Ashes of Creation

I don’t remember the season of Lent ever following so closely on the heels of Epiphany, but sure enough, the time is upon us. As a Presbyterian growing up in the small town of Gahanna, Ohio, I was never really properly introduced to the observance of the one day that kicks it all off, Ash Wednesday. Smudging the forehead with the burnt remains of who knows what always seemed like an obscure ritual reserved for “those Catholics.” (I can still hear the old folks gossiping about them in church.) Add to this the equally confusing atmosphere of Mardi Gras -- where repentance seems like the last thing on anyone’s mind -- and you can understand why this white bread Protestant wasn’t on speaking terms with the season until well into his thirties, and then only as a kind of academic curiosity.

Thankfully my perspective has changed, and this as a long and deliberate process of trying to think differently about the concept of time. It’s interesting, I think, that the Church never really pushed the notion of a religiously sanctioned New Year celebration. In some ways, I believe this has been a detriment to the spiritual lives of the faithful. I have always had a deep respect for the way that Jews are able to renew their commitments to each other and to God over a ten-day period – from Rosh Hashanah to Yom Kippur – and thus start their year with a clean spiritual slate. Sure, we in secular America make our New Year’s resolutions, but these always seem so flat and incidental without the kind of meaningful mythological context that religion can provide. It was for this reason that several years ago I made the concerted effort to begin marking my days, not according to the numbers and squares on my office calendar, but according to the observances of the liturgical seasons.

The only problem – for me, at least, not being well-versed in the nuances of high church temporality – was in knowing where to begin. I guess the logical choice is Advent, those four weeks where we anticipate the birth of Christ. Usually these wind up being eclipsed by the enthusiasms of children whose only real concern is their anticipation of a “jolly old elf.” Christmas then gives way to Epiphany, the manifestation of God, affirmed by the Magi bringing their gifts to place at the feet of the Christ child. Eventually the life of Jesus finds its tragic, though not ultimate, end in the crucifixion on Good Friday, and shortly thereafter we celebrate the resurrection. Fifty days later we observe Pentecost, and then it’s a long string of red weeks referred to -- anti-climatically I might add – as “ordinary time,” a kind of ecclesial version of summer break. But where does it all begin, or end? Advent? Easter? I wish the church would remember enough of its Jewish heritage to realize that people really do need to ritualize their beginnings on a yearly basis. There needs to be a meaningful start to their faith journey which will arrive ultimately at the very place where it first began.

When I think of Christian beginnings my starting point is actually the Jewish scriptures: the creation narrative found in Genesis 2:4ff, the oldest cosmogonic myth in the Bible. As someone interested in ecology and the human connection to the natural world, I take great comfort in the symbolic notion that we have been created from the earth itself. Adam is in fact a play on words, for the first man was formed from adamah, the Hebrew word for the good, dark humus into which God sank his knees when breathing the breath of life into the human form beneath him. “And the man became a living being. …[and the] Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden to till it and to keep it” (Gen. 2:7b, 15). I have always wondered what the effects might be of ritualizing this narrative in the context of Christian worship. We place so much emphasis on our “new creation” in the waters of baptism that the “old Adam,” child of the dirt, seems to be washed away entirely. But Lent is surely Adam's season, for if the truth be told, his weaknesses, his fears, his very fallible nature, his grubby face, are still very much our own, and they will be until our return to the earth from which we were made.

For me, Lent is a time for remembering this and even celebrating it. Our Augustinian heritage has taught us to over-emphasize the radicality of sin in our lives, to such an extent that the black soot we bear on our foreheads on Ash Wednesday has come to be seen only as a mark of extreme woe and repentance. Think sack cloth and ash. Think Jeremiah lamenting the destruction of Jerusalem. But lately I have come to wonder whether Lent might be regarded as a “new beginning,” an observance that has long been absent from church ritual (or at least from my experience of it). What I am suggesting is that Lent might become for us a kind of “Christian New Year.” Like the High Holy Days in Judaism, it could be seen as a period of time in which we are all encouraged to consider not so much our deplorable sin but simply our vulnerable humanity and our need for connections to the earth, to God, and to our human community. It could be a time to focus on how our lives are shared with so many others, and how we often fail to affirm this simple fact in our words and deeds. More importantly, Lent might become an opportunity to reflect on how each of us lives the life of Adam who, though he was created from the rich soil of Eden, was nevertheless banished from it… but not from God.

