“I’ll bet there are a hundred good hiking sticks in that patch of woods.”
“Look along the fencerows there; it looks like the red-winged blackbirds are back.”
“Boy, those blue jays are really in a dogfight with that hawk.”
“That blazing red maple sure makes a pretty picture against that white barn, doesn’t it?”

My statements like this as driver of our car got me grounded by my wife.  They convinced her that my AFD is getting worse.  My “Attention Fixation Disorder” really doesn’t bother me, but Marge has come to the opinion that the disorder is not good and could even be terminal—for both of us.  “I have an idea,” she said, “why don’t you let me drive so you can watch nature.”

Actually, I soon found that to be a very good idea, especially in the spring when the outdoors comes back to life here in West Michigan.  Did you know that the male red-winged blackbirds come north up to three weeks before the females?  They do that in order to find, claim, and fight for the best nesting areas—ones near water and preferably occupied by dense clumps of cattails.

So in late March, the red-wing fights begin.  The striking males with their bright shoulder patch of red and yellow stake out their claims with loud songs and then fight anything that approaches their claim be it other males, crows, hawks, or humans. Since being a tease was handed down to me by my father, I sometimes like to bug these territorial males by making a move across their unmarked boundary lines just to see how aggressive they might become.  And let me tell you, once the females arrive, you can be sure your approach will be duly noted, protested loudly, and attended with skydives that stop about six feet short of your head.

Cold northern winters keep my disorder somewhat in remission; but come March, twinges of it begin to turn my head away from the potholes in the street and hard-packed ice still laying skid traps on the road.  Which are the very things Marge believes I should be giving my attention to.  But AFD is a hard taskmaster, and when it wants to attend to something, it will.  So about the time the red-winged blackbirds return, my AFD returns as well.

Marge and I have learned to cope with it pretty well, I think: when wild nature comes into view through the car windows and my attention begins to fixate on its many facets, I simply allow her to drive.  Because she is a good driver, we can both relax.  She watches the road, and my gaze can stay fixed on the wispy cirrus clouds overhead, the deer grazing at the edge of a bean field, or a red-tailed hawk dodging crows near the horizon.  Comments from the seat beside me about a Hummer behind being too close to our rear or the woman ahead who apparently does not have plans for the day are usually not enough to keep me from fixating on those parts of the natural landscape that always fill me with a sense of wonder.

See you outdoors!

Dean

In my last post I stirred up a good debate on the issue of technology.  Although my primary intent was to recommend the use of wild places as a place of retreat from the pressures and distractions of modern life so heavily influenced by rapid technological change, I believe some felt that by my reference to Jacques Ellul’s writing I was condemning modern technology and was recommending a return to some idyllic, but fictitious, “good ole days.”

So let me reiterate what I mentioned in comments I posted last fall:

No doubt the value of wilderness is almost more in what is not found there than in what is.  Consider what we typically do not find in a true uninhabited wilderness (uninhabited by humans, that is!):

. . . personal multipliers of power (vehicles, electricity, et. al.)
. . . markets and marketers
. . . external temptations
. . . false values
. . . lying words
. . . too many voices to attend to
. . . too many people to relate to
. . . racial, ethnic, and gender tensions
. . . personal deception and pretense (masks)
. . . meaningless entertainment
. . . continuous distraction
. . . an overload of news (information)
. . . an overload of human technology
. . . an overload of noise
. . . the need to talk incessantly
. . . daily routines and responsibilities clamoring for attention
. . . constant time pressure
. . . the sense that I am in control

Is there any person who cannot benefit from being relieved of these stresses from time to time?

Many of those stresses relate to modern technology; so let me say a few more words about the thoughts of Elull, a French Christian and professor of sociology at the University of Bordeaux who died in 1994.  His magnum opus was the sociology tome The Technological Society (1964), which was not a Christian publication (though containing many Christian and theological implications).  His book The Technological Bluff was published in 1990 by Christian publisher Eerdmans.  His major point in that book was a sort of twist on Emerson who said that “Things are in the saddle and ride mankind,” and held that, “Technology is in the saddle and rides mankind.”

His belief was that those of us living in the technology society, for all its many benefits, are so enamored of technology and technology is so pervasive in its influence that we have simply lost control over it—and lost even the will to control it.  Without critical, moral, wise, and godly oversight and direction, technology has a life of its own that has in many ways become a powerful extension of human evil.

So we have atomic energy and the atomic bomb; we have microwave ovens to cook and expensive electronic toys and TV to divert our thoughts and steal our time from the things of first importance; we have chain saws to harvest timber and do landscaping; and we have massive machines that literally mow down old growth forests and threaten entire ecosystems; we have TVs and computers for instant access to important information and access to more information than one can possibly grasp, pornography one click away from our online Bibles, and endless diversion.

TVA coal ash spill 2008

And all the while, God’s good earth suffers and we suffer for our lack of valuing it, understanding it, being good stewards of it, and neglecting being outdoors in it enough to be reminded of the power and glory of our Creator and be refreshed and renewed by the experience.

