Advent 2: A Way in the Wilderness
It never fails that when I post a picture of a snake on social media, someone comes along to comment and tell me how much they fear or hate snakes. Beyond wondering why such people don’t keep scrolling–after all, I wouldn’t have posted the picture if I didn’t like it–one such interaction recently made me pause.
I’d posted a picture of a copperhead from the nashville zoo because the snake was awake and up against the glass, watching passersby from one intricately colored eye. I was able to get a decent picture through the glass from mere inches away, something I’ll never achieve with my phone in the wild as one ought to maintain a respectful distance from venomous snakes.
After someone had come along and commented on their hatred of all snakes, I reminded them of snakes' essential role in the ecosystem and invited them to zoom in on the snake's eye and appreciate how cool the coloration and vein pattern was. This invitation is really without risk as this is a picture of a snake that can in no way harm them, and what’s more, it was a picture of a snake behind glass. This is the safest way to examine a snake I could imagine, and instead of continuing in hate, why not find something to appreciate in this creature that shares our world?
Their response? “No.”
There’s not much left to say after that, but it made me sad. We as a species have adopted attitudes of indifference, fear, and hatred towards many essential species, and also tolerate or embrace attitudes of utilitarianism and domination and entitlement towards the natural world which we view as “other.”
I’ve written before regarding relationships to other humans that there is no “other” and now I think we need to realize that metaphor extends to all creation. We are inextricably interconnected as a part of nature: we humans are nature, not in its totality, but in our totality. All humans are nature, but nature is much bigger than just humans.
To reclaim this understanding among those of us in a post-industrialized world especially those of us whose ancestors passed down colonization as “biblical” truth in many cases means that we will have to step beyond what we’ve been taught, step beyond where we feel safe, and confront that which we’ve been taught to fear or even hate. This is essential for us to reclaim our relationships with all of creation because utilitarianism towards what we term “natural resources” actually extends towards everything, including humans. We who are immersed in capitalism sometimes fail to see how we’ve been taught to view everything from a monetary standpoint. We devalue labor that doesn’t earn money, and even devalue ourselves when what we do doesn’t produce enough income. We don’t make time for rest and reconnection because there’s no direct monetary component to those things. These mentalities fuel everything from a dramatically overworked population to ableism and intolerance of anyone who doesn’t fit the sort of average profile to be “useful” to society.
I recently saw yet another writer coming from a Christian perspective quoting Isaiah 43:19 “I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth; do you not perceive it? I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert.” I’ve written before about my issues with Isaiah 43, and you might say my issues have gotten even more specific as people continue to lean into a misunderstanding of these passages. This verse in particular gets misused in that people assume that the wilderness and the desert (sometimes translated wasteland) are the same thing.
The wilderness comes from a word that basically means unfenced pastures or woodlands. This wilderness is where shepherds would have guided the sheep to graze or cowherds taken their cows. This is not the same as the dry land that needs water to come to life: they are two completely different words in both Hebrew and English. I think it is only our disconnection from the natural world–our misunderstanding of ourselves as somehow not a part of nature–that allows us to conflate the two.
The writer whose post I saw said something about how for God to make a way in the wilderness you have to be where you don’t want to be. Of course from my perspective, I was like, what? The wilderness is exactly where I want to be, in fact, I’d like more wilderness in my life.
Of course when I go into the backcountry, I don’t just bushwack my way through the woods. I follow established trails and camp on established campsites. I do this because it allows me to experience the wilderness without increasing impact on the forests I’m visiting. And so from my experience, I see this verse as God saying, “I’m going to blaze a trail through the backcountry so you know where to go, so you don’t get lost.” I’m experiencing tended wildernesses in most of my travels.
In my hiking adventures, I have great appreciation for the trail-blazers and trail-maintainers who make my trips possible. Parks and trailways rely on a network of passionate volunteers who not only keep the trails passable, but remove invasive species and help the forestlands continue to flourish. In these small areas, we see humans moving into right relationship with the forests–moving back into them. These relationships are something indigenous peoples of most regions have known back in pre-industrial days at least.
I have to think my own ancestors from the alps in France and the vast wilds of Scotland also knew these things once upon a time before populations were consolidated into cities, work became mechanized and the natural world became fuel and supplies fed to the factories that choked the air in London and Glasgow and many other cities for years before anything was done about it. And this of course was fueled by the rich and their corporations that burned humanity along with the wood they cut and the coal they blew up mountains in Appalachia to get to. Factory workers were expendable. Look up the matchstick girls strike of the late 19th century and the radium girls from the early 20th century who were dying because of radiation exposure while the corporations that profited off their bodies resisted change for years while more girls grew sick and died. And those are just two examples among many.
In Finding the Mother Tree, Suzanne Simard writes of her discoveries of the interconnectedness of the forests. Trees don’t compete for resources as we once thought they did, rather they are a cooperative society sharing nutrients and water both with their own relatives, and their neighbors. They communicate information over a vast network we are only beginning to understand.
Foresting practices on this continent, at least in the United States and Canada ignored this for years and even continue to ignore this in some places. They clear-cut the forest, razed everything to the ground and then planted non-native, fast-growing firs and pines in stiff rows, with roots in plugs of soil that didn’t allow them to connect into the networks of the existing forest. They applied capitalism to the forest and the forests died. Profit in the near future is all that drives too many of our decisions to this day, and our world suffers.
