In this episode I speak with Dr. Heidi Steltzer, an Earth scientist with a background in high-altitude and Arctic ecology who is now pursuing theological studies. She offers a unique perspective on the intersection of scientific inquiry and spiritual experience. We discuss:
How her mystical experiences in remote mountain and Arctic landscapes led to a deeper understanding of Earth as a living relationship rather than an object of study.
Her spiritual journey from Lutheran upbringing through thirty years away from organized religion to returning to church and entering theology school in her late forties.
The development of her Center for Earth Theology in Colorado, designed as an immersive space for scientists, theologians, and entrepreneurs to explore the intersection of faith and environmental stewardship.
Why she believes we're experiencing a rising of human consciousness that's necessary to address global environmental crises through more than purely quantitative approaches.
How the practice of science can be a form of mystical discernment when approached with presence and openness to Earth's guidance.
David Valerio: How would you describe your spirituality, and how it impacts your work?
Heidi Steltzer: It's challenging to describe because of how I arrived at it. It wasn't through going to churches. It was through presence in the wilds of our world, the high mountains and Arctic where I've spent much of my thirty years working to understand Earth. And I want to say it that way: understand Earth as she's a friend, a neighbor, a cousin, a relative.
I felt connected in ways I didn't even realize when it first started happening. It was a relationship where I could know things from and about Earth by being fully present on mountain tops and in vast Arctic tundra landscapes in Alaska and Greenland. Now in my late forties, reflecting back on those experiences, I realize: "Oh, that's how it works." That was my path into relationship with, first, the planet, and then through the planet, with the Divine.
It's really different from many other people's paths. In theology school, I've been reading about the Church of the Wild, and that's the best way I can describe it. I learned about relationship with the Divine through the wilds of our world. What do we call that? Earth worship? I don't think so, because Earth-centered ways of knowing and being are part of most religious traditions. That's what I'm exploring in theology school now, where and how this shows up in faith traditions that have names.
David Valerio: Did you grow up in a church? What cultural influences did you have before science brought you into knowledge of the Divine?
Heidi Steltzer: I went to church while I was growing up. We were a Lutheran family. I did all of it: Sundays every week, Sunday School, confirmation, youth group involvement. I kept attending chapel services at Duke during my undergraduate years.
But in my sophomore year, I had what I'd call an epiphany moment. I went to service one Sunday and realized I knew all the words without looking at the bulletin—the Lord's Prayer, the Apostle's Creed, everything—but none of it came with feeling. It was just rote memorization from habituation. I hadn't been comfortable with confirmation in eighth grade, but that wasn't something I could speak about in my family at the time.
After that realization at nineteen, I looked at the church the next week and thought, "I'm not going." I just stopped. It's strange to have grown up going so consistently and then stop completely. There was definitely fear. "Oh my God, God's gonna come get me because I just boldly stopped." But one week went by, then two, then three and four. Each week I'd peer out my dorm window at Duke Chapel. The church is still there, I'm still here.
That was the space I lived in for thirty years. Literally at forty-nine years old, in December 2021, one Sunday I just thought, "I think I have to go to church again. The path forward is through." That was before I was considering theology school.
David Valerio: Tell me about that interim period. What was your science background, and how was creation shaping and forming you?
Heidi Steltzer: I thought I wanted to study the oceans and then rainforests, but neither of those ecosystems fit me. When I got to the mountains, I knew I was home. I started studying mountain ecosystems in Colorado in 1993. Initially I wanted to study plants, but got assigned to a project about cannibalism of insects in subalpine ponds. I studied a very aggressive species of caddis fly that ate eight individuals of its own species to acquire nutrients in that cold environment with short growing seasons.
Mountains are places where the veil is thin, where we can feel divine presence. I spent a lot of time alone with intention. I lived in a cabin at the base of a high mountain ridge in Colorado's Front Range, going up the mountain for PhD research, coming down, not talking to people for days. That sounds wild and eccentric, but I think it enabled me to live into an experience aligned with discerning Earth.
