“Beloved” | Reflection by Charles Lemert

To many this image will be familiar. It is what I call the Mill Pond on the Mill River below East Rock. Just after the waters fall from Whitney Lake they open into a false-pond before the foot bridge. I love this pond and its paths, as Henry Thoreau loved Walden. I walk by my pond most days. I am warmed when, as these days, the green is beginning to bud all about; or when birds come and go, sing and chirp. The place cloaks me with hope.

But what might it mean to say that one loves a natural setting? Harder still, is it possible to say that we are beloved by nature? It is one thing to hold another person beloved. But another to think of ourselves as beloved by nature and the earth. Yet if we look again at the creation myth in Genesis, we might be surprised. God, in turn made the waters, plants, and animal life and “God saw that it was good.” But on the sixth day, when he made woman and man, and gave all this to them, He does not expressly say that they were good. He is God. He knew.

We are good only to the extent that we love the natural world that God made for us. God so “beloved” us that he gave us a good and beautiful gift to enrich our days. Can we even hold other persons beloved if we do not accept God’s love given in this earth which is our only true home?