I might be a pagan at heart. "Pagans," Latin for "people of the country," or what we might call "country bumpkins," these were the last to embrace Christianity, to give up their local gods of nature. Christianity solved this well - they made Virgin sites out of mother goddess springs, or replaced forest gods with saints, leaving the magic intact while refocusing the issue. Now, nature bowed down to the one God, dependent on the greater hierarchy.
It was a brilliant - a "catholic" - move.
But it left something out. Edward Abbey, in his ground-breaking environmentalist book Desert Solitaire, wrote of good, God-fearing midwestern tourists coming to see the stone arches in Utah and exclaiming "God!" No, not God, said Abbey, but nature in her inexplicable wonder. God to him was church, Jesus, innocent children and humble men, not this, not this nature that sustained and killed almost indiscriminately. Nature was not a social being. It was vast, powerful, and left humans to their own devices much as it did ants. It simply was, and could not be supplicated, or even cursed. It stood alone, awesome in its heartless (but not hateful) being.
Such were my thoughts, too, when we reached the lake caves. We had been traveling around with our pop-up camper for a week, first seeing the cliffs and waterfalls of the North Shore of Minnesota that stretch of coast from Duluth to Canada, and we had been impressed. Now, we were back in Wisconsin along the same lake, Superior, where the shore wore a different face. We stopped at the parking lot to the Apostle Islands National Park and began the hike outward towards the famous caves, which can be visited by kayak in good weather, and on foot during very cold winters, but now, in stormy but warm September, we would be going by foot. Within 2 miles, the views began of red sandstone cliffs artistically carved by millennia of waves: arches, crevasses, and yes, caves. They took the breath away as the waves roared against the cliffs and shot into the crevasses and out the arches. At one spot in particular, a great expanse of cliff wall lay open in a wide bay, its sides pocked with dozens of holes and small caves, the red of its rock burning into the mind like sacrificial blood. I was left feeling like I did after reading Carlos Castaneda's Don Juan books - impressed, but spooked; awed, and humbled, but not filled with heavenly love. Here there was no love, just power and beauty.
Perhaps one could see God there, but he would be the Old Testament God, the One irreducible and inscrutable, the one who would wipe out entire tribes of people to prove a point, whatever that might be. Terrible, wonderful, life-affirming even as it promised death, fear even as you rejoice. With it, this nature, this God, one must supplicate as a cliff climber would, being precise to get everything just right, or else...
In that lies the necessity, or so it seems to me, to see the Bible as a piece, even though to a Christian, it is the New Testament that really matters. The god of the Old was like nature with a voice - powerful and awe-full, not something to trifle with or even to bargain with. You don't bargain with an avalanche or a flood. You do it right, period, just as the Jewish scribes did. Mercy could be had, just as nature sometimes allowed one to live, inexplicably, but it was always best, smartest, to do it right and leave pleading to the totally screwed, to those who had not done it right, or were to fit into God's plan in an ugly, and beyond-rational, way.
Jesus, human-god, hope of hope, but seen wrongly by us, or at least by me. My Jesus is not the cliff or the avalanche, but the hand of God on my shoulder, one who has my back. As Abbey knew, the desert has no one's back. It simply kills the ill-prepared, or maybe even the prepared. It simply won't respond to plea-bargaining.
And yet: in the past few weeks I have had remarkable occurrences of synchronicity. For instance, talking to a woman at a lighthouse on our journey, I became slightly annoyed as she referenced all the national parks she had been to, exclaiming on the wonders of nature. Nature, as said, often bights, and so I threw in a curve ball that made her back away from me slowly, as if I were slightly mad. Did you ever, I said, see the oil refineries of Elizabeth, New Jersey? They, too, were beautiful at night, but not for their pristine nature. Rather, the roaring flares from the escape towers that shot up in the dead landscape through sulfurous smoke into the blighted, starless night sky, all man-made and poisonous, was a beauty unto itself, hellish though it might be. "Elizabeth New Jersey," she said, giving a brittle smile, "I guess I should see that, too," the smile fading as she walked quickly to catch her husband.
A week later, all hell broke lose in Elizabeth, New Jersey with the Afghan bomber. I had probably not even thought of that city for years.
And others, too, but on to this thought: nature might seem to be dead to our human pleas, but it is not. It does not act as a human would to us - just as any god would not - but it does interact with us in odd ways. While the good Christians of the midwest might not have it right, neither did Edward Abbey. We are not apart from nature, or just mindless ants at its mercy. Somehow, amidst its unthinkable enormity, we matter to nature, but in ways as beyond us as this enormity. It all, really, depends on how we define God to know if it exists. Nature - or God - is not as cold as we think a rock to be. Something, indeed, is going on. Something is drawing us, or compelling us, towards something. Maybe the pagans were on to something. But we of Western culture could do worse than to see God as the Bible does, with its two major parts: mysterious, terrible, un-fair, yet somehow human and involved. Why else, then, would the sandstone cliffs, or even Elizabeth, New Jersey, bring to us such great awe, even though awe has nothing to do with the mindlessness of a rock, or the chemical reactions of a refinery? FK
It was a brilliant - a "catholic" - move.