So here I am in my high-tech office employed as a blog author and writing this post, which shortly you will be reading via the Internet on your high-tech device in your high-tech home.  With a hunger within me for the simple, agrarian ways (thinking Wendell Berry and the Amish), I do this with a nagging sense of both guilt and angst—wishing often that I was not here but out there.  A technology captive with self-applied shackles.  Sigh.

See you outdoors!

Dean

One of the values of the wild is that helps put technology in its place.  One way to understand this is to imagine yourself on a remote wooded ridge—say somewhere in the Ozarks.  You’re suddenly engulfed by a violent thunderstorm, and while rushing to find shelter and safety, you find yourself in the company of two others in the same pursuit.  Together you find a large overhanging rock ledge and crawl under it for cover.  Finally at rest, you seek to begin a conversation but quickly find that verbal communication is hopeless—for the other two, because of some warp in time, are a French explorer from the late 1600′s and an Osage Indian from the 1200′s.

Because your cell phone doesn’t work where you are, it’s a mere fascination to the other two, and your iPod, while it creates a sense of awe, soon goes the way of all battery-powered devices and your companions’ wonder ceases.  Your clothing, too, is a curiosity—as well as your eye-glasses.  But when the storm soon shows that it is but the precursor of a cold front bringing with it several inches of snow, other modern devices, like your classic Swiss Army “knifelet” becomes of little value, and the frustration of leaving that lighter in your car several miles away only adds to your distress.  What you discover is that the wild pretty much obliterates all the differences between the generations.  But you are also soon delighted that you are not caught in these circumstances with, say, “important people” like Oprah, Michael Jackson, or Donald Trump, who appear to have never have ventured more than a hundred yards away from a light switch and whose wilderness survival understanding could well be limited to the old joke that you start a fire by rubbing two boy scouts together.

I like to think that in the wilderness we meet our ancestors, because apart from our technology and heads full of technical knowledge, most of which is of little lasting significance, our common spiritual, emotional, physical, and relational needs have been the same since Adam left the Garden.  Further, the importance of the health and fruitfulness of the creation is as important now as it ever was.  They could not—and we cannot—remain healthy without good air, good water, good soil, adequate shelter, and health-giving foods—access to which modern technology may as much threaten as provide.

Dean and St. Francis

Having, as most of us do, a pride of the present, we find ourselves irrationally disconnected from the past—somehow thinking that no forebear would have much to offer us moderns.  Yet if we did find ourselves in a raging thunderstorm on a wilderness mountaintop, we’d quickly learn that we are fundamentally no different from any other person living today—or yesterday. The fears, desires, and temptations of the first human beings were at heart no different from ours.  The wild is one of the most important venues for compelling us to recognize what is most significant in life and what is common to all people of all ages.

In the same clothes, speaking the same language, I believe we’d find Saint Francis, William Penn, and John Muir certainly far wiser and astute companions on life’s journey than Bill Gates or Steve Jobs.  Jacques Ellul reminds us of this in his book The Technological Bluff:

[Modern technology] causes us to live in a world of diversion and illusion. . . .  It finally sucks us into this world by banishing all our ancient reservations and fears.

So among its many other values, a walk in the wild links us in an unbroken chain with all who have gone before. Valuing and preserving our natural parks and wilderness areas will permit our descendants to do the same.

See you outdoors!

Dean

It’s exactly twenty years this year since I became an “official” commentator on the creation and the Christian faith.  Then living in Fullerton, California, I had just completed a two-year contract as a staff writer for Biola University.  A few years before that, I was director of communication for Bibles for India—during which time I did a great deal of research on the New Age Movement and the influence of Eastern religion in America.  What distressed me in particular was the way that the big nature agencies like the Sierra Club and the Audubon Society were giving lots of coverage to Eastern thought and suggesting that it might provide the best “spiritual” underpinning for grasping the mystery of the natural world.

A one-time member of the Sierra Club, I was particularly stunned by an official Sierra Club “Environmental Health Sourcebook” titled Well Body, Well Earth published in 1983.  It pretty much wrote off Christianity as having any significance in dealing with the world’s environmental problems and suggested that Buddhism, Hinduism, Native American mysticism, and Transcendental Meditation along with communion with Gaia, the spirit of the earth, were more apt to give us a true understanding of the mystery of existence and our relationship to the earth.  One chapter even provided prayers that you could offer to Gaia.  The very next year saw the publication of the bestseller Out On A Limb by Shirley MacLaine in which she told the story of her conversion to Eastern mysticism.

My reaction to all of this was to think to myself, “We have let secular humanism explain to us the meaning of the universe for decades, and now we are turning to Eastern religion to give us the explanation.”  There was no room any more for a Creator God who spoke all things into existence and continues to maintain the integrity of the cosmos.  It was then that I realized what a prophet Francis Schaeffer had been in his book Pollution and the Death of Man: The Christian View of Ecology, in which he warned that if the Church did not become an active force in the issue of caring for creation, pantheism would become the religion of the Environmental Movement.  So in further conversation with myself I asked, “Why don’t we have a Christian nature agency that is entirely based on the biblical worldview and honors our Creator from the start?

