A Plea for Wild Religion
by Norman Wirzba

God is irrelevant in the way that the North Pole is irrelevant. I may be able to say that both exist, but their existence does not matter since neither figures much in the affairs of my day-to-day life.

In past centuries the religious sense grew out of the human perception that the cosmos was ordered and maintained by a deeply mysterious power. The agrarian encounter with nature enacted our dependence upon the powerful, elemental forces of life and death. In the face of this contact, and it is important to understand how concrete and immediate this contact was, humans naturally perceived the presence of the divine. The divine had to do with the powers of growth and decay, health and illness, abundance and hunger. The experience of growing food pointed not only to the fragility of life, but to the beneficence that continually renewed life - though we plant the seed, the power of growth itself is entirely beyond our capacity or will. For good reason, sacrifice was an important element within religion since it acknowledged our absolute dependence on a sacred power we can neither understand or control, but to which we are all indebted.

The practical conditions for this sort of perception are now mostly gone, since few of us have any direct or concrete experience of life's elemental forces. We have lost the art of being creatures. The truth of being a creature is that we cannot fully take control of our own needs, since at the most fundamental level our lives depend on the gifts that God so mercifully gives. As every farmer or gardener knows, and as Psalm 104 so eloquently describes, no matter how well we prepare the soil, the power of life is entirely beyond our mastery. But our urban lives, because they shield us from life's elemental forces, foster the illusion that we do create ourselves and the conditions that make life possible. Our technologies and our machines deceive us because we come to think, not unlike the proud men in Isaiah 2 who liked to boast of the work of their own hands, that our lives really are our own, and that we have control over them. If anything, the colonization of humanity by machines, and the numerous horrors they have introduced - smart bombs, lethal injection, terminator seeds, strip mines - ought to teach us about the destructiveness of our own pride.

The message of advertising, now increasingly carried out in fits of screaming or yelling, is obvious – you must have what we can sell you, and you deserve it!

What I have been arguing is that the practical habits of our contemporary culture have made possible for the first time in human history the "irrelevance of God." Though we may continue to speak of God, it is a speech that does not really matter since it primarily plays an ornamental role - the divine does not issue from the sense of our tenuous yet merciful place in the forces of life and death. The trajectories of our lives, insofar as they subscribe to the major tenets of our cultural goals, bespeak what can now be termed a tame or domestic religion.

A tame religion is one that has excised the elements of wildness and terror, what Rudolph Otto in "The Idea of the Holy" once called the mysterium tremendum. As a reflection of a consumer society, the God that appears in this religious context is a God patterned after our self-chosen needs and desires. To be sure, our emotional attachments to this God can be very high. But the intensity of emotion bears a striking resemblance to the intensity with which we shop (Sunday mornings are replete with people shopping for church). It has little to do with the understanding of ourselves as creatures held in the grip of a fascinating and joyful, though also terrifying, grace.

Our way out of an abstract religion to a more authentic understanding of our place within the divine life will require the recovery of wildness, the recovery of the sense of our absolute dependence on elemental forces that sustain our being. Thoreau, in his famous essay "Walking," once remarked that "Life consists with wildness. The most alive is the wildest." He also said that "in Wildness is the preservation of the World." We should now amend his words to say in wildness lies the recovery of religion, the recovery of the practical sense for the relevance of God.

Our effort to instantiate this authentic or wild religion will not be easy since the forces we are up against are not merely theoretical. Our culture has left the wildness and unpredictability of life behind in our pursuit of the secure, comfortable life made possible by urban, technological existence. It will not do simply to go back to nature if we do not at the same time alter basic cultural assumptions about what it is for us to assume a place in the world, since the effect of our cultural practices has been to destroy wildness.

As we have sought to create a world more to our own liking and benefit, we have so transformed the earth and its creatures as to make the idea of natural processes ambiguous if not obsolete.

The destruction of wildness does not refer only to the destruction of wilderness areas. What I mean refers to a more basic phenomenon, namely the destruction of the idea of nature itself, and with that the destruction of the idea of creation. As we have sought to create a world more to our own liking and benefit, we have so transformed the earth and its creatures as to make the idea of natural processes ambiguous if not obsolete. There is hardly a habitat that has not been engineered or fixed by us. The weather, as we all know, is determined as much by human as it is by global forces. Moreover, the idea of what a creature is has been clouded and confused by the prospect and the reality of genetic manipulation. Where is wildness, where is the creation, in a world that is increasingly the work of our own hands?

If we are to find it we are going to have to exercise the virtue of restraint that is unique to the human species. So far, we have shown little ability to exercise this virtue. But exercise it we must if we are to have any hope of the recovery of an authentic religious sensibility. We must learn to humbly take our place within creation, and forego the Baconian dream of its mastery. What is at stake is not simply the moral benefit of knowing that there are some things we will not do even though we can. More importantly, in the practice of restraint we renew the possibility, a possibility that was once a constitutive part of daily life, of placing ourselves and our lives at the disposal of God's grace and presence. It will make possible an honest trust and faith in God as our creator and sustainer.

