Some nights here in Spartanburg, when the humidity settles like a gentle hand on the earth and the sky finally exhales after a hot Carolina day, I go outside to stand beneath the walnut tree. There’s a particular quiet that isn’t silence at all. It hums. It holds. It feels charged, like something is speaking in a language older than breath.
That stillness always reminds me: we don’t live in a dead universe.
Most of the visible universe, ninety-nine percent, isn’t solid matter at all. It is plasma. A luminous, relational sea of charged particles. Currents and fields. Filaments stretching between galaxies. A cosmos not built from bricks, but from glowing threads of electricity and flow.
In school, we learn, and I taught the states of matter like a checklist—solid, liquid, gas, and plasma as a throwaway footnote. But plasma is not a footnote. It is the rule, and our familiar solids are the exception. The universe is radiant, alive with movement, constantly exchanging information and energy.
Physics tells us that plasma behaves in collective ways, self-organizing, dynamic, responsive to disturbances, and creative in its patterns. Process thinkers like Whitehead remind us that reality itself is relational becoming. Thomas Berry whispers, “The universe is a communion of subjects, not a collection of objects.” And my own practice of watching the seasons through a single tree, learning to listen instead of command, keeps confirming it in the soil of experience.
If consciousness is not a switch flipped by neurons but a field that emerges from relationship, then plasma invites us into a bigger imagination of mind. Not disembodied mysticism. Not new-age glitter. But a grounded recognition that life and awareness might be woven into the fabric of becoming itself.
A tree’s communication with fungi under soil. A river responding to drought. Human emotion is entangled with weather and place. Stars singing in plasma arcs across galactic filaments.
This doesn’t diminish our humanity. It situates it.
We are not the lonely minds in a mute universe. We are participants in a luminous commons.
Maybe the first step toward ecological repair is remembering we never lived in a mechanical world to begin with. We live in a vibrant, shimmering, relational cosmos. A universe charged with possibility, longing, and attention.
And maybe consciousness is less a private possession and more a shared pulse in the field — like wind through pine needles, like sap rising, like starlight in summer air.
I stand beneath this walnut tree and remember: I am not separate. I am charge. I am relation. I am part of a glowing, praying universe that has been speaking long before humans arrived to give it names.
This paper develops the concept of Integral Plasma Ecology as a framework that bridges physics, cosmology, and ecological theology through a process-relational lens. Drawing from Alfred North Whitehead’s cosmology, Teilhard de Chardin’s evolutionary mysticism, and Thomas Berry’s integral ecology, I propose that plasma, the most abundant and least understood state of matter in the cosmos, can serve as a metaphysical and theological metaphor for participatory consciousness and relational ecology. My background in physics education informs this exploration, as I integrate scientific understandings of plasma’s dynamics with phenomenological and theological insights from Merleau-Ponty, Edith Stein, and Leonardo Boff. The result is a vision of reality as a living field of plasma-like relationality, charged with energy, consciousness, and divine creativity.
Introduction: From Physics to Ecology
Teaching AP Physics for more than a decade invited me to teach the universe’s foundational structures of motion, fields, and forces. I taught students how energy moves through systems, how charge generates fields, and how the visible world depends on invisible relations. Yet it was through my doctoral work in ecology and religion that these physical insights deepened into theological questions. What if these energetic relationships are not merely physical but also metaphysical? What if the cosmos itself is an ecological process of becoming, an ever-living plasma of divine relation?
As Whitehead writes, “the energetic activity considered in physics is the emotional intensity entertained in life” (Whitehead 1978, 113). This simple but profound statement reframes matter not as inert but as alive with feeling. Physics thus becomes a spiritual ecology and a study of how creativity courses through the veins of the universe.
In this paper, I build on that insight, proposing that plasma, the ionized, dynamic, relational state of matter, embodies the ontological structure of reality described by process philosophy and integral ecology. Plasma is the medium of creation: relational, dynamic, self-organizing, and luminous. It is the cosmos’ own ecology.