But it left something out. Edward Abbey, in his ground-breaking environmentalist book Desert Solitaire, wrote of good, God-fearing midwestern tourists coming to see the stone arches in Utah and exclaiming "God!" No, not God, said Abbey, but nature in her inexplicable wonder. God to him was church, Jesus, innocent children and humble men, not this, not this nature that sustained and killed almost indiscriminately. Nature was not a social being. It was vast, powerful, and left humans to their own devices much as it did ants. It simply was, and could not be supplicated, or even cursed. It stood alone, awesome in its heartless (but not hateful) being.
Such were my thoughts, too, when we reached the lake caves. We had been traveling around with our pop-up camper for a week, first seeing the cliffs and waterfalls of the North Shore of Minnesota that stretch of coast from Duluth to Canada, and we had been impressed. Now, we were back in Wisconsin along the same lake, Superior, where the shore wore a different face. We stopped at the parking lot to the Apostle Islands National Park and began the hike outward towards the famous caves, which can be visited by kayak in good weather, and on foot during very cold winters, but now, in stormy but warm September, we would be going by foot. Within 2 miles, the views began of red sandstone cliffs artistically carved by millennia of waves: arches, crevasses, and yes, caves. They took the breath away as the waves roared against the cliffs and shot into the crevasses and out the arches. At one spot in particular, a great expanse of cliff wall lay open in a wide bay, its sides pocked with dozens of holes and small caves, the red of its rock burning into the mind like sacrificial blood. I was left feeling like I did after reading Carlos Castaneda's Don Juan books - impressed, but spooked; awed, and humbled, but not filled with heavenly love. Here there was no love, just power and beauty.
Perhaps one could see God there, but he would be the Old Testament God, the One irreducible and inscrutable, the one who would wipe out entire tribes of people to prove a point, whatever that might be. Terrible, wonderful, life-affirming even as it promised death, fear even as you rejoice. With it, this nature, this God, one must supplicate as a cliff climber would, being precise to get everything just right, or else...
In that lies the necessity, or so it seems to me, to see the Bible as a piece, even though to a Christian, it is the New Testament that really matters. The god of the Old was like nature with a voice - powerful and awe-full, not something to trifle with or even to bargain with. You don't bargain with an avalanche or a flood. You do it right, period, just as the Jewish scribes did. Mercy could be had, just as nature sometimes allowed one to live, inexplicably, but it was always best, smartest, to do it right and leave pleading to the totally screwed, to those who had not done it right, or were to fit into God's plan in an ugly, and beyond-rational, way.
Jesus, human-god, hope of hope, but seen wrongly by us, or at least by me. My Jesus is not the cliff or the avalanche, but the hand of God on my shoulder, one who has my back. As Abbey knew, the desert has no one's back. It simply kills the ill-prepared, or maybe even the prepared. It simply won't respond to plea-bargaining.
And yet: in the past few weeks I have had remarkable occurrences of synchronicity. For instance, talking to a woman at a lighthouse on our journey, I became slightly annoyed as she referenced all the national parks she had been to, exclaiming on the wonders of nature. Nature, as said, often bights, and so I threw in a curve ball that made her back away from me slowly, as if I were slightly mad. Did you ever, I said, see the oil refineries of Elizabeth, New Jersey? They, too, were beautiful at night, but not for their pristine nature. Rather, the roaring flares from the escape towers that shot up in the dead landscape through sulfurous smoke into the blighted, starless night sky, all man-made and poisonous, was a beauty unto itself, hellish though it might be. "Elizabeth New Jersey," she said, giving a brittle smile, "I guess I should see that, too," the smile fading as she walked quickly to catch her husband.
A week later, all hell broke lose in Elizabeth, New Jersey with the Afghan bomber. I had probably not even thought of that city for years.
And others, too, but on to this thought: nature might seem to be dead to our human pleas, but it is not. It does not act as a human would to us - just as any god would not - but it does interact with us in odd ways. While the good Christians of the midwest might not have it right, neither did Edward Abbey. We are not apart from nature, or just mindless ants at its mercy. Somehow, amidst its unthinkable enormity, we matter to nature, but in ways as beyond us as this enormity. It all, really, depends on how we define God to know if it exists. Nature - or God - is not as cold as we think a rock to be. Something, indeed, is going on. Something is drawing us, or compelling us, towards something. Maybe the pagans were on to something. But we of Western culture could do worse than to see God as the Bible does, with its two major parts: mysterious, terrible, un-fair, yet somehow human and involved. Why else, then, would the sandstone cliffs, or even Elizabeth, New Jersey, bring to us such great awe, even though awe has nothing to do with the mindlessness of a rock, or the chemical reactions of a refinery? FK
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