Watershed Discipleship: An Ancient Path

A Blog by Todd Wynward
  Author of The Secrets of Leaven

[The fourth in a series on Watershed Discipleship]

There is a covenant that undergirds our lives.  Like a watershed, it’s about blessings, it’s about relationships, and it’s about limits. Much of the time, we oh-so-independent, uber-mobile North Americans forget this covenant we have with creation. We who suffer from the disease of affluenza tell ourselves we’ve earned the benefits we receive; as privileged perpetrators of the global economy, we think it our God-given right to acquire whatever we want, whenever we want, from wherever we want, without reflecting on the real cost.

But our tradition tells us a different story.  The Hebrew people began as habiru, wanderers who came to know a deeply covenanted relationship with their God. In the ancient story of Exodus, Yahweh frames it this way: “I will take you for my people, and I will be your God [6:7].”  It’s a covenant, a shared promise that has responsibilities on both sides.  For us moderns who aren’t used to limits, God might need to say it in a few more ways, to get it into our thick skulls: I shall provide for you an abundant world, and you shall rejoice in my provision.  I shall create a world full of many creatures, and you shall find your right place among them.

Genesis tells us that Yahweh, in a deeply intimate tone, says “I will establish…an everlasting covenant between me and you and your descendants [17:7];” in doing so, the land of Canaan becomes an “everlasting possession [17:8].”

Land as possession? Booyaa, we North Americans say.  We love that concept.  To us, who commodify everything, the scripture clearly tells a tale of God giving his favorite people a chunk of natural resources to do with as they please, to exploit as they want and discard when done.

Except God didn’t.  God gave the land as an everlasting possession, which is a permanent relationship with a place, an entrusted legacy for a body of humans to exist in covenanted right relationship with a place for generations. That’s watershed discipleship. It’s communion with a particular bioregion. And it’s been going on for as long as people have told stories around campfires.

With covenanted right relationship in mind, I’d like to look at Psalm 104 with new eyes.  Protestant preachers, like noted scholar Charles Spurgeon, have a serious history of relegating Psalm 104 to beatific poetry, calling it “lofty” and “one of the longest sustained flights of the inspired muse.” Spurgeon was much closer to its core teaching when he said this Psalm “sings sweetly of both creation and providence.”

That’s what it’s about: Providence.  Don’t underestimate how much this psalm can reprogram your hard-wired capitalist psyche. Read it more than once, let it creep into you.  2500 years ago, the author of this song was expressing covenanted right relationship.  In response to God’s flowing providence, how does the psalmist say we are to act? To say thank you with every breath; to make a practice of trust; to embrace God’s will; and to let all selfishness disappear.

This Psalm is long.  I’m going to do two things that are a bit different: I’m going to present only excerpts—not the whole thing—and I’m going to present it as translated by Buddhist writer Stephen Mitchell. These two shifts from convention help me hear the Psalm’s power with new ears. 

It starts as an ecstatic thank-you letter to God:

You water the hills from the sky;
             by your care the whole earth is nourished.
You make grass grow for the cattle
             and grains for the service of mankind,
To bring forth food from the earth
             and bread that strengthens the body,
oil that makes the face shine
             and wine that gladdens the heart.
You plant the trees that grow tall,
             pines, and cedars of Lebanon,
on which many birds build their nests,
             and the stork in the topmost branches.
The mountains are for the wild goats;
             the cliffs are a shelter for the rock squirrels.
You created the moon to count months;
             the sun knows when it must set.
You make darkness, it is night,
             the forest animals emerge.
The young lions roar for their prey,
             seeking their food from God.
The sun rises, they withdraw,
             and lie down in their dens.
Man goes out to his labor
             and works until it is evening.
All [creatures] depend on you
             to give them food in due time.
You open your hands—they gather it;
             you give it—they are filled with gladness.
You send forth your breath—they are born,
              and with them you replenish the earth.
Your glory will last forever;
              eternally you rejoice in your own works.
I will sing to you at every moment;
              I will praise you with every breath.
How sweet it is to trust you;
              what joy to embrace your will.
May all selfishness disappear from me,
              and may you always shine from my heart.

