Wild thoughts
"I am sick of nature. Sick of trees, sick of birds, sick of the ocean," David Gessner writes in the Boston Globe at Boston.com."Too often when I flip through the pages of contemporary nature books the tone is awed, hushed, reverential," Gessner continues. "The same things that drove me away from Sunday School. And the same thing that drove me, unable to resist my own buffoonery, to fart loudly against the pews."
Much writing in spirituality and theology falls into the same trap, whispering about the beauty of Spirit while ignoring raw physicality. If only my parishioners would fart loudly in the pews!
While Gessner primarily offers Thoreau (whose Walden was published 150 years ago yesterday) as an antidote to his personal sickness, I would suggest readers with a spiritual bent look at Gary Snyder's The Practice of the Wild, a collection of essays on wilderness, freedom, and grace, saturated with Zen Buddhist thought.
We are wild creatures ('though not Wild at Heart in the ways John Eldredge's essentialist, Evangelical tome on men suggests), and I suspect God appreciates it when we show it.
.: Posted by Duane Bidwell on Tuesday, August 10, 2004
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