Spiritual Direction with Stephen Hatch

07/12/2024

HERE IS THE FIRST EPISODE OF OUR NEW PODCAST!

Today is an exciting day! My friend Will Warrick and I are releasing our first podcast episode. It's called "Nature As Beloved, Nature as Self" and our first episode is available today!

On this podcast, we explore the vast landscape of Wilderness Christian Mysticism—what it is, why it matters, and how it can help us lead more fulfilling lives.

This podcast is for nature lovers, people who consider themselves spiritual but not religious, modern mystics of all backgrounds, and all who are genuine seekers of truth, goodness, and beauty.

Whether on the road or trail this summer, at home or around town, we invite you to join us on this audio journey.

You can listen to "Nature As Beloved, Nature As Self" on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or YouTube. For more ways to listen and follow along, you can check out our Podbean page:

natureasbeloved.podbean.com

06/22/2024

Are you interested in meditation? If so, this may interest you. Our first meeting in June was delightful. Please RSVP if you plan to attend :)

05/17/2024

05/11/2024

Join Kim Grant as she speaks with Stephen Hatch; a contemplative teacher, thinker, photographer, and writer, as he shares his deep connection with nature and how photography can help us connect with the oneness of life.  He emphasises the imp...

04/25/2024

For those of you who have not yet seen "The Unruly Mystic: John Muir," I wholeheartedly recommend it. Filmmakers Michael M. Conti and Heather Boyle have done an amazing job assembling interviews, video footage of stunning natural places, and insight into how John Muir has influenced millions to appreciate the natural world. This film is unique insofar as it really addresses the spiritual experience of Nature from numerous perspectives. You'll get to hear snippets of interviews of people like Matthew Fox, Ranger Shelton Johnson, John Philip Newell, and yours truly. The new edition (which I saw for the first time last week) features added footage from a second interview with Shelton, as well as new material from Muir's birthplace in Dunbar, Scotland. As you know, I'm all about "depth," and this film features plenty of that!

04/05/2024

In my spiritual interaction with the Entrada Sandstone rock layers at Ghost Ranch during my regular solitary retreats, I experience a two-way mystical communion.

On the one hand, I find myself trying to grasp the primordial nature of the rock. In my imagination, I'm carried back to the Jurassic era when the rocks were formed, between 180 and 140 million years ago. I find myself in a vast dune desert that covered northern New Mexico, northern Arizona, southwest Colorado, and most of Utah.

I travel back in time to earth's origin, some 4.5 billions years ago, and then back further into the primordial dimension when the Great Beyond was just about to speak the silent love-word that would resonate within the core of all things. I find myself amazed that echoes of that era resonate within the Entrada Sandstone, without my being able ever to reach the infinitely distant time when the word was about to be spoken. This inability creates a longing within me that can never be satisfied.

At the same time, I experience a subjective Presence within the rock when the beauty of the white, yellow and orange layers grip me, seeking out the endless depths of my own inner being without ever being able to fathom them.

Thus, my unfulfilled longing and the endless desire of the Presence indwelling the rock form a seamless circle that allows me to rest in my longing. For my desire is a participation in a larger Desire that is never fulfilled. Two desires trading endlessly back and forth between the rock layers and myself!

(Ghost Ranch, NM, April, 2024)

04/04/2024

"I sometimes imagine that I AM my ancestors. That as I write I am speaking what my ancestors spoke or would speak through me . . . It’s not something of which I am intellectually aware. That’s not the best of it. It is something of which I’m instinctively aware, I think . . . I think sometimes that my voice is the reincarnation of a voice from my ancestral past. Not only when I write but when I lecture, and even when I speak on a one-to-one basis, I sometimes have that feeling, and I think, 'Yes, this voice of mine is proceeding from a great distance in the past'. . . When I have this awareness that I am speaking from an ancestral point back in time, I feel very peaceful. I have the feeling that I have entered into the flow of things."

N. Scott Momaday
Kiowa writer who grew up on the Jemez Pueblo

Signs of Spring today on Jemez Pueblo! The wildflowers are Milkvetch (purple) and Baby White Aster.

(Jemez Pueblo, NM, April 4, 2024)

04/03/2024

"The chance to find a pasque-flower is a right as inalienable as free speech."

Aldo Leopold

I was elated to find our first New Mexico Pasqueflowers of the spring today! They were growing next to lava boulders in the Rio Grande Canyon. When I checked the same spot five days ago, there was so sign of them.