--Excerpts from Psalm 104: 10-35

It starts as an ecstatic thank-you to Yahweh—for God’s part in the bargain--but it ends in a revolutionary promise to do our part: “How sweet it is to trust you…May all selfishness disappear from me, and may you always shine in my heart.”  Trusting in enoughness, rejoicing in the gifts we are given, finding our bioregional place as one species among many: these are the tasks of the watershed disciple.  It’s an ancient path—as old as the covenanted right relationship discovered by the wanderinghabiru—but it just might be the way that leads us back to God’s dream of right living.

[Note to my loyal readers out there: No, you didn’t miss a post.  I just decided to write about something other than what I’d planned!  Forgive, if you can.  I was inspired.--TW]

Watershed Discipleship: An Improbable Movement

A Blog by Todd Wynward
  Author of The Secrets of Leaven

[The third in a series on Watershed Discipleship]

There’s a profound environmental movement beginning to bubble up in an unlikely place: the Mennonite church.

I don’t have an easy relationship with institutional Christianity.  All too often, organized religion ends up supporting the warlike tendencies, ravenous greed and socioeconomic inequities that Jesus wanted to liberate us from.

Knowing this, I became a Mennonite fifteen years ago.  Why?  Well, frankly, if you’re interested in participating with God’s dream to make earth as heaven, Mennos are one of the best outifits going. Despite a lot of human inconsistency and moral weakness, for five hundred years the Mennonite tradition has taken seriously the idea of following a radical Jesus.  This has led to all types of embarrassing, Empire-defying stances: civil disobedience, refusing to bear arms, intentional simplicity, forgiving murderers, befriending the poor, practicing mutual aid, and engaging deeply in global peacemaking. Now, not all Mennonites are guided by such values, to be sure. But many are. Radical discipleship is in the tradition’s roots; it’s in the blood.  Fifteen years ago, when I encountered a pocket of inspiring Mennonites doing their broken best to practice the Jesus Way in the neighborhoods of Albuquerque, I was hooked.  I wanted to be one of them.

An undomesticated Anabaptist

I like Mennonites most because they have a long history of developing parallel societies in the shadow of Empire. My wife and I try to do that too: we live in a yurt in the Sangre de Cristo mountains near Taos, New Mexico. My friends and I milk goats, shear sheep, plant trees, and try to grow a lot of our food in the high desert. My wife and I each have more than two decades of experience as wilderness educators, river guides and camp directors. Both of us have spent more than a thousand days—three years of our lives—in open country and in wilderness, sleeping under the stars.  More than once we have been called feral. Last week, a citified visitor from Philadelphia giggled in awe when she entered our small dwelling, and immediately started snapping photos.  She simply couldn’t believe we use a composting toilet and carry water to our house by hand in buckets, like millions of people across the world.

Before you get too impressed, let’s be clear: we’re nothing but pretenders.  My family still has laptops and a cappuccino maker, cell phones and Netflix. We daily take our son to soccer practice in a Prius and monthly drive a hundred miles to shop at the nearest Trader Joe’s.  Even though we homestead in the high country, we’re still entangled in Empire, as much a part of the system as anyone.  Which is why my encounter last month with other Mennonites hungry for transformation was so life-giving.

Did not our hearts burn within us?

Picture this: July 2013, downtown Phoenix, AZ, me at my first national Mennonite Convention.  During the last hours of the week-long event, about a dozen of us gathered from across the nation, hastily organizing our own meeting on white plastic chairs in a faceless food court. We came together as Mennonites to see we could do regarding climate change.  We came together as North Americans hoping to transform our policies, our perspectives and our lifestyles.  We came together wanting Mennonites to repent from our culture’s eco-cidal madness; we came together wanting ourselves and our churches to practice watershed discipleship, as followers of a God who loves all of creation.

What began as a hasty assembly evolved into a sacred circle.  Spirit moved strongly amongst and through us.  Together we listened attentively and spoke prophetically. Here we were, at an institutional gathering for an institutional church, and transformation was filling the air. No lie—I was caught up. Potential for a new reality blossomed in my cynical heart.

Where there is no vision, the people perish.

At the end of our meeting, the dozen of us departed to our own scattered parts of the continent, yet we did not feel alone.  We now held a common vision: a not-so-distant future filled with congregations across North America embodying watershed discipleship, changing our society from the inside out.