Plasma: The Fourth State of Matter as First Principle
Plasma constitutes over 99% of the visible universe (Peratt 1992, 4). From stars to nebulae, from lightning to auroras, plasma bridges energy and matter, revealing that the cosmos is not built of solid bodies but of dynamic, interpenetrating fields. In a plasma, electrons and ions exist in constant tension as an interplay of attraction and repulsion, order and chaos.
As a physics teacher, I explained plasma to students as “a soup of charged particles,” but even that language undersells its mystery. Plasma self-organizes into filaments and double layers, forming intricate networks that resemble neural or ecological systems. This self-organization without central control challenges the Newtonian image of matter as passive substance. It invites metaphysical reflection: perhaps plasma is a cosmological icon of relational being and a physical analogue for what theologians call the divine pleroma, or fullness of life.
Teilhard de Chardin’s The Phenomenon of Man anticipated this perspective when he described matter as “spirit-in-evolution,” energized from within by a divine impetus (Teilhard 1959, 56). Plasma, as the living medium of the universe, may represent that very process as matter suffused by its own luminous consciousness.
Process and Participation: Whitehead, Cobb, and Berry
In Whitehead’s process cosmology, the universe is composed not of things but of events or occasions of experience that prehend one another in an ongoing flow of creativity (Whitehead 1978). Energy is not something added to matter but the form of its feeling. Plasma, then, is not simply physical energy but a processual manifestation of relational creativity with the universe becoming itself through fields of feeling or being or perception.
John Cobb, a key interpreter of Whitehead, extends this insight into ecological theology, arguing that “God and the world are relationally co-creative; the world participates in God’s creative advance” (Cobb 1985, 87). This participation, like plasma dynamics, is nonlinear, chaotic, and interdependent. There is no static center; instead, reality unfolds through relational patterns of mutual influence.
Thomas Berry’s call for an “integral ecology” resonates deeply here. In The Great Work, Berry envisions the universe as a single, living communion of subjects rather than a collection of objects (Berry 1999, 16). The plasma universe offers a tangible vision of that communion: everything is charged, in motion, and co-creating. Energy and consciousness are not separate categories but expressions of the same cosmic pulse.
Phenomenology and the Plasma of Perception
Turning from cosmology to phenomenology, Merleau-Ponty and Edith Stein offer complementary perspectives on relational being. For Merleau-Ponty, perception is “an intertwining, a flesh of the world” (Merleau-Ponty 1968, 147). This “flesh” is not simply physical matter but a relational medium, much like plasma, that binds perceiver and perceived in a dynamic exchange.
Stein, in On the Problem of Empathy, describes consciousness as fundamentally participatory: to know another is to “live into” them, to resonate with their inner life (Stein 1989, 11). In plasma terms, empathy is the transfer of charge across a relational field. Consciousness is an electro-phenomenological event, where selves co-arise through interaction.
This phenomenological perspective reframes plasma as existential metaphor. The cosmos itself perceives, or feels, through its fields. Every charged particle participates in the world’s ongoing self-awareness. Thus, Integral Plasma Ecology posits that ecological consciousness is not uniquely human but cosmic, woven into the plasma fabric of being.
Integral Theory and the Ecology of Energy
The term “integral” situates this framework within the lineage of integral thinkers such as Ken Wilber, Sri Aurobindo, and Jean Gebser, who each envisioned reality as a multidimensional, evolving whole. In Wilber’s AQAL model (all quadrants, all levels), energy and consciousness co-evolve across developmental lines (Wilber 2000, 44). Plasma, as both physical and metaphysical energy, bridges those quadrants—interior and exterior, individual and collective.
In Integral Plasma Ecology, plasma functions as an integrative metaphor and ontological medium. It unites:
Physical energy (electromagnetic fields, thermodynamics)
Biological life (ecological flows and feedbacks)
Spiritual consciousness (divine creativity and relational presence)
This integration reflects Teilhard’s noosphere where the emergence of collective consciousness through the energetic evolution of matter. Humanity’s ecological crises, then, are not merely environmental but energetic dissonances within the plasma field of creation. Our technologies, economies, and even theologies have disrupted the cosmic charge balance.