Although Leopold is most well known for his "Sand County Almanac" (1949), detailing his experiences of the landscape of central Wisconsin, he spent several of the early years of his forestry career in Tres Piedras, New Mexico, just up the road from my home. Here is some information from Taos News:

"In the spring of 1912, Aldo Leopold, a 25-year-old forester from the Midwest, was named supervisor of the 1 million-acre Carson National Forest. Leopold had quickly ascended the ranks in the fledgling agency. He was also recently engaged to Estella Bergere, the daughter of a prominent Santa Fean, who had agreed to leave the comforts of the city to join him at his rocky outpost.

"Months earlier, Leopold had relocated to Tres Piedras from the former forest office in Antonito. The reason was obvious — the commute to Santa Fe was significantly shorter, giving him more opportunities to court his bride. Leopold’s short stint on the Carson and at Tres Piedras came long before he became famous as a land ethics and father of the wilderness movement.

"In 1912, the Forest Service approved $650 so Leopold could build a new supervisor’s quarters in Tres Piedras. He designed the cabin himself — a one-and-a-half-story bungalow set back against one of the village’s massive granite outcrops and facing east toward the Sangre de Cristo Range, which spanned the entire horizon.

"Today, more than 100 years later, the Leopold cabin still stands. It sits just behind the post office in Tres Piedras.

"Leopold was transferred to the Carson in May 1911. He left Tres Piedras in April 1913. He spent most of his time in the forest wrangling sheep herders and changing rangeland management in the hopes of undoing some of the damage caused by abusive grazing practices. The changes weren’t always popular. Leopold often wore a six-shooter while on duty in the woods.

(Picuris Trail near Pilar, NM, April 2, 2024, and Aldo and Estella's Tres Piedras home).

03/31/2024

burn away;
Laugh!
My ashes are alive!
I die a thousand times:
My ashes dance back-
A thousand new faces

Jelaluddin Rumi

(Pasqueflowers and Spring Beauties the spring after the High Park Fire, Poudre Canyon, CO, April, 2013)

03/31/2024

EASTER REFLECTION

A mystical interpretation of Holy Week understands that the Cross and the Resurrection occur during every moment of our lives. In the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus says: "Come into being as you pass away." And the poet Rainer Maria Rilke reminds us: "BE the crystal cup that rings as it shatters."

Of her time studying with shaman Joseph Rael, Mary Elizabeth Marlow says she learned that:

"Joseph practices NOT BEING. It is the place where God hides . . . When you watch a slide show, one slide is projected on the screen. Then it is removed and the screen goes blank for a moment, followed by another slide. There is form, no-form, and then form again. When we go to the cinema we are still seeing individual images, but now the images are flashed on the screen in a much quicker sequence. Our brain merges these images, so we experience the motion picture as one uninterrupted story.

"Quantum physicist Greg Braden says our everyday reality operates in a way similar to that of a movie. For example, when we watch a runner racing down a track, we perceive one continuous, uninterrupted movement. In reality, that is not what is happening. Our brain has merged together the brief tiny bursts of energy, or light, called quanta. Thus, what we consider to be 'reality' is not so real or solid after all. The runner, in actuality, is appearing and disappearing. So in truth, WE ARE NOT HERE, at least not in the way we think we are.

"In the emptiness, in those BETWEEN SPACES beyond form, beyond anything, is where we experience the source field from which all of our energies emerge. This is where God dwells. We can think about ourselves in the same way. For a miniscule fraction of a second we are formless, in the loving embrace of pure spirit. Just as quickly, we return to form and the material world. So in truth, we are appearing and disappearing, moving from form to the formless world, over and over again.

"I asked Joseph [Rael], 'Since we return to the Source again and again, why do we not progress more quickly? His answer was, 'Because we are so stuck.' Most of us have not yet learned to see the bursts of light as the runner goes down the track, since they are too rapid for the untrained eye. The same is true of one's own identity. When one can slow the mind down sufficiently, one sees the quanta. How extraordinary to be living at a point in time when what the mystics have always known is now being confirmed by science!"

May each of us learn to trust this process of continual death and resurrection moment by moment by moment . . .

(Bulbous Spring Parsley, Rio Pueblo Rim, near Llano Quemado, NM, March, 2024)

03/30/2024

“My suffering is in God, and my suffering is God. My suffering is God, and therefore is not ultimately mine. God assumed me totally. In Christ there was so great a union of the Word with flesh that he communicated his own properties to it, so that God may be said to suffer and humanity is the creator of heaven.”

Meister Eckhart
14th century Germany

“The ineffable union of the human nature and the divine, whereby God suffers and humanity descends from heaven with the divine, expresses the most excellent communication according to the exchange of properties which naturally belong to each nature of Christ.”