Each year we are encouraged to give up something during this season, and in the past I have done so faithfully (most of the time). But this time, instead of deprivation I am going to try to think in terms of a kind of reflective celebration. Like Adam being brought forth from the earth, I want to wear on my forehead the ashes of creation. I want to take strange comfort in the fact that from dust I came and to dust I shall return. I want to look at those who are close to me and remember how much their lives have enriched my own. I will also remember how my lifestyle choices affect those whom I may never see, both human and nonhuman.

Robert Frost once wrote, “Earth is the right place for love/ I don’t know where it is likely to go better.” There is wisdom in this. Our attention and our hope at this time of year cannot be in some heaven above but must be focused right here on the earth below, where the ashes of creation – the bittersweet paradox of human existence – are lived out in all their mystery, somewhere between suffering and salvation, just a little east of Eden.

Questions for Further Discussion

1. What are some of your earliest memories of Ash Wednesday and the rituals associated with it?

2. What does the symbol of ashes mean to you in the context of Lent?

3. Lent is often seen as a time for giving up certain practices or luxuries in our lives, but it can also be an opportunity for new beginnings. What positive resolutions might you make during Lent this season (for example, deciding to volunteer several days a week at a local community service organization)?

4. Is the notion of focusing on the “old Adam” in anticipation of the “new Adam” – the resurrected Christ – helpful for you? See Romans 5:12-21.

Integrated Health: For the Birds

One of the purposes of this blog is to explore issues of “integrated health,” but before doing so it is probably best to define the concept so we know what we are talking about. To some it may appear that what is at stake here is just a sound integration of mind, body, and spirit, the kind of description you are likely to run across in the pages of any number of self-help texts. While I want to affirm that good exercise, intellectual stimulation, and emotional stability are all essential to human health, I would like also to broaden the conversation. The assumption that we can achieve a state of well-being by simply harmonizing these three aspects of our human existence really relies on an Enlightenment understanding of what we are as human creatures. This perspective suggests that we are individuals first and we can freely choose to make associations with whatever community we deem most appropriate for our self-interests. This is perhaps best summarized by Voltaire’s Candide who at the end of that classic work concluded that everything would fall so neatly into place if everyone would just tend to their own gardens.

Unfortunately Enlightenment philosophy has long labored under the delusion that the whole – whether a human body or the body politic – can be adequately described as a sum of its constituent parts. More recent forays into the limits of human experience, however, have demonstrated that this supposition is not only false but also potentially dangerous. It fails to recognize the integral connections that exist among so many entities and on so many levels, from the micro- to the macrocosmic. The evidence these days suggests that, contrary to what our extreme individualism would have us believe, I am by virtue of my many relationships, whether I choose to acknowledge these or not. Similarly, what I do and how I live will have an effect, one way or another, on the innumerable beings with whom I share my life-world. Given this state of affairs, the notion of “health” must be broadened significantly so as to acknowledge that who I am and where I am are of a piece. The welfare of one will inevitably affect the well-being of the other.

An example of this revised perspective can be seen when we consider the surprising reach of something as simple as enjoying a morning cup of coffee. We are all familiar with the questions that might be raised from a traditional health perspective with respect to this ritual. How many cups are safe for me to drink per day? How will the caffeine affect my bodily functions? Is there a connection between this stimulant and heart disease, hypertension, even cancer? The beginning and end of this orientation is the human body and mind, how they function and what threats they might encounter as a result of excess or abuse. Our response to these questions will usually have only the well-being of the individual in mind. We may choose, for example, to decrease our coffee consumption because it keeps us up at night, or because it gives us horrendous breath. Whatever the case, the final criterion seems always to be me and my needs. This is a traditional orientation when it comes to the question of coffee and health.

A more integrated approach to this issue is what I’d like to call a “global humanitarian perspective.” In recent years the social injustices that accompany our morning java have been brought to light by a number of authors and community organizations, and many have begun to advocate the purchase of “fair trade coffee” in lieu of the cheaper and more readily available brands in our local supermarkets. Drinking fair trade coffee in itself makes a deliberate political statement. It speaks out against the displacement of indigenous peoples at the hands of multi-national corporations wanting to grow the addictive little beans on their land. At the same time, it offers a resounding “yes” to those few men and women who have been able to retain their ancestral farms and grow coffee to be sold on the international market. Their local cooperatives eliminate the need for the greedy middle man so that a fair price can be achieved and ultimately their families can be fed. True, we on the other end have to pay a little extra for each cup of joe. This is so counter-intuitive in our capitalistic society where our very raison d’etre is to reap the cheap, but the knowledge that we have struck a small blow against the human injustices brought on by globalization makes it all worth while. Some of us are willing to pay a little more so that others might suffer a little less.