Toward an Integral Plasma Ecology
Building on these traditions, I define Integral Plasma Ecology as:
“A participatory framework for understanding energy, consciousness, and ecology as manifestations of a single, relational plasma of creativity.”
Its key premises are:
Ontological Continuity: Matter, life, and mind are phases of the same energetic continuum.
Relational Primacy: Reality is constituted by relations, not substances.
Participatory Consciousness: Perception and energy exchange are coextensive phenomena.
Integral Practice: Healing the ecological crisis requires rebalancing our energetic and spiritual relations with the cosmos.
From the ionosphere to the biosphere, plasma organizes itself through feedback loops that mirror ecological networks. Lightning, solar flares, and auroras become more than meteorological curiosities, and they are expressions of what could be considered planetary consciousness.
In this sense, the Earth’s magnetosphere is a form of cosmic empathy, or a membrane that translates solar energy into life-giving patterns. The planet participates in the cosmic plasma dance, filtering chaos into order, radiation into rhythm.
Theological Implications: The Cross and the Charge
For me, the cross serves as a central symbol for this plasma cosmology. In my ongoing work on The Ecology of the Cross, I have proposed that the cross represents not only human suffering but the interpenetration of divine and cosmic energies. In a plasma field, positive and negative charges continually intersect, annihilate, and generate light. Likewise, the cross signifies the intersection of divine transcendence and immanent materiality and creation’s own plasma arc.
As Whitehead puts it, “God is the poet of the world, with tender patience leading it by his vision of truth, beauty, and goodness” (Whitehead 1978, 346). The divine presence, like an electromagnetic field, permeates creation, luring it toward harmony. Yet, as plasma reminds us, equilibrium arises not from stasis but from dynamic tension. The divine is not separate from chaos but works through it.
In this view, Christ’s crucifixion becomes a cosmic event: the discharge of divine energy into the plasma of existence, reconciling opposites and igniting the potential for renewal. Integral Plasma Ecology thus extends Christology into a cosmotheandric ecology when and where God, cosmos, and humanity participate in one charged field of becoming (Panikkar 1993, 58).
Ecological Ethics in a Plasma Universe
If the cosmos is a plasma ecology, then ethics must shift from dominion to participation. Every act, every thought, emission, or prayer, sends ripples through the field. Leonardo Boff’s Cry of the Earth, Cry of the Poor emphasizes that ecological healing depends on recovering our “mystical sense of communion with the universe” (Boff 1997, 67). Plasma theology radicalizes that claim: communion is not symbolic but ontological.
To pollute a river is to alter the energetic balance of the planet; to pray beside it is to restore resonance. Our responsibility is not to manage nature as resource but to resonate with it as fellow participant. This echoes Berry’s notion of the “Great Work” and the transformation of human presence from disruption to participation (Berry 1999, 105).
In educational terms, teaching physics or ecology becomes a spiritual practice. Students learn not only equations but energetic empathy with an awareness that to study energy is to encounter the divine flow itself.
Integrating Pedagogy: Teaching the Plasma Universe
In the classroom, I once drew magnetic field lines on the board, showing how charges move in loops rather than straight lines. Now I see that lesson differently. Those loops are metaphors for relational return to the continual circulation of divine energy through matter and consciousness.
An integral pedagogy of plasma would invite students to see science and spirituality not as opposites but as complementary ways of tracing those loops. Using laboratory experiments, like plasma globes or Van de Graaff generators, can become invitations to wonder at the living electricity of creation.
As David Bohm argued, the universe is a “holomovement,” a continuous enfolding and unfolding of energy and meaning (Bohm 1980, 48). Teaching within that paradigm transforms education into ecological initiation: a way of learning to dwell consciously in the plasma field of being.
Conclusion: The Luminous Communion
Integral Plasma Ecology reimagines reality as a luminous communion of charged relations. It bridges physics and theology, matter and mind, offering a cosmological language for our age of ecological crisis. It invites us to live as participants in the plasma field and to sense the divine energy pulsing through trees, storms, and starlight.
