THE GREAT SEARCH: Turning to Earth & Soul in the Quest for Healing and Home

John Philip Newell, author of The Great Search: Turning to Earth and Soul in the Quest for Healing and Home, has written several extraordinary books on Celtic spirituality, including Sacred Earth Sacred Soul, Christ of the Celts, and The Book of Creation, among others. Throughout his work, Newell writes of the deep and abiding presence of the divinity within the human soul, the Earth, and all of creation.

In The Great Search, Newell seeks healing for the suffering caused by man’s inhumanity to man and for the environmental harm we are inflicting on ourselves and the Earth. He is also searching for a truly enlightened understanding of how our spiritual home is part of the larger context of our deeper selves, our sacred planet, and an infinite cosmos. As he searches for an authentic sense of healing and home, Newell says that he is “drawing on the teachings of wise figures who have gone before us,” and that he is “channeling their truths into the heart of this moment in time.”

As we journey with Newell on this great search and explore the spiritual landscape of these wise figures, we find that they are just as gifted as the artists described by depth psychologist Erich Neumann in his essay “Art and Time.” In this essay, Neumann says that through their creative genius, great artists are able to break through to the spiritual “realm of essence” at the heart of “the inner life of the world.” The wise figures that Newell writes of in The Great Search are artists, visionaries, and mystics in their own right, and they illuminate this “realm of essence” in their work.

Deep within this “realm of essence” are the light and love that exist in the sacred relationship between spirit and matter, heaven and earth—a relationship that is intrinsic to the perspective of each of the figures described by Newell. These figures include priest and cultural historian Thomas Berry, writer Nan Shepherd, philosopher Martin Buber, psychoanalyst Carl Jung, mystic Julian of Norwich, poet and mystic Jalaluddin Rumi, poet and Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore, writer and Holocaust victim Etty Hillesum, and poet Edwin Muir. In this review of The Great Search, we will reflect on the perspectives of four of these figures—Thomas Berry, Nan Shepherd, Martin Buber, and Carl Jung.

Newell describes priest and cultural historian Thomas Berry as a wolf in the wilderness, calling us “prophetically from the edge of religion” to a “sacred relationship with everything that has being.” Berry believed in the oneness, the wholeness, of the natural world and in what Newell calls “the holy interrelatedness of all things.” According to Newell, the natural world for Berry is “the place of our primary revelatory experience of the divine.” From this perspective, Berry’s ideas resonate with those of philosopher John Hick in The Fifth Dimension: An Exploration of the Spiritual Realm, who says that the numinosity of the natural world creates “a sense of wonder” within us “that is felt as a point of contact between our own spiritual nature and a greater spiritual reality within, around, and beyond us.”

Writer Nan Shepherd’s sacred relationship with the natural world was inspired by the love she felt for the mountains of the Scottish Highlands. Like Thomas Berry, Shepherd sensed the oneness of nature. In The Living Mountain, Shepherd says that “The disintegrating rock, the nurturing rain, the quickening sun, the root, the bird—all are one.” Newell says that it was through communing with “the wildness of the natural world” that Shepherd was able to pass “from the outer landscape around her” to “the inner landscape of her soul” and to travel “though the outer veil of reality into the inner light of being.” It was when Shepherd reached what Neumann calls “the realm of essence” at “the inner life of the world” that she saw, in Newell’s words, “the light deep within all life” and “the ‘enchanted radiance’ at the heart of nature.”

Just as Nan Shepherd found “the light deep within all life,” so did philosopher Martin Buber, who believed that the world, in Newell’s words, is “lit from within” by a divine light. This light shines especially brightly in an I-Thou relationship, which is governed by respect for, and benevolence towards, the other and resonates with the equality, harmony, and love that bring genuine peace to humanity. When describing an I-Thou relationship, Newell says that “when we encounter the Thou in another, whether that be in another person or in another life-form or in the radiance of sun, moon, and stars, we are encountering ‘the eternal Thou.’ We are experiencing the divine presence in and through the other.”

While Martin Buber highlights the spirituality of an I-Thou relationship, psychoanalyst Carl Jung brings to us, in Newell’s words, an awareness of “the healing energies of consciousness” and the insight that the “deepest energies of our being are given to find wholeness in relationship to all things.” For Jung, there is a sacred relationship between the outer realm of the natural world and the inner realm of the human psyche. Central to this relationship is what Jung calls “the illumination of a holy and whole-making spirit” that enlightened him with a dream of great beauty – a dream of a “valley of diamonds,” or what Newell says is a “place of immortal shining of light.” For Jung, this dream brought a glimpse of what Newell calls “the divine within us” at “the core of our being,” where “we shine, like the translucence of jewels in sunlight.”

Such are the light, love, and spirit of four of the nine wise figures celebrated by Newell in The Great Search. These artists, visionaries, and mystics found the majestic presence of the divinity in the beauty of the natural world and in the mind of humanity, wove the temporal moments of their lives with the luminous threads of immortality, and transcended into the numinous “realm of essence” at the heart of “the inner life of the world.”