Now I want to ask you, dear reader: Will you be part of this vision? You can be if you help your community live out four key traits:

◦       Practice bioregional adaptation, seeking to craft sustainable lifestyles that fit within the gifts and limits of our watersheds;

◦       Enact structural mitigation, resisting eco-cidal institutions and policies that threaten the health of our vital life systems;

◦       Actively explore and implement alternative institutions and appropriate new technologies that foster healthy regional economies;

◦       Embody a spiritual resiliency, sharing and living a scripturally-grounded, Jesus-following, earth-honoring, despair-erasing Christianity.

How to get there from here? 

How do we become the church we want to be--the watershed disciples that our God is yearning for us to become? Our group is not sure, but we have some places to start.  However, dear reader, that is a topic for another day.  Tune in next time as I share my exciting conversations with Ched Myers and Luke Gascho, and also share the inspirational actions and ideas of Sheri Hostetler from the Bay Area, Anita Amstutz, Donna Detweiler, Ken Gingerich and Andy Gingerich from Albuquerque, Joel Miller from Columbus, and Steve Heinrichs from all the way up in Vancouver!

Watershed Discipleship: Region As Rabbi

A Blog by Todd Wynward
 Author of The Secrets of Leaven

[The second in a series on Watershed Discipleship]

Watershed discipleship defies Empire-based thinking, and converts us to Sabbath living. Sabbath living, writesChed Myers, “is about gift and limits: the grace of receiving that which the Creator gives, and the responsibility not to take too much, nor to mistake the gift for a possession.”

This is what Jesus meant when he said the meek shall inherit the earth (Matthew 5:5). The meek—those who do not grasp and hoard, those who do not think too highly of their own importance and needs—these are the ones who understand the blessing of creation.

Try this on:  Does being a Jesus disciple today require one to also be a watershed disciple?  I’m starting to say yes. “Consider the lilies of the field,” the Master encouraged (Matthew 6:25). Jesus was saying model your life upon this aspect of nature at your fingertips, be a student of God’s creation that thrives in your watershed. 

So what might watershed discipleship look like?  I’ve spent the last several years living into this question.  It’s a question of both perspective and practice: Seeing differently leads to acting differently.  As I learn to re-inhabit the place I live, I’m seeing my region as my rabbi in three specific ways.

Watershed as Sustainer, Teacher, and Corrector.  Try on this idea: All of my food needs, my watershed can provide.  Sounds crazy?  It does to me. I mean, I know most of humanity for all of history were sustained by their watersheds, but those were primitive people, primitive times. What about my Italian parmesan and my Florida orange juice? What about my olive oil and coconut milk? 

Can all the items my family loves be sourced in my bioregion?  I seriously doubt it. But this line of inquiry leads me to pursue two questions.  First: How much of what my family desires can be sourced from our watershed?  In the high deserts of New Mexico where I live, the answer seems bleak.  For my family to obtain what we like eating, I’d have to drive hundreds of miles before I found the first orange tree or avocado orchard.  This leads me to a second question: To what extent can we become creatures who thrive within the limits of our bioregion?  In other words, to what extent can we adapt?

Wait—me, adapt my wants to my watershed? As an entitled American consumer steeped in the values of Empire, this suggestion is not only absurd; it is scandalous.  I’m trained to buy whatever I want whenever I want, without a second thought to planetary consequences.  To be asked to limit my lifestyle, to curb my appetites, fills a part of me with indignant fury and fear. I’m an American, dammit! I want to roar.

Yet my watershed, my rabbi, corrects my spoiled behavior. Just like in any master-apprentice relationship, my rabbi corrects me as part of my training, just as any master would refine and re-form an immature and out-of-shape disciple.  This is a kind of conversion, metanoia, the transformation of worldview and habits that early followers of Jesus underwent. They were taught to walk away from the values of Empire and instead care for the poor, love their neighbors, and anticipate a modest bounty of daily bread.  These age-old precepts were central to the teachings of Jesus; they are equally central to the teachings of my watershed. They cause me to look anew at the two troubling and transformative questions raised earlier: What can my watershed provide? How can I adapt my wants?

