To explain these believers refer to God's qualities of love, mercy, forgiveness, or his gifts of grace and salvation. Otto, op. cit. We know that the beauties of nature can inspire deep love. In the most sensitive people it may inspire something akin to ecstasy - a feeling of being enveloped by a mother, of belonging to a family, of yearning for a lover. These feelings are not simply romantic imagination.
Nature is our mother.
She bears us and nurtures us, as she does all natural beings. We are all like a huge extended family, all related genetically back to the first cell. The night sky has a similar effect, as an enveloping beauty beyond all words, a dark enfolding womb. And again, that feeling is not imagination. We came from the darkness.