Is this, then, the fully integrated approach to human health that we should advocate? Close, but not quite. While it is a step in the right direction, it nevertheless assumes that human well-being, and this on a worldwide scale, is the objective that informs the personal choices we make in the market place. A truly integrated health perspective, however, will recognize that there must finally be a concern for the nonhuman creatures and ecosystems that make up our life-world. We must also consider how our lifestyle choices affect them. This affirms that each and every human being is part of a highly complex ecological, and not just economic, web of life. What might this look like with respect to our morning coffee ritual?

It turns out that there are more than simply humanitarian concerns involved when deciding on what brand of coffee to bring into your household, business, or place of worship. There are in fact very sound ecological reasons for drinking a fair trade product. Whereas industrial coffee production in Central and South America often involves eradicating dense indigenous forests and sowing open fields with hybridized varieties of beans, fair trade producers tend to grow their plants in the shade -- the habitat to which they are naturally adapted -- and they usually work on a much smaller scale. Most employ organic and sustainable methods of fertilization and pest control. Beans are often harvested by hand instead of under the soil-compacting duress of heavy machinery. These farmers are caretakers of the land, preserving the forests -- and thus the biodiversity -- that so many large producers view as annoying obstacles to their profit motives.

So why should we care about this? The importance of rain forests in counteracting the effects of greenhouse gases is well known, but there are other reasons for being concerned about these habitats. As an avid bird watcher I have observed that over the past twenty years or so fewer species of songbirds appear to be making their springtime visits to the woods and fields around my house. Whereas the month of April used to be a time of delighting in the sounds and glimpses of the migratory species passing through our bioregion, it seems that lately the thickets have become a lot quieter. I know that many of the birds I look for – the warblers for instance – spend the winter months in the very forests of Central and South America where most of our coffee is produced, and I have to wonder about a possible connection. Does the demand for cheaper coffee among global consumers result in fewer forests in this part of the world? Since this is certainly the case, does the loss of this habitat mean also a loss of the songbirds that so brighten our spring? The evidence seems to suggest as much, though the variables involved are surely complex. Nevertheless, even if there is a perceived correlation, my next questions should be these: Which do I enjoy more, the sound of a Prairie Warbler calling out from a flowering dogwood, or the smell of cheap java brewing in the morning? Which is more important for maintaining the integrity of our biosphere? Which is more illustrative of a world approaching the ideal of a peaceable kingdom? Which best reflects the objectives of integrated health?

As someone interested in an understanding of human health as a function of a much larger system, I cannot downplay or ignore the ecological consequences of my actions, no matter how inconsequential they may seem. While I might want to believe that my personal well-being simply involves an optimum balance of body, mind, and soul, my experience as a global citizen seems daily to challenge this oversimplification. John Muir once said that if we tug at anything in nature we will find that it is connected to the rest of the world. Perhaps it is time – indeed, past time – for us to realize that the same holds true for our very lives: what we do and who we are inevitably affect the ecosystems of which we are a part, and in this highly globalized environment, this includes everything.

So, yes, integrated health is for the birds – and for the trees, the rivers, the atmosphere, our local human and nonhuman community, for the planet. It takes into account everything that makes up the vastly integrated living system of which we are a vital -- though oftentimes irresponsible -- part. Bringing our mind, body, and spirit into a balanced state of being is surely a worthwhile goal, but one that can be expanded upon in light of a revised understanding of who and what we are as human beings connected to the world. We are all related, not separated.

Questions for Further Discussion

1. Think about your current lifestyle choices and imagine what effects these are having on parts of the world that you may never see. Are there ways that you might resolve to become healthier in a more integrated manner?

2. If you are a member of a worshiping community, how might your congregation be a better representative of integrated health in the context of your local community? Are there ways that these issues might be incorporated in a meaningful way into your worship experience?

3. What connections do you see between integrated health and Jesus’ vision of the Kingdom of God?

4. Can you purchase fair trade coffee and other similar items in your town? If not, how might you change this?

5. Reflect on the last statement above: we are all related, not separated. What does this mean for you?

Related Links:

Seattle Audubon Northwest Shade Coffee Campaign

Global Exchange

Forest Stewardship Council

Thoughts on Richard Louv's Last Child in the Woods

I thought I'd introduce this blog -- a new venture for me, a relative Luddite when it comes to technology -- with a review of Richard Louv's book, Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder (Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Press, 2006). I should probably also mention that this piece will appear in the February 2008 issue of Prairie Fire: The Progressive Voice of the Great Plains.