By letting creation be the measure of us rather than making ourselves the measure of creation, as we do when we recklessly engineer habitats and organisms to our own liking, we discover that we are part of a larger, life-giving whole.

The experience of wildness has long played a central role in religious life. Prophets and would-be religious leaders, but also common folk entering into the responsibilities of adulthood, would first have their lives purged and cleansed by what the experience of wildness affords. According to one rabbinic tradition, for instance, Moses first had to go into the desert to tend sheep before he could be entrusted with the Israelites. The experience, we are to presume, would teach him to depend less on his own wits and skill and more on the mercies and provisions of God. The purpose of wild experiences such as these is thus to gain a proper appreciation for who we truly are in the context of the larger creation and God. We need them, as Wendell Berry says, so we can negotiate the twin evils of despair and pride. By letting creation be the measure of us rather than making ourselves the measure of creation, as we do when we recklessly engineer habitats and organisms to our own liking, we discover that we are part of a larger, life-giving whole. We come to see more readily the folly of presuming to be God when we feel in our bodies the fragility of our lives. We see also the falsity of our despair as we recognize the undeserved abundance of gifts that surround and sustain us.

One of the primary tasks of the church today is to provide leadership in the cultivation of wildness. This is an urgent need because it is more and more difficult to find practices or rituals within our society that put us in direct contact with the wildness of God and ourselves. One way for the church to do this is for it to take a leadership role in promoting and protecting small farms (not to be confused with agribusiness factories) since they represent the most intimate and concrete place where human work encounters the grace of God. Liberty Hyde Bailey, once the dean of agricultural educators in America, remarked that "A man cannot be a good farmer unless he is a religious man." His reason for saying this was that the true farmer sees him or herself as a dispenser and trustee of the holy mysteries of God. No doubt this sensibility remains among some farmers, but it is also lost as farming has become a big business and as small farmers have left the land, the site of God's continuing work of creation.

In addition to the work of protecting and learning from agrarian life the church must also incorporate within its own religious practice a renewed liturgy of creation. The church must hold before the attention of its members the fact that all that lives, lives only by the grace of God. Ritual life, as when the gifts of the earth - water, bread, grain, carrots, apples, meat - are prominently placed on the altar and then shared by all, can serve as a powerful antidote to the belief that all we need can be had at the store if we only have the money.

Churches can also take a leadership role in the promotion of community gardens, and so directly participate in the forces of life and death, all the while producing food for those in need. The production, sharing and eating of food is holy work, work that enriches and sustains the eucharistic life of the church. As Wendell Berry once remarked in his essay "The Gift of Good Land," "To live, we must daily break the body and shed the blood of creation. When we do this knowingly, lovingly, skillfully, reverently, it is a sacrament. When we do it ignorantly, greedily, clumsily, destructively, it is a desecration. In such desecration we condemn ourselves to spiritual and moral loneliness, and others to want."

From the foregoing it should be clear that the church must increasingly become counter-cultural, particularly if we see how our culture represents the denial of creation. To do this we will need to extricate ourselves in practical ways from its obviously stressful and destructive ways. A good start would be to turn off the media, not simply because they promote greed, sex and violence, which are bad enough, but because they replace the desires of God with self-desire. Church people must also learn to consume less, not only because less consumption preserves the earth, but also because frugality is inherently a hospitable gesture - it acknowledges the gifted character of what we live by, and it makes available to others in need what we would take as luxury. Our aim must be to envision our economic lives in such a way as to bear witness to the grace of God.

The goal of a Christian culture, which we can here preliminarily define as a culture in which God is a relevant and determinative influence, is to release us into the Sabbath life of peace and joy. Our present culture has fooled us into thinking that if we focus on ourselves we will be happy. The dissatisfied and ungrateful character of our economic lives shows this premise to be a lie. Our hope lies in the renewed understanding of ourselves as members of God's creation. Our joy rests on the humble repose in the grace and goodness of a wild God.

Norman Wirzba chairs the Philosophy Department at Georgetown College in Georgetown, Kentucky. In addition to teaching a wide range of courses in his discipline, he also holds special interests in agrarian thought, environmental philosophy, and Christian theology. Norman is currently writing a book entitled "Becoming a Culture of Creation: Christian Faith and Life in an Ecological Age." He is married to fellow Yale Divinity School alum Gretchen Ziegenhals, and together they have four children.

For related content, check out:

The April 2001 issue of "The Witness" - The Politics and Spirituality of Weather - on our web site (especially the article "Erosional Spirituality: An Interview with Terry Tempest Williams")