A few years ago, some neighbors and I decided to have some fun with these questions. Instead of bemoaning the arid sparseness of northern New Mexico’s high country, we began to explore what kinds of food sources could thrive in our dry mountain environment.  At the same time, with a perverse joy, we began to break from Empire-based thinking, and explore if we could learn to be happy with what our watershed provided.  My ranching friend, Daniel, has managed small herds to see which livestock could thrive with minimal inputs while being maximally useful to us.  What has he found?  Goats and sheep, we want to keep.  They adapt well to our bioregion, are fairly easy to manage, and provide milk, cheese, meat, kefir and yogurt.  But yaks?  Not so much. After five years of experimentation and hard work, Daniel concluded that they’re substantially more trouble than they’re worth.  As for vegetables and fruits, we’ve found success with plenty of the usual fare—carrots, onions, beets, tomatoes, zucchini, apples, plums, greens galore.  Also, under the guidance of my mentor gardener Seth, I’ve adapted my habits to appreciate hand-ground cornmeal, many new types of beans, high-altitude quinoa, plum preserves, wild amaranth and lamb’s quarters, sorrel, kale chips, broccoli leaves, and varieties of squash and potato previously untasted.

I’m finding that many of my life practices—habits formed unconsciously growing up within Empire’s culture of excess--have no part in the life of a watershed disciple, nor of a serious  Jesus follower.  Even as I slowly transform, however, a small part of me wants to remain an unconscious and self-absorbed consumer, a well-trained cog of Empire.  Are you feeling it too? We both know it’s easier to remain a spoiled child instead of becoming a responsible adult. Yet in this “watershed” moment of history—with our existence in the balance--it’s clear our watersheds are calling us to do something old-fashioned: repent, turn around.  To exist within the limits of our watersheds, we’ll need to release our attitudes of entitlement and retract our rude-boy appetites.  To what extent can we thrive within the bounty—and the boundaries—of our bioregions?  I honestly don’t know; for me, my addiction to affluenza is scarily strong.  But with my friends in my Lama Mountain community, I’m going to keep trying to learn from my watershed’s teachings, and see if we might find a good life within it.  Our other option? Stay unrepentant, keep purchasing whatever we want whenever we want, keep demanding that the world cater to our whims.  To do this, though, we’d need to consciously reject the teachings of the Master, and admit we’re greedy and reckless bastards whose needs are to be met at the expense of the planet.  Which option are you going to choose?

Watershed Discipleship: A Way Through?

A Blog by Todd Wynward
 Author of The Secrets of Leaven

[The first in a series on Watershed Discipleship]

In early July 2013, Todd Wynward sat down with author and activist Ched Myers to discuss the concept of watershed discipleship and dream about building an alliance among faith-based groups engaged in localized, bioregional living. Below are Todd’s reflections.

I have to agree with Ched Myers’ stark analysis of the current human condition:  modern society lies drugged in an “ecocidal slumber.”  We’re fully aware our actions are causing the corrosion of earth’s basic life-sustaining systems, and we know we have choices, yet we lay paralyzed, trapped by our compulsive habits and oh-so comfortable lifestyles.

Ched holds up a strange hope to our post-modern progressive paralysis: the Bible. He asserts that “the prophetic traditions indigenous to both testaments may alone be capable of rousing us” from our addictive malaise.

The Bible—our best spur toward urgent action? It’s an unconventional hope for most modern progressives who—for good reason—are leery of anyone declaring they’re “Bible-based.”  Yet Ched claims the Bible might be the best tool we’ve got to get modern America to drop the iPad and get off the collective couch.

It’s an interesting proposition.  Do the ancient scriptures hold enough social critique to radicalize slumbering evangelicals AND enough social credibility to galvanize cynical progressives?  Perhaps.  Ched thinks so.  He describes the power of the prophetic strands that weave through the Bible:

The reflective poems, warning tales, grand sagas and radical histories of scripture summon us to remember our origins and the ways of our ancestors; invite us to imagine and work for a restorative future, and call us to liberate and heal ourselves and our home places.

Reforms of habits--such as recycling and eating locally and shopping responsibly--are important, Ched affirms, but to become the people we need to be to face our environmental crisis, we’ll need to do much more:  we’ll need to practice transformed living through watershed discipleship.

