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2007-04-17 issue:

Hiding from Nature

Mediaculture

by Gordon Houser

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Around me the leaves stir in their leaves
and call out, “Stay awhile.”
The light flows from their branches.
And they call again, “It’s simple,” they say,
“and you too have come
into the world to do this, to go easy, to be filled
with light, and to shine.”—Mary Oliver, “When I Am Among the Trees”

Increasingly we spend most of our time indoors, away from the natural world. Yet few of us reflect on how this affects our faith, our understanding of God and the world around us.

One who has is Dale C. Allison Jr. in his essay “The World Around Us” in his book The Luminous Dusk (Eerdmans, 2006, $14). With technological progress comes an increasing isolation from Nature. For the most part, we welcome this; we dislike suffering and welcome comfort. But we don’t think about the fact that “as we change our environment, our environment changes us.”

Allison points out that religious belief has waned as we have moved indoors. Socrates, he writes, maintained that “philosophy has no foundation other than the feeling of wonder,” and Aristotle pointed out the sun, moon and stars as “the chief objects of wonder.”

Throughout history, religion and literature have reflected this wonder at the night sky. But today we rarely look at the stars. Most of us either are indoors or there are too many artificial lights to allow us to experience the wonder of the heavens that our forebears did.

When we read Psalm 136, which gives thanks to the Lord of lords, who “does great wonders, … made the heavens, … spread out the earth on the waters, … made the great lights, … the sun to rule over the day, … the moon and stars to rule over the night,” we cannot identify well with the feeling of the Psalmist, who knew the stars.

When we read the teachings and stories of Jesus in the Gospels, we tend not to think about the fact that nearly all of these occurred outside.

Scripture is filled with references to Nature—“Go to the ant,” “look at the birds of the air”—that may seem less familiar than quaint to us. How well can we understand Scripture when we live in such a different world (indoors) from its world.

As our closeness to Nature diminishes, so too does our experience of the wonder and mystery of God’s creation.

We may have church retreats or view Nature with romantic notions, but few of us experience it intimately. The distance most of us live from where our food originates and our clothes are made, for example, leads us to treat much in our world as commodities to be consumed.

And while “Christianity has always posited that we cannot solve our own problems,” our technological progress makes us feel more and more self-sufficient. In the face of droughts, floods and diseases, our forebears felt helpless and cried to God. Now we tend to look to meteorologists and doctors for help.

Allison writes: “The ongoing mastery of Nature, which is in effect removal from Nature, has reduced the habit of feeling helpless, a habit which was once, on a subconscious level, congruent with the Christian mission.”

I work indoors most of the time, but I usually walk to and from work, which gives me at least some exposure to the whims of weather. One afternoon in late March, I walked home in a light rain. Five days later, I carried my jacket and sweated in the 80-degree heat. Today (April 5), I walked to work in a snowfall. Each day presented an instance of the bothersome beauty of our world and helped remind me that I’m not in control, that sometimes life is uncomfortable.

As I walk, I pray and try to listen, with the poet, to the trees say, “Stay awhile.”

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