Last Child in the Woods rarely stays on my book shelves, primarily because I am always giving it away. This may be one of the most important popular texts written on child development in the last decade -- it is certainly one of the most compelling. Anyone raising children needs at least to be conversant with Louv’s thesis that boys and girls today are living in a de-natured environment. Surprisingly, educators and parents -- responding to a number of social, political, and cultural forces -- are doing their level best to keep children away from a primary experience of the natural world. The result, Louv suggests, is an emerging “nature-deficit disorder,” a condition that is not unrelated to the attention-deficit disorder so commonly diagnosed among school children in the United States. The urgency of the book for the American populace, and especially for parents, is perhaps best exemplified by a young boy’s response to a question concerning his favorite place to play: “I like to play indoors,” the boy said, “‘cause that’s where all the electrical outlets are.”

It is tempting, of course, to point our fingers at the usual culprits of television and video games when trying to determine the source of this problem, but Louv is quick to point out that such an oversimplification only prevents us from recognizing the more subtle issues involved. Thirty years ago it was not uncommon for children to spend their free time scavenging for critters in creeks and wood lots, building tree houses, or camping out under the stars in a neighbor’s field. Experiences of nature tended to be direct, associated with smells, tastes, sounds, and feelings. Though Walt Disney informed many of the less fortunate suburbanites about the peculiar habits of footloose foxes and other whimsical creatures, there was nevertheless a tendency among children to spend much of their time outdoors -- ice skating in the winter, investigating pussy willows in the spring, collecting fireflies and colored leaves in the summer and fall. Now, according to Louv, all of that has changed, and nature has come to be perceived as a kind of “bogeyman,” another victim of our pervasive culture of fear.

Louv’s perspective was brought home to me in no uncertain terms this past summer. I happened to be reading his book while visiting relatives in my hometown of Gahanna, Ohio, a place where the contours of the landscape had once been as familiar to me as my sisters and cousins whose company I was now there to enjoy. Much like Louv, who grew up near Kansas City, I spent most of my time as a youth building the very forts and tree houses that he recalls with such fondness in his book. I was also a frequent visitor to the Rocky Fork Creek that wended its way through our small village. The creek was a kind of social gathering place for all the kids of my neighborhood; there was not one sycamore stump or fishing hole that I had not explored and known intimately before I was ten years old. Last July, with thoughts of recapturing some of our old experiences, two of my cousins and I decided to don our old tennis shoes, find a trusty five-gallon bucket and wade the creek in search of tadpoles and crawdads -- just like old times. Never did I dream that such a spontaneous activity would generate so much anxiety among the parents of the children who wanted to join us. All kinds of questions arose. Was the water clean? We had better call the Department of Environmental Quality to find out. Just to be sure, we should probably not allow the young ones to get wet, and let’s be certain that everyone has a good shower afterwards. Another issue: What kind of riff-raff might we expect to encounter along those foreboding waters, so far from the safety of civilization? We were just going wading in a creek! Somehow our little afternoon excursion turned into Charles Marlow venturing into the heart of darkness.

What my two cousins and I encountered on the Rocky Fork that afternoon was even more disheartening. It was the middle of the summer and kids were on break from school, but apparently they had no intention of spending it along the banks of the creek. I was surprised, and encouraged, to find that the tadpoles and other water creatures were still there in the mile-long stretch of water we waded. The only thing missing was a human presence: no Huck Finns with cane poles and tin cans filled with worms; no Sam Gribleys playing My Side of the Mountain. Indeed, after about a half hour in the water, even the young boys who accompanied the nostalgic forty-somethings on their eccentric adventure seemed a little bored, albeit still politely willing to indulge us in our memories of the past. Predictably, after all the residue of natural otherness had been washed away, and each child had been checked for suspicious-looking rashes, the hand-held electronic games came out and the “real fun” resumed among the kids. For me, the experience was made all the more poignant by the fact that I was so completely engrossed in Louv’s book at the time. I was seeing corroborating evidence of his thesis nearly everywhere I looked. It was only the fear of dropping the text in the water that kept me from taking it along to read amidst the old haunts of my childhood “place.”

