Back To Nature!

The heavens are telling the glory of God, *

     and the firmament proclaims his handiwork.

                                                                                                Psalm 19:1

            The best thing about summer is the opportunity to spend more time outdoors. That was particularly true when I was growing up in North Dakota. When we were let out of school at the end of May, we literally lived outside for three months. We only went home to eat and sleep. It was before television! Our parents never worried about us. We were just outside somewhere. Sadly, times have changed and so has American society. Liz and I sit out in our backyard every night but we rarely see any of our neighbors. We don’t understand it! Why would anyone choose air conditioning and television over being outside? There is a larger issue - at least for me - at play here.

            It has been my experience that people live in a tension between urbanization and all its stresses, and a need to be nearer to (God’s) creation. Cities are human creations and the outside, the countryside, is more revelatory of the hand of God. I like to point out to people when talking about this subject that when the United States was founded, 98% of the people lived on farms and 2% lived in cities. Now the situation is completely reversed. Today 99% live in cities and less than 1% live on farms (or vineyards). Sometimes I wonder just how well our inner selves have made that transition. I personally think that there is a void within us which city life is just not able to fill.

            One of my theories about urban sprawl is that people keep moving from the city to suburbs further and further away because of the need to return to some semblance of living in the country. One sees this in cutesy subdivision names like Country Estates, Highland Meadows, or Jost Farms. Were people really meant to live on top of each other? I don’t think so! In large population areas like St. Louis, life becomes more and more impersonal. Who really knows their neighbors? Live in a small town for a while and you will see and feel the difference and it will shock you!

            The tension between urban and rural, city and country is revealed in the history of modern thought. Following the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment, Western society began to industrialize because of the development of machines. Machines meant factories which were located in cities. People left the countryside and small villages (their roots) and came to the cities to work in those factories. Large cities like the London described by Charles Dickens in his novels came into being. Slums became a reality.

Many people deplored this new “modern” society which the triumph of reason had created. It was a cold, arid, unfeeling world from which God had seemingly been banished. Nature had become an inanimate (dead) thing) to be mastered and exploited instead of something at which to marvel. In reaction to this state of affairs, the spirit of Romanticism developed. It was an attempt to infuse feeling, emotion and mystery back into the world. Artists like J.M.W. Turner and John Constable created paintings of woodland scenes and harbors which literally glowed with a holy light. Their paintings were a statement that nature was alive and that the world was a deeper, more complicated mystery than human reason had yet discovered.

It is interesting to note that Jesus himself avoided the larger cities like Caesarea Philippi and instead focused the majority of his ministry in smaller towns and villages where people lived who were close to the land and very open and responsive to his parables about sowers of seeds, vineyards and harvesting. 

            I say, Amen! All of us need to take the time to reestablish a spiritual communication with nature. Take a drive out to a rural area and look carefully at the beautiful countryside and think of Turner and Constable and the “holy light” which they saw in nature. Can you see it? It should warm your soul!