As Berry wrote, “The universe is not a collection of objects, but a communion of subjects” (Berry 1999, 16). In plasma, that communion shines visibly as the very light of the world is the glow of relation.
To dwell in that light is our calling, our work, and our joy.
References
Berry, Thomas. The Great Work: Our Way into the Future. New York: Bell Tower, 1999.
Boff, Leonardo. Cry of the Earth, Cry of the Poor. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1997.
Bohm, David. Wholeness and the Implicate Order. London: Routledge, 1980.
Cobb, John B. Process Theology as Political Theology. Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1985.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Visible and the Invisible. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968.
Panikkar, Raimon. The Cosmotheandric Experience: Emerging Religious Consciousness. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1993.
Peratt, Anthony L. Physics of the Plasma Universe. New York: Springer, 1992.
Stein, Edith. On the Problem of Empathy. Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 1989.
Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre. The Phenomenon of Man. New York: Harper & Row, 1959.
Whitehead, Alfred North. Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology. New York: Free Press, 1978.
Wilber, Ken. A Theory of Everything: An Integral Vision for Business, Politics, Science, and Spirituality. Boston: Shambhala, 2000.
Sheldrake is one of my favorite thinkers and a huge inspiration for my own work. Great lecture here from my process theology meets medieval Christian theology point of view… well worth your time:
In this talk, Rupert Sheldrake explores panentheism—the idea that the divine is not separate from the world but present throughout it, while also transcending it. With the grip of mechanistic materialism loosening, Rupert invites us to reconsider how we see nature, mind, and spirit. Tracing a broad arc from ancient philosophies and Christian mysticism to AI-generated worldviews, panpsychism, and psychedelics, he reflects on how the sacred presence in nature—-long affirmed by spiritual traditions-—is re-emerging through science, experience, and renewed practices of attention.
This talk was recorded at St James Church, Piccadilly, a longstanding hub for open spiritual inquiry and progressive theology in the heart of London.
Process philosophy offers an alternative proposal that avoids the extremes of both reductive materialism and transcendent idealism. Rather than treating forms as autonomous agents, it understands them as potentiae—non-historical possibilities with patterned relations among themselves and to actuality generally. These possibilities do not act. They ingress. Agency belongs to actual occasions of experience, the events of concrescence in which the physical inheritance of the past meets the lure of unrealized potential. Forms become effective only as they are selected and transformed within the creative advance of living occasions.
Trees are older than us (though not as old as you might think), longer-lived than empires, and deeply woven into the stories we tell about wisdom and spirit. They are teachers of patience and endurance, bearing witness to countless centuries of human seeking. Our ancient and modern columns of brick, stone, marble, or concrete still pale in comparison to our ancient tree kin.
Across traditions, trees have anchored human imagination. They serve as symbols of wisdom, life, and connection. However, more than symbols, they are living presences, mediators of the sacred. From Genesis to the Bodhi Tree, from Yggdrasil to the cottonwood of the Lakota Sun Dance, trees appear where human beings grapple with the mysteries of being alive.
The philosopher Owen Barfield once suggested that human consciousness itself has a history, that the way we experience the world evolves over time. He pointed to the so-called Axial Age, when religious and philosophical traditions in Israel, Greece, India, and China reimagined humanity’s relationship to the cosmos. Trees appear in those traditions as if marking the shift: not just as backdrops, but as active participants in our emerging sense of meaning. They carry forward the memory of the older ways of knowing, when spirit and matter were inseparable, and they gesture toward futures in which we might relearn that intimacy.
To pay attention to the trees is to pay attention to our own evolving consciousness. It is also to listen to what Donna Haraway calls “tentacular thinking,” the recognition that all beings are entangled in webs of relation, that meaning itself stretches across roots and fungi and soil and sky. Trees remind us that life is not linear but branching, not heroic but networked. They embody what Ursula Le Guin called the “carrier bag” story of humanity: not a single plot driven by conquest, but a gathering of seeds, fruits, and stories carried in community.
