The Goodness of Nature

I just arrived home from a three day work conference which was held at a resort. Because there was an indoor water park and other family-friendly amenities, I brought my wife and my kids with me, which was nice since I find staying by myself in corporate hotel rooms depressing. While I was presenting, going to receptions, eating and drinking and networking with colleagues, the rest of my family entertained themselves.

By the second day, however, we were all starting to feel a little...hungover. For our summer family vacation, we rent a modest cottage on the Cape, which has been spared much chain commercialization. We spend our days going to a fresh water pond and the bay, riding bikes on the rail trails, laying in the hammock, and cooking in the small kitchen, occasionally going out to get fish and chips. The most important thing is being together as a family, but it's also in a more natural environment which is more in line with our values. So, the setting we found ourselves this past week seemed great at first, but slowly felt like it was corroding our souls. When we emerged from the commercial tomb and stepped out into the 16 degree air on the third day to go home, we all breathed a frosty sense of relief.

Because everyone is different, this is not a judgment piece. Some people really enjoy places like Disney World and Six Flags, but I personally do not (and that's a restrained statement), nor (we all realized after this week) do my wife and kids. Maybe this is because while I'm not an environmentalist per se, I think there is something special and sacred, not to mention psychologically and spiritually healthy about the natural environment. It was where I first encountered God. It was where I continue to return to when I need to be refreshed and re-center my prayer life. I can appreciate the spirit of conservationists like Emerson and the naturalists like Thoreau. The natural world humbles us, inspires poetry, and inspires awe at the magnificent handiwork of God. That he has entrusted us to be stewards of the earth which He created is a great and privileged responsibility.

When I find myself in these kind of artificial environments, however, I feel my spirit struggling to bloom as if I were an orchid planted in a can of spent potting soil in the middle of a prison yard. Mother Teresa, of course, found Christ and his radiant glory in the worst slums of Calcutta and among the most forgotten poorest of the poor. The task of the Christian is to put things in their proper place in relation to God, but in doing so is given the gift and subsequent burden of having eyes to see. And sometimes the world in which we live and have constructed for ourselves does not in fact reflect God's handiwork, but the elevation of man in all his self-centeredness and forgetfulness of his Creator. 

What I really struggle with most in these commercialized environments--besides the price gouging, the sterility and lack of anything beautiful, the difficulty in praying, the plastic kitschy commercialization, and the frenzied over-stimulation--is that they exist to indulge, pamper and serve the self. For the Christian, we strive to find our joy in God alone, and to find life by emptying ourselves in service to others. We mortify our senses to gain what money can't buy--joy, detachment, inner freedom. When your heart has been captured by the true, the beautiful, and the good, the counterfeits are akin to dead wooden idols before the power of the Living God.

We are blessed in this vast and diverse country to have access to at least little pockets of natural environments. Even the city dweller living in mid-town can escape to the Poconos or the shore to get little bite-sized respites of the natural world outside the concrete jungles. Those blessed to live in states like Montana or Alaska may even take such untamed environments for granted, since they are in their backyards. It's good and natural to take periodic respite in nature--good for the soul, for the mind, good for the body--away from the digital sea we soak in daily, away from the commerce and money changers taking up house in the Temple--to be with ourselves and our God. 

Speaking of the Temple, it was there in that dramatic scene in Mt 21:12-12 where Christ's anger burned and consumed him, and where he drove them out from that place that should have stood undefiled but had been corrupted by the self-interest of those trying to turn a profit and make debt-slaves out of unsuspecting people.

There is also something healing about nature, something which allows us to draw from a deep spring rather than being cajoled to open and empty our purses for the promise of a drink of water which will only make us thirst again. It gives us time to rest, to bandage the wounds inflicted upon us, to fast from self-indulgence and satisfying our every whim and desire and experience hunger--the hunger of the soul. Ironically, when we return to our homes, we feel refreshingly full; whereas coming home from this kind of commercialized vacation, I felt unfulfilled and even a little empty.

Nature at its most pristine and untouched reflects the majesty of God which cannot be captured, commodified, domesticated and exploited. It is a reflection of the wild autonomy of the Creator and the terrible firmament of justice, which can only be tamed and made hospitable with the grace of His mercy. God answers to no man, and yet nature and the laws of nature--as stark and majestic and cruel as it can be--are subject to Him, for "our God is in the Heavens; he hath done whatever He hath pleased" (Ps 115:3).