I wasn't really alone. I had friends in the mountains. I was discerning Earth, feeling an energy and call about which of these mountain friends had a story to tell me. How much should I pay attention? Where? When? These days I talk about how many decisions we make as scientists that we think are for objective reasons, but I don't think we've talked enough about how much is influenced by presence, knowing, relationship with Earth, mysticism, the magic of connection.
Without awareness at the time, that's what I was doing. Then I could repeat it in the Brooks Range, in Greenland, in new mountain ranges in Colorado. Picture that pattern repeating: knowing what to study, where to study it, understanding something about Earth, then figuring out how to make modern science work with hypotheses, data collection, testing ideas.
There are wonders to that process, but also limitations if we don't allow for hypotheses that sound far-fetched or inconsistent with what we think we've known about these cold, stressful ecosystems. We've been studying them on our timeline—the timeline of grants, of my existence—rather than on Earth's timeline. Many individual plants in high-elevation and Arctic landscapes can be thousands of years old. What's a three-year study going to tell us unless we allow the mystery, magic, and stories of the species to help us figure it out?
David Valerio: Did you think of it as Earth speaking to you and guiding your hypotheses at the time, or is that something that emerged over time?
Heidi Steltzer: I didn't notice it at first. Not for the first ten, maybe fifteen years. Awareness started about fifteen years ago. Knowing it and having intention about the process was maybe five years ago. Being willing to talk about it… you and your audience are some of the first who say "we're listening."
Going to theology school has helped me understand this is all real. This isn't pretend. It's something possible for all of us. I don't want it to sound ordinary, but I do want it to sound possible, natural, a potential of every human to be in relationship with Earth in some way we'd describe as magical or mystical.
David Valerio: I've noticed more people in my age group coming back to some form of religion or spirituality. Do you feel like part of your comfort speaking about this was the times changing, or your own personal experience shifting?
Heidi Steltzer: There was the epiphany moment of "the path forward is through, I have to go to church again." But then the practical: How do I do that? Where do I go? Do I tell my family? I didn't tell anyone. I went out for groceries one Sunday morning, got groceries, went to church, came home with groceries, and told no one because I thought, "Am I really going to do this? This is so outside my norm for thirty years."
I don't think I could be traveling this path without honesty and openness to talk about it. If I don't speak about it, I won't figure out what I want to learn about myself without offering opportunities for conversation with friends. It creates a different dynamic of conversation, especially since many of my friends don't go to church.
I'm weaving other things in too. Continuing experiences in the wild, theological education, yoga, and sutra study. My plan includes an independent study on faiths that fall under the label of paganism, though I don't like that term because those European faiths had names that we lost track of. My instinct is we probably didn't lose the traditions. They got tucked into Christianity and secular culture. It's hard for people to drop something spiritually important and not continue it, but we hide it.
David Valerio: I had a similar experience of hiding when coming back to my faith in graduate school. There's an assumed atheism in academia, but I've found more openness to these conversations than expected. The spiritual, mystical, philosophical—it's a category of human experience we all experience it in some form. Some are more attuned, some less. Some actively reject it, others go into it actively. But it's such a huge part of why anybody does anything they do. Opening the door to conversation invites people into discussions about our place in the universe. Not just my place, but our place, because we're interconnected beings relying on each other for support.
Anyway, tell me about the Center for Earth Theology you founded in Durango.
Heidi Steltzer: I bought four acres and five buildings in high-elevation desert adjacent to the San Juan Mountains with a plan to write a book. I wanted a hermitage to spend time writing. Within two months, I realized, "This place isn't for me. It's for many. What shape does it take?"
At first I thought about field stations, which are remote locations where scientists pay fees for lodging and facilities to reside in community while having easier access to remote places. I chose to start visioning it as a field station, painting walls, scraping grout, improving buildings with my own money.
