Natural Contemplation – a Christian Healing for the Environment?

Abstract Recent studies have acknowledged the insufficiency of rational arguments to motivate us for necessary changes to save the planet: hence the attraction of non-religious ecospiritualities. Identifying Western Christianity’s relationship with the environment as more moral than spiritual, I respond to the principle of right relation to the environment developed by the Methodist social creed tradition to recover the neglected tradition of natural contemplation from Christian cosmology and the monastic tradition. Drawing also on Douglas Christie’s analytical autoethnographic approach and on neglected liturgical tradition, I argue further that natural contemplation is intrinsically a prayer for the healing of nature.