When despair for the world grows in me / and I wake in the night at the least sound / in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be, / I go and lie down where the wood drake / rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds./ I come into the peace of wild things/ who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief.../ For a time / I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.[1]
We in Colorado know how
restorative it is to walk in gratitude like this, among the beauties of the
natural world. How freeing it feels to give up our anxious striving for
possessions, success, or money .... and to rest in the simple joy of the divine
miracle of life all around us. Such is the grace-filled freedom that Jesus
seems to want for us.
And yet .... this poem also raises a deeper issue. Did you know that Wendell Berry later regretted the title: "The Peace of Wild Things?" Don was attending a live interview with Berry several years ago. A member of the audience asked the poet to read this poem, one of his earliest works. After reading it and hearing the heavy applause that followed, Berry asked for quiet. "When I go out in nature and observe the birds and other creatures," he commented, "I see them building nests, digging dens, feeding their young. They are domestic creatures, building peaceful lives. It is we humans who are the wild things," Berry pointed out. "We are the ones who have become "untethered from our nature; we are the ones who react with unnecessary violence, the ones who destroy the world around us. We are the wild things, not the animals."
In French, the translation for the English word "pets," is "animaux domestiques"—domestic animals. When we bring animals into our homes, that's when we consider them "domesticated." But what about their God-given place in Creation? We modern humans have divorced the natural world almost entirely, and in so doing have divorced our own natures. We've carefully set up spaces of human control and dominance. We've made artificial spaces that we consider as "ours." We dismiss the rest of the world as our "environment," a space apart from us, a space to be conquered, tamed, and brought under our "civilizing," yet destructive, thumbs.
Author Lilian Daniels, in an essay about animals, muses on their absence from certain areas of our lives. She tells the story about flying to Botswana to begin a safari. She looked down at the runway as the plane approached for landing. To her surprise, she saw safari guides on the ground, running up and down the tarmac to chase away a herd of giraffes, who were strolling around obliviously. The giraffes wouldn't leave until a lion also padded into the plane's path ... at which point the giraffes decided to move "a bit more aerobically toward the jungle." She remembers, "What made [this experience] unforgettable was not just the animals themselves, but that we had seen them somewhere they were not supposed to be, at a time we didn't expect them to be there."[2] Indeed, except for an occasional anxious pet in his carrier, we don't see animals in the airport, do we? The airport is instead entirely dedicated to that hurried, worried striving that Jesus discourages. I once saw a sparrow in the Louisville, Kentucky airport. She was pecking at Starbucks crumbs on the carpet at the gate. Everyone was taking pictures of her, as if they had never seen a sparrow before!
Airports, hospitals, prisons, schools, churches, even whole cities, are seen in our culture as "human territory." They belong to us, to manage as we please, and only "domesticated" animals are allowed, either on leashes or in cages. Growing up in Houston's concrete tangle, I don't think I ever even saw a cow up close until I was in college. Here at St. Ambrose, the only time I've seen an animal in the nave is when my daughter brought her Great Pyrenees to our Easter service last spring. (I heard that Kristy did capture a tarantula once, though, over by the choir section .... ?) In a previous parish, we once spent several frantic days trying to remove a dove who had gotten into the two-story narthex. When luring her outside with birdseed didn't work, the staff ran around swatting the air with uplifted brooms. We did worry that we might have been chasing away the Holy Spirit.
Today's psalm shows us a different world. In Psalm 104, each creature is described as living the "domestic" life that God intends. The birds build their nests; the goats climb in the mountains; the forest animals hunt at night .... and humans work the fields. All creatures move about in a harmonious whole. There's no opposition between the human world and the "wild." Tricia Tull, the author of Inhabiting Eden, writes that in Psalm 104, the "mountains and waters are not scenery for vacation admiration, but every living being's habitat, the world in which we are embedded."[3] Furthermore, the Hebrew bible has no word for either "nature" or "culture" and thus can't distinguish between the two. The only distinction is between the Creator and creation, between God, and all of us creatures-- human, animal, vegetable, and mineral—who all owe God "service and praise."[4] Remember, both humans and animals alike were created on the same day—the sixth day—in the creation story in Genesis.
Jesus, like Wendell Berry, invites us to "rest in the grace of the world and be free." In order to do that, though, Jesus says, we must return to our God-given place among the other creatures. We must relearn how to live according to our nature. We must learn the lessons that the animals teach us: lessons of trust in God's provision, lessons of making our home where God has placed us; lessons of openness to others, of sharing what we have. Can we learn? Well, this week's news certainly gives us hope.
Perhaps you've heard of the fifty Venezuelan refugees who were herded like cattle onto an airplane and shuttled away to a strange, unknown place. Believing that they were being cared for by those who lured them into buses and planes, believing that they were being taken to get jobs and work permits, the refugees soon learned that they had been political pawns, instead. Landing on the small island of Martha's Vineyard, unable to speak English, they wandered down the road, as out of place, vulnerable, and unwanted as those giraffes on the airplane runway. And yet, a small group of Episcopalians from a little parish like St. Ambrose refused to simply gawk at them and walk on by. These Episcopalians invited them into the church, fed them, respected them, advised them, gave them a place alongside their own.[5]
Yes, there is hope. We can learn. Thanks be to God!
[1] Wendell Berry, "The Peace of Wild Things." Found at https://onbeing.org/poetry/the-peace-of-wild-things/.
[2] Lillian Daniel, When "Spiritual but Not Religious" is not Enough (New York: Jericho Books, 2013), 130.
[3] Patricia K. Tull, Inhabiting Eden: Christians, the Bible, and the Ecological Crisis (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2013), 28-29.
[4] Ibid., 30.
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