Tradition
Wisdom
Life
Spiritual Connection
Hebrew Bible / Judaism
Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil (Genesis); Etz Chaim (“Tree of Life”) as Torah/Wisdom (Proverbs 3:18)
Tree of Life in Eden and eschatology (Revived in apocalyptic visions)
Olive tree as Israel’s covenantal identity; sacred groves as contested spaces
Christianity
Cross as Tree of Life (Acts 5:30; 1 Peter 2:24); Hildegard’s viriditas (greening wisdom)
Tree of Life in Revelation (22:2) offers healing to nations
The Cross links heaven and earth; saints/monks often dwell in tree imagery of rootedness
Islam
Sidrat al-Muntaha (Lote Tree) marks the limit of knowledge (Qur’an 53)
Tree of Immortality in Eden (Q 2:35); olive tree as “blessed tree” (Q 24:35)
Trees as signs of God’s creation; paradise described as filled with shade-giving trees
Hinduism
Ashvattha (cosmic fig tree) in Bhagavad Gita represents eternal samsara
Banyan, neem, tulsi as living presences of the divine
Sacred groves; Bodhi tree as meditation site; cosmic tree with roots in heaven, branches on earth
Buddhism
Bodhi Tree: site of enlightenment, source of awakened wisdom
Trees as natural meditation sites; Bodhi tree as axis between ignorance and awakening
Indigenous Traditions (Americas, Africa, Celtic)
Oaks and yews in Celtic Druidic tradition as sources of sacred knowledge
Trees like baobab as “roots of life”; cottonwood in Lakota Sun Dance
World Tree as axis mundi (linking underworld, earth, heavens); trees as homes of ancestors/spirits
Norse Mythology
Yggdrasil’s roots drink from the Well of Mimir (wisdom)
Yggdrasil sustains nine realms of existence
Yggdrasil as cosmic axis, linking worlds; ravens, serpents, and gods interact with it
Chinese Traditions
Fusang tree marks sun’s rising, cosmic order
Peach tree of immortality (fruit of eternal life)
Sacred peach tree of Queen Mother of the West links heaven’s gifts with human fate
The Tree of Life in the Ancient Near East
The Hebrew Bible begins with a garden, and at its heart, two trees: the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil and the Tree of Life (Gen. 2:9). To eat of the first was to awaken to wisdom — to the awareness of moral boundaries and human limitation. The story is often told as a fall, but it can also be read as the story of consciousness coming into its own, with trees as the threshold between innocence and maturity.
Proverbs later describes wisdom herself as “a tree of life to those who lay hold of her” (Prov. 3:18). Here the metaphor is clear: to live wisely is to be rooted, nourished, fruitful. In Jewish tradition, the Torah itself becomes the Etz Chaim, the Tree of Life, literally embodied in the wooden rollers of the scrolls used in worship.
But trees could also lead astray. The prophets railed against “sacred groves” where Canaanite deities were honored (Deut. 16:21). Yet, even this reveals the deep human instinct to find the divine among trees. And the symbol endures: the Book of Revelation imagines the Tree of Life restored in the New Jerusalem, its leaves “for the healing of the nations” (Rev. 22:2).
Christianity: The Cross as Tree
Christianity radicalizes the symbol by naming the cross itself a tree. The Apostle Peter writes that Christ “bore our sins in his body on the tree” (1 Pet. 2:24). A Roman instrument of execution becomes the world tree of redemption. The symmetry was irresistible to early theologians: where Adam and Eve grasped at fruit, Christ is lifted up on the wood, reversing the fall.
Medieval mystics expanded this imagery. Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179) described divine life as viriditas, “the greening power,” pulsing through creation. In her visions, the universe itself was a tree, verdant with God’s wisdom. Monks, too, saw trees as ascetic companions: silent, patient, enduring through storms.
For Christians, then, the tree is paradox. It bears death and life, judgment and mercy, sorrow and redemption. Like Yggdrasil, gnawed by serpents but still sustaining the worlds, the cross stands at the center of human story… fragile yet cosmic.
