Reviews
When God Is Gone,
Everything Is Holy
The Making of a Religious Naturalist
by chet raymo, reviewed by pavel cenkl
Sorin Books, 2008. $22.95, 160 pages.
IN HIS 2003 BOOK, The Path: A One-
Mile Walk Through the Universe, Chet
Raymo takes readers on his walk to work
while also taking us through an attentive
and often profound look at the natural
and cultural history of
the landscape through
which he had passed
nearly daily for four
decades. In his most
recent book, When God
Is Gone, Everything Is
Holy, Raymo turns his
prolific writer’s skill
once again to the
world’s most intimate
and intricate details.
The book traces a long
and nuanced dialogue
between science and religion and o=ers readers at the same time a
deeply academic perspective and a passionate meditation on
grace. Whether his exploration moves deftly
among written texts—religious, poetic, or
otherwise—or the perceived language of
phenomena, of things, Raymo’s approach is
to transcend the ambit inscribed by the
word in the world.
When God Is Gone pulls on interwoven
threads of a tapestry of literary touch-
stones from poetry, fiction, history, psychology, philosophy, and theology to help
draw together Raymo’s own ideas about
religion, nature, spirituality, and self. In
the book’s opening sentences, Raymo
lays the foundation
for the book’s literary
framework. He acquaints us with Myles
Connolly’s novella Mr.
Blue as a seminal text
in Raymo’s formative
youth as well as in
more recent reflective
years. His more critical
rereading of Blue’s life
in his later years
frames Raymo’s narrative of his own development from Catholicism to what he has
come to call a Catholic
agnosticism—a poten-
tial paradox of science, faith, and wonder that he explores over the course of
the book.
As we seek both wisdom and practical
approaches to resolving our environmental crisis, this small, densely packed book
sows the seeds for an ecological future
supported by the strength of faith-based
as well as scientific communities. Raymo
shares equal fascination for the intimate
miracles played out every second in our
own bodies on the cellular and genetic
level, the rich traditions of faith, and the
places where the two find ways to coexist.
I read in this book a hopeful meditation on how religious faith and scientific
insights can guide us together toward a
more attentive and mindful future. By the
simple yet profound act of just paying
attention to one another and to the world
around us, we can embrace the eternal
braiding of human with nonhuman, of
the sacred with the mundane, and of the
miraculous with the quotidian. There is
hope that we can learn to feel, as Raymo
writes, both a “love for the world as we
empirically find it, and a sense that everything is holy.”
Early in the book, as he rereads William
Carlos Williams’s well-known poem “The
Red Wheelbarrow,” Raymo limns the art of
seeing deeply and seeing well. “Attention,”
he asserts, “is the highest form of prayer”; it
is the spirituality of attention that Raymo
sees in Williams’s poem, and the simplicity
that guides his thinking about the relationship between the human and the nonhuman worlds. It is not always su;cient,
writes Raymo, to be aware of what we
know, but it is imperative to ask why and
how we have come to know what we do.
Pavel Cenkl is Dean of Academics at
Sterling College in Vermont. He is the author
of This Vast Book of Nature: Writing the
Landscape of New Hampshire’s White
Mountains, 1784–1911, and editor of the
forthcoming collection Nature and Culture
in the Northern Forest.