St. Maximus the Confessor
7th century Turkey

One of the most important contributions of Christian Mysticism to world spirituality is the profound insight that GOD SUFFERS. This means that when we find ourselves in the grip of suffering, we can begin to realize that because of the union and interpenetration of both human and divine natures in Christ, our suffering actually belongs to Another - to God. When we understand this great truth, we are thereby empowered in a fresh way to console the indwelling, suffering God and to begin offering our own creative solutions - rooted in Christ's other nature, his divinity - to the vulnerable side of God.

In the book "Care for Creation: A Franciscan Spirituality of the Earth," there is a chapter entitled “Contemplating Our Crucified Earth.” In it, Franciscan theologian Ilia Delio and several others remind us that “Our Mother Earth cries out in labor pains, longing for her fulfillment in God.” St. Paul says: “We know that the whole creation has been groaning in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time.” It is “waiting in eager expectation for the sons of God to be revealed” (Rom. 8:22).

Reframing the Earth's suffering as a labor pain, connecting this suffering to that of the crucified Christ, and then allowing these sufferings to be absorbed into God can help us cease identifying so strongly with our own grief and anger, thus enabling us to move forward in consoling both God and the Earth and to provide creative solutions in the next stage of cosmic evolution.

(Bulto carving of Christ by Michael Salazar of Taos, New Mexico. Purchased at Santos Y Mas in Arroyo Seco, NM)

03/30/2024

A Reflection for Holy Saturday

Contemplative theologian Cynthia Bourgeault speaks of the Christian tradition of "The Harrowing of Hell" that took place between Good Friday and Easter Sunday. According to this tradition, Jesus visited the realm of intense suffering - interpreted variously as "hell," "hades," "the place of the dead," "the underworld," or "limbo" - in order to release the souls present there. Even if you don't believe such a realm exists in a literal sense, the term "hell" represents the state of alienation and hopelessness that all of us experience from time to time.

Accordingly, in her book, "The Wisdom Jesus," Bourgeault says: “In the Harrowing of Hell, Jesus was JUST SITTING THERE - surrounded by the darkest, deepest, most alienated, most constricted state of pained consciousness: sitting, if we can imagine it, among all those faces of the collective false self, sitting there in the midst of all this blackness, not judging, not fixing; just letting it BE in love. And in so doing, he was allowing love to go deeper, pressing all the way to the innermost ground out of which the opposites arise and holding THAT to the light.

"A quiet, harmonizing love was infiltrating even the deepest place of darkness and blackness, in a way that didn't override them or cancel them, but gently reconnected them to the whole, holding all things in love's embrace and in such a way that released them from the grip of duality. In that ultimate letting be, he transformed them into sacred vessels of divine love. This is the mystical meaning of the great Pauline statement (in Colossians 1:17) 'In him all things hold together.' "

May each of us embody this quiet and humble ministry of Christ in our unique way - ourselves becoming the place where all things melt into their Source - and so contribute to the healing of the cosmos.

Photo: Pasqueflowers, Greyrock and the High Park Burn, Poudre Canyon, CO

03/30/2024

Today we made the pilgrimage to Sanctuario de Chimayo with thousands of other pilgrims. We walked 6 miles to and from the church, but many pilgrims walked from as far away as Santa Fe.

Highlights:

- Reveling in the stunning badland-and mountain scenery.
- Doing my breath-prayer all along the route.
- Watching young Native dancers and drummers.
- Resting back into the suffering of God, merging the world’s suffering with God’s.
-Seeing so many families and young people doing the walk
- Hearing Spanish all day long.
-Appreciating the wonderful people in a pickup handing out water, bananas and oranges to pilgrims.

(March 29, 2024)

03/26/2024

Yesterday, someone recently asked me to list the ten most influential books I've encountered over a lifetime of reading and study, and to say a bit about the reasons why they have influenced me so deeply. Here they are:

1. "John of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir.” It is no secret to all of you that Muir's exuberant relationship with Nature has affected me greatly since childhood. This book gets at the heart of his spiritual vision. My book, "The Contemplative John Muir" (2012) was inspired in part by this volume. Like “John of the Mountains,” my book contains many previously unpublished passages from The John Muir Papers.

2. "Inheriting the Holy Mountain: Religion and the Rise of American Environmentalism,” by Mark Stoll. This book helped me make the connection more explicit between my own Christian spiritual tradition and my interest in wilderness. It reveals the fact that it was the Puritans and other Calvinists who gave America its wildland preservation philosophy.

3. "Secrets from the Center of the World," by Joy Harjo (from the Muskogee tribe) and Stephen Strom. This book represents my passion for Native American philosophy. Harjo's poetry brings me directly into a timeless indigenous state of mind, where past, present and future all interpenetrate. The Southwest photos contained in this book support that vision. I found this book at Zion National Park.