Islam: The Blessed Tree
In the Qur’an, trees shape both warning and blessing. Adam and Eve are commanded not to eat from the Tree of Immortality (Q 2:35). Yet another tree, the Lote Tree of the Utmost Boundary (Sidrat al-Muntaha), appears in the Prophet Muhammad’s night journey. It marks the furthest boundary of created knowledge: beyond it lies only God (Q 53:14–16).
The olive tree carries special significance. The famous Light Verse declares: “God is the Light of the heavens and the earth… lit from a blessed olive tree, neither of the east nor of the west” (Q 24:35). Here, tree and light merge: the olive, ancient source of fuel, becomes metaphor for divine illumination.
Paradise itself is pictured as a garden of abundant, shade-giving trees — a vision profoundly embodied for people whose daily lives knew desert heat. The tree is not abstract; it is rest, sustenance, and divine nearness.
Hinduism: The Cosmic Ashvattha
In the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna describes the universe as a cosmic fig tree, the Ashvattha: “With roots above and branches below, whose leaves are the Vedas; he who knows this tree is the knower of the Veda” (Gita 15:1). Unlike earthly trees, this one grows downward, its nourishment flowing from the eternal into the temporal. To attain liberation, one must cut it down with the “axe of detachment” and seek the source beyond appearances.
But trees are not only metaphors. Living trees are venerated: the banyan, with its aerial roots; the neem, with healing powers; the tulsi plant, tended in courtyards as a goddess in her own right. Sacred groves still shelter temples, holding ecological as well as spiritual memory.
The cosmic tree gathers together time, scripture, and existence. Like Barfield’s insight into symbolic consciousness, it points to a way of seeing in which reality itself is read as text, and trees as living letters of the divine alphabet.
Buddhism: Under the Bodhi Tree
Perhaps no tree is more famous than the Bodhi Tree under which Siddhartha Gautama attained enlightenment. Sitting through the night, he confronted desire, fear, and illusion until he awoke into Buddhahood. Ever since, the Bodhi tree has stood as the site of awakening: wisdom that arises not from conquest but from stillness, from simply being present beneath a tree.
Buddhism also speaks of the Kalpavriksha, the wish-fulfilling tree, symbolizing abundance. Yet the Bodhi dominates the tradition’s imagination, embodying the dharma itself: impermanence in its falling leaves, interdependence in its roots, patient endurance in its trunk.
Like Le Guin’s “carrier bag” theory of narrative, the Bodhi tree is not a hero’s monument but a gathering site. Pilgrims circle it, meditate beneath it, collect its fallen leaves. It is not conquered; it shelters. It contains, carries, holds the story of awakening.
Indigenous Traditions: The World Tree
In Native American cosmologies, the World Tree or Sacred Tree connects earth, underworld, and sky. For the Lakota, the cottonwood chosen for the Sun Dance becomes the axis around which the world is renewed. Dancers tether themselves to it in prayer, embodying the life-giving bond between human and cosmos.
In Africa, great trees such as the baobab and iroko are revered as ancestors themselves, places of gathering, storytelling, and ritual. The tree is not a metaphor for community; it is the community’s center.
Celtic Druids likewise revered oaks and yews, holding ceremonies in groves. Mistletoe growing on oaks was especially sacred, believed to embody divine vitality. These groves were what Haraway might call “tentacular nodes,” entangled sites of relation where human, animal, plant, and divine life braided together.
Norse Mythology: Yggdrasil
Norse mythology centers its cosmos upon Yggdrasil, the great ash tree. Its branches span the heavens; its roots drink from wells of wisdom and fate. Odin, in search of knowledge, sacrifices his eye at the Well of Mimir. Later, he hangs himself upon Yggdrasil for nine nights to gain the runes. Wisdom here is costly, rooted in suffering and sacrifice.
But Yggdrasil is under threat. Serpents gnaw at its roots, Ragnarok looms, yet the tree sustains all realms. It is fragile and resilient at once, much like our own ecological situation.
