullness of its grandeur.”
― Thomas Berry, The Dream of the Earth

“A degraded habitat will produce degraded humans. If there is to be any true progress, then the entire life community must progress.”
― Thomas Berry

“We must say of the universe that it is a communion of subjects, not a collection of objects. ”
― Thomas Berry

“[O]ur human economy is derivative from the Earth economy. To glory in a rising Gross Domestic Product with an irreversibly declining Earth Product is an economic absurdity.”
― Thomas Berry, The Universe Story: From the Primordial Flaring Forth to the Ecozoic Era--A Celebration of the Unfolding of the Cosmos

“We must, however, reflect on what is happening. It is an urgent matter, especially for those of us who still live in a meaningful, even a numinous, earth community. We have not spoken. Nor even have we seen clearly what is happening. The issue goes far beyond economics, or commerce, or poetics, or an evening of pleasantries as we look out over a scenic view. Something is happening beyond all this. We are losing splendind and intimate modes of divine presence. We are, perhaps, losing ourselves.”
― Thomas Berry, The Dream of the Earth

“The Earth is so integral in the unity of its functioning that every aspect of the Earth is affected by what happens to any component member of the community. Because of its organic quality, Earth cannot survive in fragments….The integral functioning of the planet must be preserved.”
― Thomas Berry

“For people, generally, their story of the universe and the human role in the universe is their primary source of intelligibility and value. ... The deepest crises experienced by any society are those moments of change when the story becomes inadequate for meeting the survival demands of a present situation.”
― Thomas Berry, The Dream of the Earth

“It's not possible to save the world by trying to save it. You need to find what is genuinely yours to offer the world before you can make it a better place. Discovering your unique gift to bring to your community is your greatest opportunity and challenge. The offering of that gift — your true self — is the most you can do to love and serve the world. And it is all the world needs.”
― Thomas Berry, Soulcraft: Crossing into the Mysteries of Nature and Psyche

“Until technologists learn reverence for the earth, there will be no possibility of bringing a healing or a new creative age to the earth.”
― Thomas Berry, The Dream of the Earth

“This law of diversity holds, not only for the other areas of being and of action, but also for the religious life of the human community, for revelation, belief, spiritual disciplines, and sacramental forms. If there is revelation, it will not be singular but differentiated. If there is grace, it will be differentiated in its expression. If there are spiritual disciplines or sacraments or sacred communities, they will be differentiated. The greater the differentiation the greater the perfection of the whole, since perfection is in the interacting of diversity; the extend of the diversity is the measure of the perfection.”
― Thomas Berry, The Christian Future and the Fate of Earth

“But while Earth is a single integral community, it is not a global sameness. It is highly differentiated in bioregional communities - in arctic as well as tropical regions, in mountains, valleys, plains, and coastal regions. These bioregions can be described as identifiable geographical areas of interacting live systems that are relatively self-sustaining in the ever-renewing process of nature. As the functional units of the planet these biogreions can be described as self-propagating, self-nourishing, self-educating, self-governing, self-healing, and self-fulfilling communities [...] the larger life community [...] sustains us in every expression of our human quality of life - in our aesthetic and emotional sensitivities, our intellectual perceptions, our sense of the divine, and our physical nourishment and our bodily healing.”
― Thomas Berry, The Christian Future and the Fate of Earth

“We need to move from a spirituality of alienation from the natural world to a spirituality of intimacy with it [...] to a spirituality of the divine as revealed in the visible world about us”
― Thomas Berry, The Christian Future and the Fate of Earth

“The "First Mediation" is that between the divine and the human ... the "Second Mediation" [is] the inter-human mediation, the reconciliation of different human groups ... a "Third Mediation" has become an imperative ... the mediation between the human community and the Earth ... It is not only food for the body that comes from Earth, but our very powers of thinking and the great images of our imagination. Our arts and education, too, all proceed from Earth. Even our knowledge of God comes from our acquaintance with Earth, for the divine reveals itself first of all in the sky and in the waters and in the wind, in the mountains and valleys, in the birds of the air and in all those forms that flower and move over the surface of the planet.”
― Thomas Berry, The Christian Future and the Fate of Earth

“The natural world is the fundamental locus for the meeting of the divine and the human. We need to look up at the stars at night and recover our primordial wonder that awakened in our souls when we first saw the stars ablaze in the heavens against the dark mystery of the night. We need to hear the song of the mockingbird thrown out to the universe from the topmost branch of the highest tree in the meadow ... In all these experiences communion takes place between ourselves and the numinous reality ... If we were truly sensitive, we would realize that in these moments the universe is communicating to us the most basic understanding that we really need.”
― Thomas Berry, The Christian Future and the Fate of Earth

“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: Earth, Spirituality, and Religion in the Twenty-First Century

“... the natural world is the primary revelation to us of the divine.”
― Thomas Berry, The Christian Future and the Fate of Earth

“We should be listening to the stars in the heavens and the sun and the moon, to the mountains and the plains, to the forest and rives and seas that surround us, to the meadows and the flowering grasses, to the songbirds and the insects and to their music especially in the evening and the early hours of the night. We ned to experience, to feel, and to see these myriad creatures all caught up in the celebration of life. [...] We have lost sight of the fact that these myriad creatures are revelations of the divine and inspirations to our spiritual life. Our inner spiritual world cannot be activated without experience of the outer world of wonder for the mind, beauty for the imagination, and intimacy for the emotions.”
― Thomas Berry, The Christian Future and the Fate of Earth

“... the revelation of the natural world directly and immediately awakens a sense of awe and mystery along with a sense of creatureliness. It arouses, as well, a tendency to worship.”
― Thomas Berry, The Christian Future and the Fate of Earth

“... our soul life is developed only in contact with these surrounding experiences [life forms and other environmental factors]. So integral is our inner world with the outer world that if this outer world is damaged, then the inner life of our souls is diminished proportionally ... To preserve this sacred world of our origins ... We need to move from a spirituality of alienation from the natural world to a spirituality of intimacy with it ... a spirituality of the divine as revealed in the visible world around us...”
― Thomas Berry, The Christian Future and the Fate of Earth

“... realize that the universe is a communion of subjects rather than a collection of objects.”
― Thomas Berry, Evening Thoughts: Reflecting on Earth as Sacred Community

“The mystery of the cross can be matched by the mystery of creation. Neither is within human comprehension.”
― Thomas Berry, The Christian Future and the Fate of Earth

“Earlier in the course of human affairs this communion with the universe and with spirit-presence in the universe took place spontaneously. The grandeur of the mountains was a spiritual mode of being. Sunrise and sunset were sacred moments. Animals were spirit presences. The human mind was awakened to beauty. An enduring intimacy was established between the human and non-human worlds. All human affairs were understood within the functioning of this larger community of existences. Religoius ritual, prayer, poetry and music were born of this source. The primary human obligation was integration into this larger structure and functioning of the universe as a sacred mode of being. Acceptance of this fact was the foundation of the profound wisdom possessed by indigenous peoples the world over.”
― Thomas Berry, The Christian Future and the Fate of Earth

“Our knowledge needs to be a creative response to the natural world rather than a domination of the natural world.”
― Thomas Berry, The Christian Future and the Fate of Earth

“... from the things that are made we come to know th eMaker. These three - divine, natural, human - are so integrally connected with each other that none can function effectively without the others.”
― Thomas Berry, The Christian Future and the Fate of Earth