PHILOSOPHY
Kierkegaard On How Lilies And Birds Can Teach Us To Pray Genuinely
Letting Nature Lead Us; First Seeking God’s Kingdom; Matthew 6:24–34
The idea of learning from nature is nothing new. Humans have been doing it for thousands of years, and current movements around the world are pushing people back into this space of contemplating the slow and gentle lessons to be found in nature. Movements like slow living, re-wilding, and heirloom seeding are just a few examples of the potent conversations happening right now surrounding the wisdom of the natural world.
Of course, when Kierkegaard does it, you know it’s going to have a profound tie to faith and existing in spite of the trials of anxiety and despair, in spite of the absurdity of some elements of the human experience.
In his series of essays titled The Lily Of The Field And The Bird Of The Air, Kierkegaard takes part in what he calls “Three Godly Discourses.” It would almost be more fair to call them sermons, but given that Kierkegaard wasn’t ordained and he was a special kind of Christian (a phrase I’m using here to mean a genuine Christian), he probably wouldn’t be down with that.
The first discourse in the collection is entitled “Look at the birds of the air; consider the lily of the…
