About the Center
Restoring Kindred Relationship with a Sacred Earth
There is a dangerous fissure at the heart of modern culture, a belief that our spirituality is separate from the natural world. As cultural historian Thomas Berry warned, we have "broken the great conversation" with the wind, the waters, and the trees.
The Center for Wild Spirituality is a wild seedbed dedicated to repairing that conversation. We support those answering the call of the holy wild, a growing collective of seekers and leaders who are stepping out of the old story of domination and into a new story of kindred reciprocity.
Victoria and her beloved friends, Mary and Marta (you can read more about these friends in Church of the Wild: How Nature Invites us into the Sacred)
Victoria Loorz, MDiv, founded the Center after thirty years of wrestling with this broken conversation as a pastor, climate activist, and mother. She discovered that trying to keep her faith separate from the living world led to a deep personal burnout, revealing how the severance of spirituality from nature diminishes the aliveness of both.
The Center was created as a way to foster a shared spiritual formation that is grounded in our relationship with the living world. While Victoria’s work is rooted in the mystical Christ tradition, she stands as an edge-walker on the hemlines of that story, inviting a circle that transcends specific religious boundaries.
Wild Spirituality is the work of edge-walkers, those who find themselves standing on the threshold between an old, human-centered, institutional story and an emerging new story, grounded in the ground. The Center for Wild Spirituality holds the container for edge-walkers as we, together, live in the creative tension between our deep, primal belonging to the Earth and our necessary participation in the modern human world. It is the ongoing practice of carrying the restorative wisdom of the wild back into the systems we inhabit, whether those are digital spaces, local neighborhoods, or religious traditions.
The Center serves as a gathering place for this movement, providing the clarity, courage, and collective energy we need to sustain our response to the call of the wild.
Our Mission:
The Center for Wild Spirituality nurtures the emerging movement of edge-walkers who are reconnecting spirituality with the rest of the living world.
Roots and Branches
The Center acts as the roots and trunk for an emerging movement of leaders, seekers, and communities. This living structure provides a steady container for us to find our way back into kindred relationship with the sacred in all things. From this trunk, the work grows through three primary branches:
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Seminary of the Wild Earth is a deep immersion into the practice of wild spirituality. This two year program provides a supportive container for deep spiritual growth as we re-learn the language of the living world and enter back into conversation with the sacred in our own watersheds.
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The Wild Church Network supports local, earth-based spiritual communities where the holy is encountered directly in the wild. This global network fosters a communal practice of re-sacralizing our home places.
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Threshold Experiences act as the permeable membrane of our movement. The Holy Wild podcast, on-land gatherings, and our online commons offer accessible invitations to step out of our everyday perspectives and cross into a deeper, sacred relationship with the living world.
This work is a collective participation in the healing of our world. Together, we are remembering what it means to be human in this time of transition: to belong, fully and fiercely, to the living cosmos. When we fall in love with the lands and the creatures around us, they can no longer be perceived as a resource; they are kin. And we knew this all along.
The Wild Guides
The spiritual path is one of relationship — we never walk alone. The Wild Guides are a team of visionary elders, people who can be trusted to hold space and support those who are used to holding space for others. These are people who are already walking the path of earth-based spirituality from different religious traditions. We are committed to serving participants with respect and high regard for the seed of genius lying within each person.
Partners and Friends:
Art Acknowledgment
Illustrations throughout this website by the remarkably talented Manne Green.
