II. The Religious Guardians

There was a very wise teacher named Hildegard of Bingen, a German Benedictine abbess, who lived nine hundred years ago. She once said, "Everything that is in heaven, on earth and under the earth is penetrated with connectedness, penetrated with relatedness. Every creature is a glittering, glistening mirror of divinity. All living creatures are sparks from the radiation of God's brilliance, emerging from God like rays of the sun."