The foresters poisoned what they viewed as weed trees in pursuit of a more profitable forest. These corporations stood on the shoulders of their colonizing ancestors that attempted to wipe out all the indigenous nations on this continent: sweeping aside people they viewed as disposable in their pursuit of profitable lands. There’s direct lines from indigenous genocide to deforestation to the rape of the mountains for coal to the deaths of factory workers: all were viewed as either obstacles to be removed or resources to be abused in the persuit of the fastest and most profit for those in power.
Ultimately this is stupid as it’s not sustainable forever, but too long have we gone on acting as though we don’t owe anything to the future. Completely disconnected from the rest of nature, we’ve forgotten the lesson of the mother tree who shares resources with offspring and neighbors alike, receiving gifts in return. And when she dies, she sends a final burst of nutrients and information to her offspring so that nothing is lost, but continues. Then in death, when her great form eventually falls and begins to decompose, seedlings sprout within her and she becomes a nurse log, still making the environment better for the next generation as it comes up behind her.
Should this not be our goal as well? We can see this pattern replicated among some humans: the ones we still quote, the ones whose work lives on in our hearts and minds and our own work. Those we call our ancestors not in a biological sense, but in a spiritual sense.
This Advent, in this time of darkness and rest that calls us to reflection, let’s ask ourselves what legacy we are leaving when it’s our turn to become ancestors. Is our spiritual legacy one that will sustain the work of the next generation? Is it one that will replenish what’s been depleted and restore what has been destroyed? Will saplings sprout in our wake when it's our turn to become one with the soil from which all life springs?
Resources:
On wilderness, desert, and wasteland
Line by line Hebrew to English of Isaiah 43:19
Story about the matchstick girls strike
Alabama Trailblaze Challenge 2023
Last year, I decided my words for the year were “find out,” and one of the things I wanted to find out was if I could pull off the 2022 Trailblaze challenge. And I did! Hiking by myself on all those training hikes showed me a lot of personal strength and I went into wanting to help kids but it still felt like more of a personal goal.
This year, as I sign back up in the midst of studying the interconnectedness of the forests I hike through, I realize that we are all connected: connected to each other, connected to the rest of life on this planet for better or worse.
Hiking last year with several hundred others, getting to know them on the hike weekend, hearing their stories, I realized how much of a difference it makes when we all come together. Raising over a million dollars seems like a lot when we’re raising $2500 to $5000 a person, but when you multiply that by hundreds of hikers and thousands of donors, suddenly it’s achievable. We raised over a million last year, and we’re setting out to do it again. And you can be a part of the story! Some of you already have been, and I’m so grateful that you’re back to do it again.
I am excited to take on this year’s Trailblaze Challenge. In addition to the physical challenge, I have committed myself to raising the critical funds necessary for Make-A-Wish to grant the one true wish for each eligible child with a critical illness. With your help, it’s possible.
Did you know that Make-A-Wish grants more than 15,000 wishes nationwide every year? That’s a lot, yes. But that’s only 50% of the eligible kids. Every hour of every day, on average, three children are diagnosed with a critical illness. Every one of these kids needs a wish to give them strength and help them heal. I’m fundraising so more deserving kids and their families can know the true happiness, relief and renewal a wish can bring.
These essential wishes are only possible because of supporters like you. Together, we are transforming lives- One wish at a time!
Will you help me support Make-A-Wish by donating today?
Reclaiming Your Wild
Visit this post to learn more about hiking and backpacking retreats where we reconnect with the wild in ourselves and learn to read the Book of Nature. Coming Fall of 2023.
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Substack now has chat in the app!
In an effort to be a more robust media ecosystem, Substack has created an app that now lets you see all your subscriptions in a feed, as well as chat with your favorite authors and other subscribers who read them! Head over to your app store, or click here and download that for a more complete experience.
Return of the Poisoned Bible Project
I don’t know about you, but I have a tendency to think I can do more than I can actually do. Far from the initial monthly installments I envisioned, I have only managed to dig into three of the many thorny texts you all submitted to the survey (which is still open so keep it up!).
I suppose writing a whole book in there is a possible excuse, but I do want to get better at both regular thoughts here for the newsletter and more regular PBP episodes as well. And so I began the way I often do, not with examining the texts, no, but with designing a spiffy new logo! It shows my determination, I think ;-)
So I’m pleased to announce PBP Episode 4: Spare the Rod: Authoritarianism and Childism (What we get wrong about proof texting those “discipline” verses) will be coming January 8th, 2023. I know that’s a ways out still, but as I’m returning to my Advent series tradition, I needed to push it beyond those articles.
Also! All past and future episodes can be found here in the new section I created if you want to browse them (there is one I couldn’t move because evidently when the audio and text are together, they get stuck to the main channel only, but I’ve created internal links in the articles so navigation is still fairly seamless).
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Anna Elisabeth Howard writes highly caffeinated takes on shalom as a lens for everything from her front porch in Hendersonville, TN where she lives with her husband and two sons. She is a community organizer and movement chaplain with a background in youth and family ministry and is a graduate of Fuller Theological Seminary. An avid hiker and backpacker, many thoughts start somewhere in the middle of the woods, or under a waterfall. She is a regular contributer to Earth & Altar and her latest book is Inward Apocalypse: Uncovering a Faith for the Common Good.
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