Through discernment and theology school, I realized: if we have these immersive Earth experience places for scientists, why don't we have them for people in faith and theology spaces? Maybe what I've lived into fits immersive experiences in theology schools better than university science programs. But it shouldn't be limited to theology schools.
The four goals I have for the space: 1) Unstructured time. There are many retreat places that keep you busy with programs so I want to offer mostly unstructured time. 2) Resourced. Books are often our friends from across the ages, so there are over a thousand books in science and faith literature. 3) Connected to Earth, and 4) In community with people. Those latter two make sense given what we've discussed. So much is possible when we're in dialogue rather than just reading and writing alone.
David Valerio: It's important to get people out into nature, to not just intellectualize it but also experience creation outside their usual context.
Heidi Steltzer: Exactly. I think there's a rising of human consciousness happening right now. What's possible for me is happening because I'm tapped into something happening for many. We see evidence when synchronies appear in ideas, energy, language that complements what feels like our own idea but is actually something wonderful and universal popping up everywhere.
Cynthia Bourgeault speaks of this being a moment that's not surprising given the disturbance in our social environmental systems. LA fires, the rise of governments not well-supported by all citizens. When the physical world feels unsettling, more people ask, "What else could be?" Higher consciousness is a space to access that "what else could be," because maybe what can be is wildly different than what we typically discuss. It's not impossible, it's possible. We just have to trust and live into it.
David Valerio: The pandemic was another such event that made many people, including myself, think more about what we were doing with our lives. We're living in a dramatic age of information. Social media, internet, AI, new ways of transferring ideas like this podcast. We might be experiencing something similar to what happened after the printing press led to radical spread of ideas and chaos in Europe. In periods of vast, quick transformation, you look at what's beneath everyday experience and wonder what's actually possible.
Heidi Steltzer: I recently spoke with a woman in Denmark who's an expert in Bildung, which is a German word that refers to developing a moral, integrative, holistic approach in education that is common in Scandinavian countries and Germany. Her research shows this same philosophy exists under different names in Latin America, Africa, Asia. It's not common in the US.
I'm going out on a limb here: this is part of theological education that we've pushed into the corner because we don't know how to offer it well in a religiously pluralistic society. We get stuck because when it's introduced, it's often associated with only one faith. If we identify it with several faiths, schools and parents become uncertain.
I think theology isn't about religious indoctrination. Theology is about who we are, why we are, how we can be in relationship, how we know our different states of being. It doesn't have to be limited to a single faith tradition. How do we bring that in so it's not missing, tucked away and inaccessible unless you decide to step into theological education?
David Valerio: There's still an implicit theology in all our systems, even in supposedly secular public education. Being more explicit about different faith traditions and ways of relating would be better than pretending we don't have any underlying worldview.
Heidi Steltzer: Open it up for dialogue, absolutely. Choose wisely even the words we use for the divine: ground, source, creator, love. There are possibilities that allow us to speak of something more universal than G-O-D, which is used in three faith traditions but not all.
David Valerio: How would you describe your current understanding of the Divine?
Heidi Steltzer: What I've lived into through experience is something much more universal than feels reflected in any one faith tradition. It's a calm, a peace, a love of presence, an experience of connection through meditation. It can be found on a quiet long hike, sitting on a cushion, in many different ways across traditions where we experience something outside of space and time, outside of me.
Thomas Merton spoke of it as something also in us, part of us. In an essay I wrote last fall, coming from the biogeochemist in me, I wondered: if there's this substance in me that is God, what elements is God made up of? I decided probably carbon, certainly nitrogen, absolutely hydrogen and oxygen, probably salt and a metal or two.
This blending of science with theology is different from what I often read about. How many people read Mystical Hope and wonder what elements God is made of? It's both immaterial and material. Isn't that wonderful? Mystics have often spoken of this, but it hasn't resonated well in some faith traditions, Christianity being one. This might be the kind of thing that gets you kicked out of the club.