4. "The New Monasticism: An Interspiritual Manifesto for Contemplative Living," by Adam Bucko and Rory McEntee. This book details the principles underlying a healthy interspirituality, the term given to a religious path that involves the combination of elements from many different traditions into a single spiritual path. Many Spiritual But Not Religious seekers or "Nones" will appreciate this book.

5. "Discovering the Enneagram," by Richard Rohr. For the past 35 years, the Enneagram has transformed my understanding of myself and others, and has helped me get in touch with the core ways that each type pays attention to life. This was one of the first books I read on the Enneagram.

6. "Iron John," by Robert Bly. I was intensely involved in the Mythopoetic Men's Movement of the late '80s and early '90s, when men - en masse - sought to get more deeply in touch with their inner lives and to heal their often unspoken suffering. This book was one of the major instigators of that movement. It is my conviction that we desperately need a new Men's Renewal in our time.

7. "Walden," by Henry David Thoreau. This classic book initiated me into a lifestyle of simplicity and connection to Nature. In junior high, I had lots of Sierra Club, Wilderness Society and Audubon calendars that included Thoreau quotes. It was then that I fell in love with his vision.

8. "Sandstone Seduction," by Katie Lee. This book expresses what Terry Tempest Williams would call "an erotics of place" whereby one engages in a vibrant love affair with the land, as a deeper aspect of human sexuality. This book really helped me be more unafraid to develop and write about that love affair.

9. "The Golden Epistle," by William of St. Thierry. This book by a 12th century Cistercian monk details a beautiful Trinitarian Mysticism, where we find ourselves dwelling right in the middle Place (the "Holy Spirit") in the living “Kiss” or Embrace or Union between "Father" and "Son” (or “Formlessness” and “Form,” if you prefer.) This book represents my longtime interest in and love of Christian Mysticism, which is my specialty at Naropa University.

10. "Expanse of God, Caress of Sophia: An Introduction to Wilderness Christian Mysticism" (2023) by Stephen Hatch. I include this book because my work on it helped crystallize more than three decades of work on my spiritual vision. For me this book is alive: IT wrote me more than I wrote it. It is long (500 pages), and could best be read in short sections. In the second section, it details contemplative meditation practices that I've developed over the years.

03/24/2024

In his book, "Treasure in the Wilderness: Desert Spirituality for Uncertain Times," Andrew Mayes says that in the desert, "Jesus learns what was to become the secret of his ministry: 'Very truly, I tell you, the Son can do nothing on his own but only what he sees his Father doing. The Father loves the Son and shows him all that he himself is doing' (John 5:19-20).

Preparing the way for this form of perception, Mayes reminds us that "John the Baptist appeared, and a voice echoed among the rocks and sand: 'Turn back to God!' The desert becomes the place of salvation, the place of transformation through John's call to metanoia, repentance, a total re-orientation of human lives towards God."

"The Greek word meta means 'beyond' or 'big,' while noia means 'mind' - so the invitation is to go beyond our existing mindset, to go into the big mind, to allow ourselves, in the desert, to see things differently."

For Jesus, this Big Mind meant allowing his Father to do the seeing and working. This reminds me of the Apostle Paul's statement about "knowing God, or rather being known by God" (Galatians 4:9). It is not a set of doctrines that is the point of the Christian mystical path. Instead, it means to change our mode of perception. Like Meister Eckhart, our metanoia is to realize that "the eye through which I see God is the same eye through which God sees me."

I pray that we may increasingly transcend our individual and collective egotism and see the world through the Creator's eyes: expansively, unitively and without boundaries.

(White Sands National Park, NM, March 20, 2024)

03/23/2024

"We are the indifferent Cosmos not only mirroring and pondering itself, but also feeling itself." The Cosmos may seem indifferent, and yet - how strange! - though the human heart it loves and delights in the 10,000 things of this world!

David Hinton
"Wild Earth, Wild Mind"

(Arizona Poppies below San Augustin Pass near Las Cruces, NM, March 22, 2024)

03/23/2024

“We humans must revere the earth, for it is our well-being. If we give our belief to the earth, it will believe in us. There is no better blessing than to be believed in.

“There are those who believe that the earth is dead. They are deceived. The earth is alive, and it is possessed of spirit. If we speak to it, if we pray, it will thrive.

“Daw-Kee, Great Mystery, let me not be ashamed before the earth. For the earth does not want shame. It wants love.”

N. Scott Momaday
Kiowa writer

Today we had a wonderful hike in the Organ Mountains above our campsite at Aguirre Springs.

(Organ Mountains - Desert Peaks National Monument, near Las Cruces, NM, March 22, 2024)