Chinese Traditions: Trees of Immortality
In Chinese myth, the fusang tree in the east holds the rising sun, anchoring cosmic order. The peach tree of immortality, tended by the Queen Mother of the West, bears fruit every 3,000 years, granting eternal life. Pines, peaches, and cypresses all became emblems of endurance, long life, and the Dao’s flowing balance.
Here again, trees bridge the human and cosmic, marking time’s rhythm and pointing to the way of harmony.
Wisdom, Life, Connection
Stepping back across cultures, we see three recurring themes:
Wisdom: Trees stand at thresholds of knowledge — Eden’s fruit, Yggdrasil’s well, the Bodhi’s silence, the Sidrat al-Muntaha’s boundary.
Life: Trees embody vitality — food, healing, shade, immortality. Their seasonal cycles mirror death and rebirth.
Connection: Trees serve as axis mundi, mediators of heaven and earth, ancestors and descendants, divine and human.
But with Haraway and Le Guin in mind, we can say more. Trees are not just vertical axes; they are networks. They are “carrier bags” of biodiversity, gathering species in their canopies and roots. They are “tentacular,” stretching mycorrhizal threads through soil, binding together whole communities.
If earlier ages saw the tree primarily as a ladder to the divine, perhaps our age can see tree as a web, and recognize in that web our own entanglement with the more-than-human world.
Religious traditions often use trees to point beyond themselves, such as metaphors for wisdom, life, and connection. But metaphysics reminds us that this pointing is not merely symbolic; it reveals something of reality’s very structure.
For Alfred North Whitehead, reality is not made of inert stuff but of events, relationships, and becoming. A tree is not simply a “thing” but a nexus of processes: roots drawing up water, leaves breathing light, fungi threading connections underground. The tree discloses the metaphysical truth that being is relational, that life is constituted by giving and receiving.
Edith Stein’s On the Problem of Empathy makes a similar point from a phenomenological angle: to encounter a tree is to recognize it as more than an object, but as a living subject with its own interiority, its own trajectory of growth and flourishing. The “tree of life” is not a metaphor we impose; it is a reality we meet.
This is where Owen Barfield’s insight comes in: the symbolic power of trees is not arbitrary but reflects the way human consciousness evolves in dialogue with the living world. We do not invent the tree-as-symbol; rather, the tree discloses meanings that consciousness gradually awakens to.
Conclusion: Listening Again
Religions around the world remind us that trees are more than scenery. They are wisdom keepers, givers of life, and cosmic connectors. They hold our evolving consciousness: from mythic imagination to axial philosophy, from medieval mysticism to today’s ecological science.
In a time of deforestation and climate upheaval, the old teachers still stand. They whisper lessons of rootedness, interconnection, and renewal. Perhaps the most spiritual act we can take is also the most practical: to plant, to tend, to listen.
The Ecology of the Cross: Cruciform Trees
If trees are life-givers, they are also sites of suffering. The cross itself was once a tree that was chosen, chopped down, shaped into an instrument of execution that was reused countless times in the Judean countryside of what we modern people of the inherited West would call the first century anno domini or Common Era. And yet in Christian imagination, it became the cosmic Tree of Life. This paradox lies at the heart of what I have been calling the Ecology of the Cross.
In ecological terms, forests today stand as cruciform realities: logged, burned, cut down, yet also central to the healing of the planet. The crucified tree is not only Christ’s cross but also the Amazon rainforest under chainsaw, the black walnut in my backyard enduring storms, the pines of South Carolina clear-cut for development, or the oak trees that are carefully manicured for aesthetic purposes in countless pieces of “property” surrounding churches here in what we now call the Southeast of the United States.
The Ecology of the Cross invites us to see cruciformity not only in human suffering but in the more-than-human world. Trees bear the wounds of our extractive systems, yet they also continue to gift us life: oxygen, shelter, shade, renewal. In this sense, the cross is ecological: a revelation of life’s pattern as death-and-renewal, as sacrifice-and-gift.
Here the metaphysical vision and the theological converge. To stand before a tree is to be confronted with both beauty and fragility, both gift and wound. It is to be drawn into what William Desmond might call the metaxological, the between, where mystery breathes through being.