Out of that thought, with long and prayerful consideration and the help of many financially and organizationally, I was able to found the Christian Nature Federation in 1989.  The story of that three-year endeavor could fill a book, but the upshot is that it could not make it financially, and we had to close up shop in 1992.  One reason that it failed, among several, was my fundamental mindset that CNF would be a nature appreciation society that recognizes the biblical Creator, but would not deal with environmental issues.  I had no inkling that God would step into the endeavor and change me, change my heart, and change the direction of the organization to one committed to creation care.  And as many of my friends from that era have since said, CNF and its message came ten years too soon.  Because the New Age Movement and secular science had made caring for creation either an Eastern concept or a totally godless endeavor, the Church simply was not ready to accept creation care as a legitimate aspect of the Christian worldview; so our constituency and our support just faded away.

Now, however, our caring for God’s creation is rising to the top as an important part of living biblically in our world—and as a part of our message.  And, fortunately, the Sierra Club and secular  scientists are now looking to followers of Christ to provide both the worldview and the hope needed to address an increasingly degraded creation—a hope expressed passionately by N. T. Wright in his book Surprised By Hope and in dozens of other Christian books, magazines, websites, and theological journals.   Joseph Sittler expressed it well almost 25 years ago:

A believer is an evangelist primarily by who he is and how he lives—not by what he says. What he says is important; but unless his speaking tallies with what he is and does, he had better keep quiet. [See my article "Caring For Creation, or Presenting the Gospel"]

Twenty years down the road, much of what I dreamed of for CNF has become a reality through my work with RBC Ministries and now with this specific blogsite.  God has indeed been faithful to His promises.

See you outdoors!

Dean

Our youngest son and his wife, Dave and Ruth, live in South Carolina; so Marge and I travel from Grand Rapids to Columbia at least once a year.  On the way we enjoy stopping at some of the major craft centers between here and there—places like Tamarack in Beckley, West Virginia, and several shops and stores in Berea Kentucky.

Since I’m an amateur woodworker, I’m often struck with amazement over the wonderful workmanship of the wood crafts on display in these places.  Typically the pieces I want to adopt and take home run in the $2000 range!  To date we have not adopted any, but a comment I’ve made more than once to Marge is that I wish we had the means to purchase these pieces if for no other reason than to reward the artisans for their painstaking craftsmanship—for their unadulterated good work.

Living not far from Berea is Wendell Berry of Henry County,  Kentucky, one of our era’s most astute commentators on the importance of carefully and purposely incorporating the natural world into our local communities.  Here is how Wikipedia characterizes his thinking:

His nonfiction serves as an extended conversation about the life he values. According to Berry, the good life includes sustainable agriculture, appropriate technologies, healthy rural communities, connection to place, the pleasures of good food, husbandry, good work, local economics, the miracle of life, fidelity, frugality, reverence, and the interconnectedness of life. The threats Berry finds to this good life include: industrial farming and the industrialization of life, ignorance, hubris, greed, violence against others and against the natural world, the eroding topsoil in the United States, global economics, and environmental destruction.

When I see truly good work being done in any form, I often think of what Berry has said about good work:

By denying spirit and truth to the non-human Creation, modern proponents of religion have legitimized a form of blasphemy without which the nature- and culture-destroying machinery of the industrial economy could not have been built—that is, they have legitimized bad work.

Good human work honors God’s work.  Good work uses no thing without respect, both for what it is in itself and for its origin.  It uses neither tool nor material that it does not respect and that it does not love.  It honors nature as a great mystery and power, as an indispensable teacher, and as the inescapable judge of all work of human hands.  It does not dissociate life and work, or pleasure and work, or love and work, or usefulness and beauty.  To work without pleasure or affection, to make a product that is not both useful and beautiful, is to dishonor God, nature, the thing that is made, and whomever it is made for.  This is blasphemy: to make shoddy work of the work of God. But such blasphemy is not possible when the entire Creation is understood as holy and when the works of God are understood as embodying and thus revealing his Spirit.

In the Bible we find none of the industrialist’s contempt or hatred for nature.  We find, instead, a poetry of awe and reverence and profound cherishing, as in these verses from Moses’ valedictory blessing of the twelve tribes:

And of Joseph he said: ‘Blessed of the LORD is his land, With the precious things of heaven, with the dew, And the deep lying beneath, With the precious fruits of the sun, With the precious produce of the months, With the best things of the ancient mountains, With the precious things of the everlasting hills, With the precious things of the earth and its fullness, And the favor of Him who dwelt in the bush (Deut. 33:13-16, NKJV).

Wendell Berry.  Christianity and the Survival of Creation. Pantheon Books, 1992-3.

Why not take the time to become familiar with Wendell Berry.  You will be challenged and wonderfully instructed.

See you outdoors!

Dean