Watershed discipleship? It’s an odd, almost jarring term, invoking and synthesizing two domains rarely joined in our imaginations: one scientific, the other religious.  Yet I’m becoming convinced it is exactly this kind of unitive consciousness—both data-driven and deeply spiritual--that is needed if we humans are to play any significant role in our planet’s healing. 

I’ve taken the liberty to change a word or two, but I agree wholeheartedly with Ched that those who aspire to watershed discipleship must embrace the following motto: “We will not save a place we do not love; we cannot love a place we do not know; we cannot know a place we have not inhabited.” Inhabiting a particular place—experiencing its characteristics and being formed by its constraints, its bounty and its boundaries—is essential to watershed discipleship.  It is the “re-placed” identity we as a species must vitally embody if we are to rouse from ecocidal slumber.

So what is watershed discipleship, exactly?  In talking to Ched this week, it became apparent that no one fully knows quite yet.  Watershed discipleship is an intriguing and powerful concept that could motivate us to move mountains of malaise and despair, but it will need some years of being embodied and explored by many of us before we arrive at a firm definition. I, for one, want to be part of the journey of discovery.  If inquiry into a deeper understanding of watershed discipleship interests you, join me in future blogs as I tackle the following topics:

• Region as Rabbi:  Watershed as Teacher, Sustainer, and Corrector

• Traits of a Watershed Disciple

• Reinhabitory Practices: Bioregional Covenants      & the Art of Re-place-ment

           Todd Wynward lives in a yurt at 8000’ elevation in the high desert 
            mountains outside of Taos, New Mexico.  Ched Myers lives closer to
            sea level near Ventura, California.  This is Todd’s first post in a series on
            Watershed Discipleship.

How have you been living called out?

A Blog by Todd Wynward
 Author of The Secrets of Leaven

[Part 4 in Going Cimarron, a series on Wilderness Spirituality]

The original Greek word for church—ekklesia—meant “the called out ones.”  How have you been living called out?

The church: a covenanted band of cimarrons?  Could it be that Jesus envisioned a social movement that was not a pillar of dominant society, but rather a drastic alternative to dominant society--a group of transformed people called away from a state culture of financial security, structural inequality and military might?

Most people who name themselves Christians today believe they’ve been called out from the world around them.  But in what ways? When I was a teenager, our earnest youth pastor once asked our high school group, “If being Christian was a crime, would there be enough evidence to convict you?”  

Back then, as a Southern California teen growing up in Reagan country, my answer came quickly. Enough evidence? Sure. I felt pretty confident in my walk with Jesus.  In the culture I was raised in, the evidence of a good Christian was all about personal piety and purity. Wasn’t I honest and kind?  Didn’t I do my best to avoid sexual temptation? Didn’t I skip parties where I knew there’d be smoking and drinking?  Besides that, I prayed for others every week at youth group, and had my own daily devotional time reading the Bible. I even shared the Gospel with friends at school, encouraging them to ask Jesus into their hearts so he could forgive their sins.

Sin in Greek is a term from archery, meaning “to miss the mark.”  Back then, I felt I was a good Christian because my goal was to stay pure in a polluted world.  Thirty years later, realizing how shackled I am to Empire-based thinking, I struggle all the time to be a follower of the Way.  I find myself missing the mark every day.  All too often I seek first my personal kingdom, rather than the kingdom of love and justice Jesus envisioned.  I say I want to love my enemy, but I go blithely about my daily business as my nation bombs other nations. I yearn to follow what my Rabbi taught in the sermon on the mount, but I still find myself worrying about tomorrow.  Tomorrow, and lots of other things: financial security, health care, college for my son, what people think of me.

Yes, I’m a cimarron child of God, tested in wilderness, someone who has been called out and who lives very differently than dominant society.  And I’m also an addict to Empire, compulsively drawn to personal greed, ego gratification, and a haunting callousness to the suffering of other people and the planet.  Too often I’m pursuing shiny gadgets instead of sharing food.

I need serious help to be the God-filled person I want to be.  I can’t do it alone.  I need to be part of a transformative ekklesia—a body of called-out ones, a covenanted band of cimarrons who support one another to embody a parallel society of the Jesus Way even in the shadow of Empire’s might.

