Brynne Valla--Making Nature Sacred #1

"A religious sense of the world lies at the heart of Berry's ecological conviction that land must be treated as a divine gift and sacrament. To approach the earth as a sacrament is to embrace its materiality while reverencing its worth beyond the horizon of visible use." --page 202

Berry's ideas of environmental healing and practice becoming major components of Christianity is confusing to me. While I believe that Nature holds strong ties to one's religious experience, I do not think that religious experience and land treated as a divine gift and sacrament are essential to a Christian's faith. I cannot figure out why he so strongly argued that religion is best satisfied when practicing natural healing and treating the land as divine. Also, the part about embracing its materiality seems odd to me. At first I interpreted this to mean that Berry condones materiality. However, upon reading it again, it seems that he accepts the materialism but frowns upon and attempts to revere it instead. I am not sure his argument is consistent or that this is an accurate assessment of it, but it is what I gathered from it.