For Louv, the present inability to regard one’s neighborhood as “place” is part of the problem. The “know-it-all mentality,” whose focus is on secondary experience – that is, on the facts, the abstractions so readily proffered by the empirical sciences – is ironically what has left so many of our children behind. Kids cannot value and love what they cannot name, and naming the creatures who inhabit our life-places is as central to the human vocation now as it was when Adam was fumbling around the Garden for a creature worthy of his affections. Such an endeavor, Louv suggests, must be pursued in a spirit of love and care, with an attitude of wonder and respect, and not with the voracious enthusiasm of a Grand Inquisitor. Louv offers examples of men and women who have spent lifetimes committed to knowing and protecting the integrity of their places, whether these be acres upon acres of a pristine natural habitat or simply a vacant urban lot. Species that appear to the uninitiated observer to be merely weeds or varmints are to the trained eye opportunities for fascination, and there are a committed few among our cities and towns who are guardians of this special form of knowledge. The trick now lies in passing along their passion to the next generation of caretakers.

There is so much that mitigates against this, however, not least of which is the tendency among many middle and high school science teachers to focus their attentions less on natural history than on the kind of empirical reductionism that invariably has a practical outcome as its objective. Louv advocates a return to getting one’s hands dirty when engaging with the natural world. But in a “culture of clean,” where fear of the unknown maintains such a tight hold on our overly-active imaginations, dirty hands seem only to represent an unnecessary risk, and after all, we want to be safe. This means that certain things just have to go. The tree houses, for example, those structures that occupy an almost archetypal place in Louv’s memory and imagination, are now likely to be prohibited by the stern protocols of our neighborhood associations. Unstructured outdoor play, so essential to the development of imagination and problem-solving in young children, has now been virtually outlawed. The vacant lots and wooded parks of decades past have now been replaced by crisply lined soccer fields and other open spaces. Again, the culprit is fear: eliminate the risk, and the chances of suffering a catastrophic lawsuit for negligence will certainly be diminished. But what else is lost?

Louv spends much of his time in this text arguing for the therapeutic value of natural experiences, citing primarily anecdotal evidence that indicates stress reduction among those who take the time to venture into the woods. He even goes so far as to suggest that the need for Ritalin among many of the nation’s attention-challenged youth might actually be reduced, if not eliminated, by simply prescribing the kinds of first-hand nature experiences that he and so many others of past generations enjoyed in their early years. Readers should be aware, however, that Louv is no romantic environmentalist advocating a kind of return to the peaceable kingdom. On the contrary, first-hand experience of the nonhuman creatures whose places we share often involves the stark realities of life and death. For this reason, Louv is an advocate -- though apparently not a practitioner – of hunting, and his argument is taken straight from the notebook of an early environmental prophet, Aldo Leopold. Tracking and overcoming one’s quarry requires a kind of attention to environmental detail that may over time engender a healthy respect for a world in which humans participate as flesh-and-blood beings. Similarly, fishing is on his list of positive activities that immerse children in the vicissitudes of their place. While the folks of P.E.T.A. may vigorously object, Louv knows that today’s young hunters and anglers are the very stuff from which the next generation of environmental stewards is likely to be fashioned.

If there is any criticism that might be offered of this important work it lies in the fleeting attention that Louv gives to the evolutionary importance of children interacting with their natural environments. While he is conversant with the work of such authors as David Sobel, Edith Cobb, and Robert Pyle (to name a few among those he lists in his very helpful bibliography), one wonders what insights he might have culled from the extraordinary reflections of the late Paul Shepard, on the importance of animal mimesis among children, for example, or on the role that animal “others” have played in human development since the Pleistocene. After all, if what Louv says is correct, we are confronting a situation that has no real precedent in human evolutionary history; a look into our distant past is certainly advisable. This is, perhaps, a topic for another book. The fundamental issue, however, lies more closely at hand: our children today seem by many accounts to be losing their ability to “learn the language of their fields,” to borrow a phrase from Thoreau. And with every birdsong that goes unrecognized, every flower that goes unnamed, every droning cicada that gets ignored, our boys and girls take one step further away from an abiding sense of what it means truly to be human.

Questions for Further Discussion

1. Describe children's play in your neighborhood. How does it differ from what you may have observed ten or perhaps twenty years ago?

2. Have our neighborhoods become so over-regulated -- i.e., restricted by community codes, etc. -- that we have come to perceive outdoor play as essentially unsafe?

3. If you have children, reflect on the differences between their structured and unstructured play. Louv suggests that the latter is a rare commodity these days with so much free time taken up by soccer practice, various lessons and school obligations. Do you agree with this assessment?

4. In what ways might the church play a role in reintroducing children to the natural world?

Related Links

Children and Nature Network

No Child Left Inside

Healthy Families Play Outside