Wilderness and religious texts

             In John Winthrop’s sermon, “A Model of Christian Charity,” wilderness is seldom mentioned directly, yet the fact that their group is venturing into the wilderness is the whole reason for writing the sermon.  Winthrop seems to define the wilderness as a place of great peril, since one of the questions he poses for his listeners is “What rule must we observe and walk by in cause of community of peril?” (80).  His answer is, “The same as before, but with more enlargement towards others and less respect towards ourselves and our own right” (80).  He goes on to describe the necessary attitudes and behaviors in great detail, then characterizes their group’s goal and work as “extraordinary, therefore we must not content ourselves with usual ordinary means.  Whatsoever we did or ought to have done when we lived in England, the same must we do, and more also, where we go” (85).  Winthrop also alludes to the wilderness as a place hazardous to one’s health in his retelling of the Old Testament story of Jonathan and David:  “He [Jonathan] chooseth to converse with him in the wilderness even to the hazard of his own life, rather than with the great courtiers in his father’s palace” (83).  

             Certainly Moses – the author of the Old Testament books of Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy, from which Winthrop quotes – characterized the wilderness as an extremely dangerous place, where people can’t survive long without God’s help.  “Remember how the Lord your God led you through the wilderness for these forty years, humbling you and testing you to prove your character, and to find out whether or not you would obey his commands.  Yes, he humbled you by letting you go hungry, and then feeding you with manna, a food previously unknown to you and your ancestors.  He did it to teach you that people do not live by bread alone; rather, we live by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord.  For all these forty years your clothes didn’t wear out, and your feet didn’t blister or swell.” (New Living Translation, Deut. 8. 2-4).  Winthrop’s frequent allusions to the covenant that the children of Israel had with God would have reminded his audience not only of the dangers of the wilderness but also of the perils of displeasing their God:  “The Lord was angry with Israel and made them wander in the wilderness for forty years until the entire generation that sinned in the Lord’s sight had died….If you turn away from him like this and he abandons them again in the wilderness, you will be responsible for destroying this entire nation!”  (Numbers 32. 13, 15).

            These ideas about wilderness differ substantially from my original definition of wilderness in my first blog posting.  Although I did mention that the wilderness could be an unpredictable and dangerous place, I mostly saw it as a place of beauty and serenity.  This is because I have had the good luck to be born in a time and a place where human civilization and technology protect us from many of nature's harsh realities.  We have furnaces to protect us from the cold, safe water to drink at the turn of a knob; ready access to food and the means to easily preserve and cook it; and antibiotics and hospitals if we get sick or injured (if we're lucky enough to have health insurance, that is!).  In Winthrop’s time – and Moses’ – human lives were much shorter and harder.  The wilderness had not been tamed to the great extent that it has in our time, so people had a much less rosy perspective of it.

Wilderness in "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge"

            In “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” wilderness is portrayed in two contrasting ways:  as beautiful and sheltering on the one hand, and as a malevolent force that is out to get the main character, on the other.  Near the beginning of Peyton Farquhar’s dream of escape, when he first comes up out of the river for air, he perceives and appreciates the beauty of the natural world in extreme detail:  “He looked at the forest on the bank of the stream, saw the individual trees, the leaves and the veining of each leaf – saw the very insects upon them:  the locusts, the brilliant-bodied flies, the grey spiders stretching their webs from twig to twig.” 

            Moments later in his dream, nature becomes Peyton’s enemy as he finds himself at the mercy of the river’s tumbling water, “…caught in a vortex…whirled on with a velocity of advance and gyration that made him giddy and sick.”  But just as quickly the river deposits him on a bank of sand and gravel, and once again the wilderness is benign and lovely:  “He dug his fingers into the sand, threw it over himself in handfuls and audibly blessed it.  It looked like diamonds, rubies, emeralds; he could think of nothing beautiful which it did not resemble.”

            To escape the gunfire from the Union soldiers Peyton plunges into the forest, where he is shielded and sheltered by the wilderness of trees.  But hours of walking without seeing any signs of human habitation make him uneasy:  “He had not known that he lived in so wild a region.  There was something uncanny in the revelation.”  This uneasiness grows as he begins to perceive the woods on either side of him as straight walls penning him in, and even the stars above “…arranged in some order which had a secret and malign significance.”  I think this is a foreshadowing of Peyton’s rapidly-approaching death, of the immutability of the laws of physics and the limitations of existence in a mortal body.

What is Wilderness?

            To me, wilderness is both a place and a state of mind.  I think of wild places I’ve visited – in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and in Utah’s Bryce Canyon – and I get a feeling of peacefulness and spaciousness.  I think in earlier times in America wilderness also represented opportunity, a blank slate, a chance to make a new start in a new place.

            The root word “wild” connotes to me an untamed spirit of nature unconfined by human technology and restrictions.  It also makes me think of innocence, pristine and uncorrupted.  In addition, there’s a connotation of unpredictability, and possibly danger (e.g., a wild animal).

            I believe wilderness areas are extremely valuable, in fact priceless!  These lands, and the plants and animals who live there, need to be protected and preserved for their own sake, as well as for future generations of human beings.  It’s important to do this for both ecological and spiritual reasons (and I believe that science and faith are not mutually exclusive).

            I feel that Sylvy, the main character in A White Heron, definitely did the right thing in keeping the location of the heron’s nest a secret.  When she was tempted to reveal it to the ornithologist I kept thinking, “No!  Don’t do it!  Don’t do it!”  It would have been a betrayal of the wild animals’ trust in Sylvy, a betrayal of the wild woods that she had grown to love and, it seems to me, a betrayal of her own soul.  

First Post

Hi everyone,

You're probably wondering how on earth I came up with a handle like "RecorderNinja."  Blame it on my helpful (and goofy) son Joseph, who saw me staring into my computer screen, stumped.  "I can't think of a good Display Name," I complained.   He suggested "recorder ninja, " and since I couldn't come up with a better one, I decided to go with it.  For a detailed explanation of recorders, you can visit the web site of the music group I belong to, www.windinthewoodsearlymusic.com, and click on "Instruments."  The second part of my name is a joke, however -- I'm a gentle soul and couldn't ninja my way out of a paper bag.

Jenelle