Natural Poetry in A Secular Pilgrimage

I recently began reading Wendell Berry's A Continuous Harmony: Essays Cultural and Agricultural. The first chapter brings the reader into the idea of nature in poetry and begins by relating nature and a religious state of mind - or more accurately put, worship. I thought it was interesting when Berry talks about how in a book by John Stewart Collis (called The Triumph of the Tree), Collis speaks of how the primitive man when presented with knowledge began looking through the things at a greater Thing. He was finding God in objects - apparently his first notion. I'm not sure where this idea comes from because I always assumed Adam's first response was "OH, I'M NAKED!"

The next part seems to go into man's rejection of the connection of the Creator and creation. This is something I feel plagues our society in particular. In other religions which share a similar God (Yahweh or Allah) there seems to be no problem with in intermingling of faith within the state. But in America, there has been and I think will always be a distinction. Our very founding was based on a religious freedom. I think that this country's idea of a separation of church and state came from a religious hold on everything. When Henry VIII basically said "Goodbye Catholic Church... HA HA I'm Pope now!"

Anyway, back to the separation of Creator from creation. There's an interesting contradiction made by Berry where he states that contemporary thinking would call the nature poetry a secular pilgrimage because it has no affiliation with a holy place or institution but is fully in search of the world. However, he then states that it's still a pilgrimage because it's a religious quest. I don't know what to make of that. He says "It does not seek the world of inert materiality that is postulated both by heaven-oriented churches and by the exploitive industries; it seeks the world of creation... in which the Creator... is still immanent and at work" (Berry, 6). Guy Davenport stated in his poem Flowers and Leaves stated "... the ghost who wears our inert rock/is fanatic with metamorphosis..."

I'm going to do some more reading and then reflect more upon this reading. Check back soon.