They are a stillness, a calm, and a hope that must be acquired slowly, because -- as Father Schmemann says of our joy in Lent -- "our fallen nature has lost the ability to accede there naturally".
Evening light glows, mist unfurls, birdsong rises and falls: nature's so rich it feels unreal.
Later on, he believed that what happened was he'd had a moment of almost seeing them both as Jesus saw them — as blind but groping, wanting to please God despite their inborn fallen nature.
You will not look upon tyranny and injustice in faraway places as the inevitable tragedy of mankind's fallen nature.
This Lenten season, I'll be thinking a lot about what our fallen nature means about how we interact with animals, and what Jesus' arrival means for us and how we lead our lives.
He anatomizes our fallen natures through such topics as ambition ("The entire theater of social encounters rests on it; it is the power pulling the strings of our tragi-farce"), blasphemy, cruelty, disgust, hatred, misfortune and, especially, terror, which he identifies as "the chief inhabitant of Europe in the 20th century".
This inevitably leads to a reflection on Pompeii, whose inhabitants the poet compares to a colony of ants crushed by a falling apple: "Nature has no more esteem / or care for the seed of man / than for the ant".
Golitha Falls Nature Reserve is one such place, where footpaths (including a buggy-friendly trail) tunnel through a wooded valley alongside the tumbling river Fowey.
According to this view, God had provided reliable moral guidance to human beings in the prelapsarian state of nature, and some remnants of God's law continue to be reflected in Fallen nature.
When the King James Bible told the story of The Fall, nature was a place of deceptive beauty; a place where you could easily lose your moral compass.
