Creating Wild Men?

As I see it, the primary religious task these days is to try to think straight.

-William Sloane Coffin

Idolatry is the peculiar province of the inflexible and unimaginative. American religion has its own brand of idolatry which remains largely unexplored. Like a feeding vulture, one of the foundational issues circles around the question “How are we to live in creation?” From that question emerge idols, rooted in deep faith needs. Some, in fact most, of American Christians are deeply moved by a need to belong. A full 75% of us identify our faith by family or tribe, i.e., by denomination. We need to belong. A smaller proportion of us have the need to quest, to challenge the prevailing conditions so carefully nurtured by those who derive identity from their faith. Each of these primal needs creates its own particular theological “spin.” And when that spin becomes fixed, it quite naturally leads to consequences. In fact, each has its own particular idolatry.

Excessive focus on belonging leads to the idol of “family.” All effort is on the preservation of the family unit, perhaps the congregational unit as well. All of the conversation is about well- being and safety. But the truth about this idolatry was laid bare by Alexander Solzhenitsyn in his famed Harvard Speech, where he said this: “Even biology knows that habitual extreme safety and well-being are not advantageous for a living organism. Today, well-being in the life of Western society has begun to reveal its pernicious mask.” Making families and congregations into suffocating havens is an idolatry.

So too, the focus on innovation and the search for answers leads to a kind of rootless and commitment free society. We see this in the reaction to the stifling “protestant ethic” of our culture. There are those who make a life out of resisting the common sense values of the dominant church culture. To make families and congregations laboratories of resistance is also an idolatry.

It is said of mental illness that is “doing the same, self defeating behavior again and again, expecting, this time, a different result.” We seem to be doing that in our religious shouting matches. The “Family Values” crowd and the “Wilderness Values” crowd seem to be shouting past one another. We are getting nowhere fast. Can there be another way?

Real men drill - Ellen Goodman

One neglected focus is the care and nurture of young men as they sort through their own ways of being in the world. We now have young men growing up in our world with no experience of any wildness at all. They are deeply suspicious, if not phobic about what lurks in nature. We also have young me who approach the natural world as their domain, using the tools of civilization to overwhelm, even attack the natural world. The tracks of 4 wheelers, the roar of Sea Do’s and the wanton destruction of wild places attest to omnipresence of this way of life. In July of 1994, I mused on this dilemma, writing this:

Sitting by the falls of the Ohio River, once one of nature’s mighty spectacles, now smelling of creosote, its backwaters stacked with coffee cups, tampon inserters,

six pack binders, the ever present plastic. The turd laden waters of the Ohio drift by hearty souls who angle for jackfish and the bottom feeding species. Nature, while under siege, still attracts the hunter gatherer. The call of the hunt is pursued even under the most adverse circumstances. I name this convergence the “missing husband.”

By this I mean that the model of manhood in nature is neither exploitation for the good of the family, nor is it found solely in nature for itself. Rather, manhood flourishes when it acts as husband. Husbanding is that peculiar role that both depends on natural gifts and at the same time resists their overuse. The husbanding paradigm is not of wild man protecting the family, nor is it of wild man protecting wildness. It is flexible, moving between each as it is require. In short, a husband approaches nature with judgment.

Husband is wildness with commitment, it is relationship. Building true manhood is about building commitment to the well being of the human family and to the divine root of the creation.

In wildness is the preservation of the world. -H. D. Thoreau

So what do we teach to young men in the wild? We teach mirroring and we teach creativity. Mirroring in creation is about finding within oneself the continuity between self and other. It is not a case of man against the wilderness. We have suffered at the hands of the opposition long enough. But it is about creation located in ourselves. It means finding creation in us. It means returning to the same places again and again so that a relationship can form. I have visited some wild places for over twenty years, before they began to reveal themselves to me. Watching the shifting vegetation in one spot year after, rejoicing in a new crop of wild fruit, sitting still enough to see an animal in its natural setting; these are ways of being in continuity with wildness. Creativity of heart is the compliment to continuity with wilderness. It is not enough to fall in love with the wilds. We must learn to express the wild in the culture as a whole. That means learning to do the arts in response to nature’s gifts.

Balanced men are husbands. A husband enters the wilds with love as his guide. He finds ways to be partners. It seems to me that the Church, the place of partnership, is the place peculiarly prepared to do this work. But it will mean abandoning the peculiar excesses of ego centered theologies. It will mean putting families in their place, forging paths between what is outside and what is inside and hearing the passionate voices who find in the created order the voice of the divine. Oh, that’s pantheism, you say. If our wild places are to be around for future generations, we must find a way to introduce them to our worship. A good place to start are with the wild men of holy writ, Moses and Jesus. They are our forerunners, whose work began in wild places. Part of today's theological challenge is to recover the husbanding of all creation.