David Valerio: Eastern Christianity actually has a higher view of creation than Western Christianity. We talk about deification, transfiguration, the cosmic Christ transforming all creation. I think you'd really appreciate it.
Heidi Steltzer: More mysticism woven in, it sounds like.
David Valerio: Absolutely. I'll send you some materials. You should also visit Christ in the Desert Monastery in New Mexico. It’s a Benedictine monastery with complete silence that's very open to visitors. You'd appreciate the Desert Fathers too, they were early Christian monastics with a strong sense of closeness to creation.
Heidi Steltzer: I probably have some of their books in my collection. I've been collecting books for just two years now. My son makes fun of me: "Mom, you're never gonna read all those." But they're not for me to read them all. They're so the Center for Earth Theology is resourced. When conversations like this happen and you recommend someone, I'll go there and books you recommend will probably already be jumping off the shelves at me.
I almost never finish books anymore. I wait for guidance like this conversation. I start reading, open to a page, flip around, might read the end first, then decide whether to read the whole thing. There are no rules about finishing every book you start. The way suggestions arrive for who to read is part of how breadcrumbs get left to guide us.
David Valerio: That's been one of the best things about this podcast, the nexus of connections it's opened up. So much of our learning is mediated through other people, and there's serendipity in conversations leading to book recommendations and new ideas.
Heidi Steltzer: Follow the trail of breadcrumbs, the trail you were meant to follow. We each get pulled in different directions, and that's wonderful, not problematic, unless we make it a problem. Being open to those conversations, my pull led me to learning about G.I. Gurdjieff, The Ray of Creation, Teilhard de Chardin, and systems thinking in a bigger universe.
I've been trained for thirty years in systems thinking: cycles, processes, flow, energy, energetics. This is all consistent with that; it's just a bigger universe I get to play in. That's part of the path science can lead people into. Are we brave enough to talk about it when science leads us there, given that it's not part of the predominant European Enlightenment system of science?
David Valerio: Science was part of my trail of breadcrumbs too. Systems thinking, complexity theory, realizing how little we truly know. There's baked-in mysticism in the universe. When you appreciate that it's in principle not knowable, what does that mean for our methods? Science and theology aren't contrasting worldviews; they're part and parcel with one another.
Heidi Steltzer: They're reinforcing ways of knowing and being. So much possibility comes from that weaving. In this exploration where I speak openly, what you just said keeps showing up. There are lots of us coming to this place concurrently at a time when we face global crises that we're trying to address through only quantitative Enlightenment approaches to science.
I think about tipping points of Earth, but there need to be tipping points of humanity, of our relationship with Earth and the Divine, of consciousness. How can those become what we talk about so we can leap out of limitations: too much carbon dioxide, plastic everywhere, disrupted systems? The solution can't only be in the material world. It has to include other ways of knowing and being, a reintegration of the magical, the mystical, the divine.
I don't know how that takes place, and I don't need to know because that's the puzzle pieces fitting together. Each of us doing our part.
David Valerio: What does a good life look like for you now, and how will you attempt to live it going forward?
Heidi Steltzer: Practically, I don't have a job right now. I'm working to develop the center. This will be the year the website opens with opportunities for personalized experiences: booking space or engaging with me. I need to test how this can work so I can earn income. I don't have the rest sorted out.
I read one book that said, "Mystics always need day jobs because mysticism doesn't pay." We don't have ways to do that yet. I'm part of contemplative communities that have been wonderful for learning, growing, being in community.
I feel pulled into spoken word, finding avenues to offer something of what I've lived into, hopefully leading to dialogue. It's not to speak and be the center, but to speak to open space, like we've been doing, for wisdom to emerge from each of us.
Do people pay others to do that? I don't know, and I don't need to earn a lot of money, but I do want to eat and help my kids get through college.
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