I have a feeling that many of us need help, addicted as we are to the comforts and customs of our juggernaut civilization. To that end, I want to highlight three energizing communities in my neck of the woods—New Mexico--that are helping me to defy Empire’s pull through creative, abundant living:

Albuquerque Mennonite Church:  This urban congregation of 150 is not only deeply worshipful, but also is a campus of life-change.  Small groups not only get together for support and song, but also for more radical reasons such as exploring consumer habits and creating community-based solutions to relieve chronic credit-card debt.  Last week, AMC sponsored the “More With Less” Fest, a day-long event in a neighborhood park celebrating lifestyle choices members have made such as collective housing, salvage living, solar retrofitting, urban gardening and chicken farming.

Lama Mountain: This tiny rural mountain community on dirt roads near Taos, NM is a hotbed of cimarron activity.  People who grew up in the belly of Empire, trained to be good consumers like the rest of us, have defected from that narrative and are now striving to be generative producers in all aspects of their lives.  Some of the findings we’ve learned from our “experiments in living” are daunting:  I didn’t know until last year how much time it takes to cultivate and process a few pounds of beans that I could buy in the store for a few dollars.  But easy, unconscious consumption on the cheap is not our chief aim: rather, it is to re-learn right relationship and cultivate our own food sources, our own music, our own culture, our own definition of what makes abundant life.  Current initiatives includecommunity agriculture, farm & wilderness summer camps, and an Outward-Bound style public school; building and dwelling in yurts and earthen structures; goat milking, sheep shearing, and yak herding; wool processing and yarn making; flood irrigation of storage foods such as quinoa, heirloom beans, winter squash and mountain corn.  It’s not easy, but it feels very real.

Taos Initiative for Life Together [TiLT]: this intentional co-housing movement in downtown Taos is in a formative stage, with occupancy by 6-8 people expected to occur in August 2014.  Although a specific location has not been identified yet, it’s been extremely life-giving to conspire and dream about what we might become together.  TiLT’s motto is “reinventing the North American lifestyle, starting with our own.” As North Americans raised in Empire, can we practice a way of life that is less destructive, less maddening, and more satisfying?  By changing our habits and attitudes, can we find a better way to live? We hope so.  Similar to other neo-monastic communities in America, we’ll practice disciplines such as prayer, song, fasting, spiritual direction, open table fellowship, Sabbath and wilderness retreat.  Our members seek to embody “shade tree economics,” treating our finances as resources to be used for the common good.  Lastly, we plan to live out the values of the global “transition towns” movement, which encourages an energy-lean, time-rich, deeply satisfying lifestyle that does not depend so much on cheap oil nor the exploitation of people and the environment.

With these words, I come to the end of a four-part series on wilderness spirituality.  In wild uncolonized space, we can find our true selves as children of God, and as cimarron people—no longer so shackled by Empire--we can cultivate kingdom communities that stand in stark contrast to dominant culture.  But what might these communities and lifestyles look like?  

What kind of creative life choices are bold Jesus followers making in modern America today? This is the next topic I intend to pursue, in my daily life and in this blog. Join me in the inquiry!

Next Time:  How Then Shall We Live?

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.

You better get converted in the desert. Jesus did.

A Blog by Todd Wynward
 Author of The Secrets of Leaven

 [Part 2 in Going Cimarron, a series on Wilderness Spirituality]

I’m just going to say it:  Jesus needed a conversion experience. He found it in the desert.  He was an evolving and struggling being who went to the wilderness to undergo radical life-change. 

This statement would’ve been heretical to the religion of my childhood.  I grew up seeing Jesus as pre-made Messiah, born as God-in-flesh.  Sure, Christendom talked about Jesus being “fully human and fully God,” but let’s get serious:  any being who is fully God is not fully human, at least not like I’m human.

Luke 4:1  Jesus...was led by the Spirit in the wilderness.”

The ways the Bible presents Jesus’ testing in the wilderness leaves me wanting more. What really happened out there? No one was around to record the actual events, but according to the Gospel writers, none of the temptations seem to have perturbed Jesus much. Temptation, schmemptation. He refuses each enticement with a quick, wise response. It’s as if our perfect Son of God overcomes without any effort, learns nothing from the testing, says hasta la vista to the evil one trying to corrupt him, and then clocks back into society.

