A Way Forged in the Wild

A Blog by Todd Wynward
 Author of The Secrets of Leaven

 [Part 3 in Going Cimarron, a series on Wilderness Spirituality]

In the wild, we are able to claim the radical stance of the prophet.  

Unplugged and unpressured, we can gain the clarity to defy dominant consciousness, experience communion, find our true identity, and practice creative cultural resistance.

Check this out: Almost 3,000 years ago the people of Israel were shackled to the power of Babylon. Isaiah, one of their leaders, took the countercultural stance of the prophet and said to his people, “There is a voice calling:  in the wilderness, make straight a path for the Lord.” I believe Isaiah was saying: Away from Empire, clean up your act. You need to be remodeled.  In the wilderness, change your head, change your allegiance, change your life.

We moderns tend to spiritualize Isaiah’s challenging words, seeing wilderness as metaphor. Yet by avoiding a literal refashioning in the wilderness, we’re left with impotent Christianity. We’re left with millennia of earnest people who want to be followers of God but instead are hooked by the baubles of Empire. It’s awfully hard to be divinely transformed when we’re protected by, provided for, and utterly entranced by mother culture. Safe in Empire’s womb, we remain untested, entitled, and wholly dependent upon the teat of technocratic society. In this state, we can’t begin to give birth to the kingdom of God in our lives.  Held captive by Empire-based thinking, we can’t begin to imagine the society Jesus envisioned: a place where violence does not have dominion over human interaction; a place where money does not have dominion over human exchange; a place where humanity does not have dominion over nature's cycles and limits.  This kind of place can only be occupied by cimarrons, those who are free of Empire’s value system.

Try this on: the degree to which you are addicted to Empire is the degree to which you depend upon money, technology and mother culture to meet your needs for food, shelter, security, entertainment and identity.

The cimarron Desert Fathers who escaped the rise of Christendom in the 4th century took Isaiah’s words seriously.  Thomas Merton describes the earliest Desert Fathers as true anarchists: individuals who refused to let themselves be passively guided by a decadent state. Rather, in the desert they devoted themselves to crafting lives of integrity, refusing slavish dependence on conventional values.  

Merton asserts that the Desert Fathers’ flight to the desert was “a flight toward experience.” What experience would that be?

An experience of limits

For modern Americans, wildland wandering is a form of fasting. When I dwell in wild places, living apart from civilization, I can’t have it all: my needs must be met by what I can carry on my back and what I can find in my immediate environment. Kurt Hahn, the inspiring figure behind Outward Bound, knew that traveling in wilderness allowed groups of people to practice reasonable self-denial and crucial interdependence. This seems mundane enough, until we realize how countercultural such a situation is to the affluent modern person.  To not have anything I want, just a click or a phone call away? To need other people to meet my basic needs? To be unable to buy my way out of boredom or hunger or discomfort? In Empire, such a situation is considered primitive, backward, undesirable.  Wilderness gets us right with God by setting appropriate limits on our individual ego, activity and greed.

An experience of Sabbath communion

Rainstorms. Mountains. The time the sun rises. In the wilderness, there is so much we cannot control. We simply must adapt, and say thank you for the blessings we get. We cannot influence our surroundings through our reputation, power or wealth.  In nature, a cash economy is absurd.

Wilderness becomes a shabbat—sabbath, a time apart--for those of us addicted to Empire’s cult of busyness and control. It gives us an enforced holy rest, exposing our restlessness. For many of us who think ourselves so important in society, the idleness of wilderness time is a shock—no big events to plan, no conference calls to make, no big product deadlines to meet, no house to maintain, no movies to watch, no internet to check up on.  The Sabbath that comes from wilderness sojourn reminds us we are human beings, not human doings, and that we can love the world just as it is.

To adapt, appreciate, and accept—this is the heart of Sabbath communion, and the secret of being at home in wildlands.  But this is scandalous to Empire-based thinking. People addicted to Empire do not fit into untamed communities of plants and animals, as members of the community; instead, we tame them.  

As Ched Myers notes in Sabbath Economics, our entire culture is built around controlling, harnessing, and taming the natural environment, breaking nature into priced commodities to serve our purposes.  

Spending time in wilderness, however, can be our antidote.  In nature we discover rhythms of blessing—be it seasonal run-off in the arroyos or wild plums that continue to produce--and therein re-discover God's gift of “enoughness for the day.”  Wendell Berry speaks of the “Great Economy” of the natural world as being the Kingdom of God that Jesus spoke about.  25 years ago Berry proclaimed: “If humans choose to live in the Great Economy on its terms, then they must live in harmony with it, maintaining it in trust and learning to consider the lives of the wild creatures.” Prophetically, Berry advocated finding a Way in the wilderness—learning to adapt and thrive within the limits of one’s natural surroundings—that Ched Myers would later call “watershed discipleship” and I might term a “bioregional covenant.”

An experience of identity formation

“What the Fathers sought most of all was their true self, in Christ,” Merton writes of those early monastics who fled Christendom for the wild places.  The desert was the place where they could “reject completely the false, formal self,” fabricated under social compulsion under the Roman Empire, and find true self in God. “They accepted and clung to the primal assertions of the Christian tradition,” Merton explains, “yet sought a way to God that was uncharted and freely chosen, not inherited from others who had mapped it out beforehand.  They sought a God whom they alone could find.”  

In wilderness, we are new creatures.  Civilized labels no longer stick.  Questions of identity and purpose abound.  Why do I spend so much time performing an unfulfilling job?  Why do I worry so much about a future I can’t control?  Do I really need so much stuff?  Who am I beyond my job, my friends, my family, my nationality? Whose am I? And to paraphrase Mary Oliver: what am I going to do with this one wild and precious life?

In wilderness, distractions disappear, busyness recedes, social pressures diminish.  We’re left with one of the Bible’s core instructions: “Be still, and know that I am God.” Like the Desert Fathers, we can let go of the false, formal self to discover our true prophetic identities as children of an undomesticated God.

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As moderns, we are addicted to Empire-based thinking.  Even so, we who seek to follow the way of Jesus can learn a different kind of communion:  a hallowing of what is, a harmonious adaptation to life on earth.  The first, decisive step, Jim Corbett writes, is to become cimarron, untamed and at home in wildlands. Whenever we spend time in untamed places—learning to adapt to and accept the healthy parameters of a bioregion—we become a little less fearful, a little less addicted to Empire’s charms.

Almost 3,000 years ago, the prophet Isaiah told his people to become God’s people by making a Way in the wilderness. I think he meant that literally. We need to do that too. When we cease to work at taming the Creation and learn to accept the abundance of life on its own terms, a way opens for us to become active participants in an ancient exodus out of idolatry and bondage to Empire—a pilgrimage that continues to be conceived and born in wilderness.