So when religions speak of trees, whether as wisdom, life, or cosmic connectors, they are not only projecting human stories onto nature. They are intuiting something real about the metaphysical and theological shape of existence.
And in an age of ecological crisis, these intuitions call us back. To see a tree as a teacher is to see the world as sacramental, alive with wisdom and suffering, calling for care. To embrace the Ecology of the Cross is to recognize that redemption is not apart from creation, but through it… through roots and branches, crucifixion and renewal, leaves for the healing of the nations.
As Wendell Berry once urged, “Practice resurrection.” A tree knows how.
Notes
The Holy Bible, New Revised Standard Version (New York: National Council of Churches, 1989), Gen. 2:9.
The Holy Bible, NRSV, Prov. 3:18.
The Holy Bible, NRSV, Rev. 22:2.
The Holy Bible, NRSV, 1 Pet. 2:24.
Hildegard of Bingen, Scivias, trans. Columba Hart and Jane Bishop (New York: Paulist Press, 1990).
The Qur’an, trans. M.A.S. Abdel Haleem (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 2:35; 53:14–16.
Owen Barfield, Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1988).
Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016).
Ursula K. Le Guin, The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction (London: Ignota Books, 2019).
Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology, corrected ed., ed. David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne (New York: Free Press, 1978).
Edith Stein, On the Problem of Empathy, trans. Waltraut Stein (Washington, D.C.: ICS Publications, 1989).
William Desmond, Being and the Between (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995).
Wendell Berry, The Mad Farmer Poems (Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint, 2008).
Mircea Eliade, Patterns in Comparative Religion, trans. Rosemary Sheed (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996), esp. chs. on sacred trees and the axis mundi.
James Frazer, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion (New York: Macmillan, 1922), selections on tree cults and sacred groves.
Matthew Hall, Plants as Persons: A Philosophical Botany (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2011).
Thomas Berry, The Great Work: Our Way into the Future (New York: Bell Tower, 1999).
John B. Cobb Jr. and Herman E. Daly, For the Common Good: Redirecting the Economy toward Community, the Environment, and a Sustainable Future (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989).
I’m always surprised by how poorly we “preach” ecology in church settings. I don’t mean that in terms of just formal sermons from a Minister during Sunday Service (although I’ve heard some rough ones over the years, particularly dealing with ecology), but instead the type of preaching that we do in Sunday School discussions or Children’s Sermons.
So, I offer these ten minutes with thoughts on a few influential thinkers and how they have helped shape my own conceptions of God, Communion, Ecology, and even “Events,” and how that might impact other ministries.
I spoke today at the Center for Process Studies’ conference, Is It Too Late?: Toward an Ecological Civilization on the topic of Gullah Geechee insights and practices that would urge the process philosophy of Whitehead or Cobb towards active participation and engagement in local communities. Here’s my paper and the presentation below…
My paper is titled Relational Roots and Ecological Futures: Bridging Whitehead, Cobb, and Gullah Wisdom Toward a Decolonized Ecological Civilization and I’ll be posting that up after the conference this weekend!
This paper proposes a Process Ecology of the Cross, a theological and philosophical reframing of the Christian symbol of the cross through the lens of process-relational metaphysics, ecological kenosis, and more-than-human cosmopolitics. Drawing from the work of Alfred North Whitehead, Catherine Keller, Mihnea Tǎnǎsescu, Donna Haraway, and Indigenous fire stewardship practices, the paper explores how the cross can be reclaimed not as a juridical transaction or redemptive violence, but as a cosmopolitical threshold: a site of shared vulnerability, transformation, and planetary communion. The argument unfolds across seven sections, examining communion as an ontological principle, kenosis as an ethical-political descent, fire as a sacrament of regeneration, and ecological intentionality as a mode of participatory perception. Through phenomenology, posthuman theology, and lived ecological practices, this paper articulates a vision of salvation not as escape from the Earth but as a deepening within it. The cross becomes an altar of becoming-with, a liturgical site of composted grief, regenerative peace, and hope beyond the human.