But if temptations weren’t a big deal, why go to the wilderness?  Why would it matter?

Try this on:  the temptations had to be a big deal.  Jesus went because he needed to change, to be converted.  Parts of him needed to die so God could fully enter.

It’s hard to deny that Jesus developed over time.  It’s there for all to see: “Jesus grew in wisdom and stature and in favor with God and humankind [Luke 2:52].” Despite Christendom’s tendency to call Jesus sinless and perfect, the Scriptures show he didn’t have such an exalted opinion of himself.  Just like us, Jesus knows he has a shadow side.  “Why do you call me good?” he asks in all three synoptic Gospels. “Only God is good.”

Even after his metanoia in the desert, doing the will of God did not always come easily to Jesus.  The most dramatic instance of this: Jesus’ agonizing, sleepless night in Gethsemane near the end of his life. “Take this bitter cup from me!” he rages in the darkness.  Just like us, at times he resists God’s call to selflessness.  “Haven’t I given enough?” I imagine he roars at the sky, ranting and crying and clawing at the earth.  His prayer is so intense the Scriptures say he sweated blood, turning the very stones red.  

These are not the actions and words of a pre-packaged Messiah.  In truth, I don’t want them to be.  His struggles matter. His life is so much more meaningful when I think of Jesus as a developing being. He screamed.  He resisted.  He evolved.  Just like we do.  He was called, time and time again, to become a bigger vessel for God.  Just as we are.

“The wilderness gave Jesus strength.  It is not simply a place of negation or temptation.  It is also a place of preparation and perception, absent of human power structures and controls, a wild place where supernatural forces move unfettered—a place that can empower, depending upon how the experience is handled.  Our wildernesses and deserts are not our endings.  It is the Spirit of God who leads us about in them.  They are our opportunities.” 

--remarks from the Renovare Spiritual Formation Bible.  Contributors: Richard Foster, Dallas Willard, Walter Brueggemann, and Eugene Peterson [1989].

So what did his wilderness experience do for Jesus? 

As Jim Douglass asks in the phenomenal little book Lightning East to West, what did Jesus find in the desert? 

I’m not sure, but I can make some guesses.

Richard Rohr asserts that if you are going to say ‘thy kingdom come,’ in the next breath you need to say ‘my kingdom go.’ I’m guessing Jesus did exactly that: in the wilderness he experienced radical emptying—kenosis—prior to being filled with an incredibly deep assurance of identity, purpose, abundance, and radical grace. Could it be that Jesus became his divine potential because of his testing in the desert? Could it be that—in the midst of his desert sojourn—Jesus experienced such profoundly deep union with God that he became one with God? 

My gut tells me yes, and the Scriptures resonate. It was only after his baptism in the desert by John that Jesus understood himself as an utterly beloved child of God. It was only after the wilderness that Jesus dared to name the Creator "Abba"--an intimate word we would translate as "Daddy," his one and only provider, source, guide and caretaker. Only after the wilderness did he call the universe abundant. Only after the wilderness did Jesus begin his public ministry of personal and social transformation, daring people to repent, to turn their lives from Empire and turn them over to an all-embracing, extravagant God, just as he had.

Now let's turn the question on us: do we need time in uncolonized wilderness to become more or our divine potential? 

In my life, I've spent more than 1000 nights sleeping out in wild places, and I've serpent more than a month at a time living and walking in mountains.  I know from experience that the wilderness exposes the false self: obsessions with self-importance, addictions to comfort, illusions of independence and control.  There are many places to learn these lessons, of course.  But once you learn to thrive in the wilds for weeks at a time with just what you can carry and find, you become a little more fearless and little more grace-filled.  Spending time in wilderness builds our trust in the abundance of God and the untamed gift economy that creation provides.  Empire starts to have less of a hold on you.

Wilderness helps us claim the radical stance of the prophet, base upon undomesticated communion with God.  Occupied and addicted as we are, from wilderness we gain the clarity to defy dominate culture, define authentic living, and practice creative cultural resistance.  A new life unshackled by Empire becomes possible, once way opens in wilderness.

Which brings us to next week's topic:

A Way Forged in the Wild--Sabbath Mind, Abundant Life