INTRODUCTION

In this book, I am inviting you on a journey into the wilderness with me where I will ask you to build an altar and there make an offering. Whenever I head out into the wilderness, I make sure that I know where I’m going and have everything I need for the trek. Our ultimate destination is the heart, where I believe we build our altar. To get there, however, we will need to explore our cosmos. Chapter One is all about this. What is creation? What does it express about its creator and about us as human beings? I want to get right into the freshness where I believe, like the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, whom I will discuss later in the book, dwell “deep down things.” This is the journey into the wilderness itself.

Once there, we will want to enjoy the scenery. Chapter Two is a study of beauty, the role of beauty in our world and how we experience it and its effects on us when we do. The natural world reveals the beauty of the divine nature that fills it. Yet it also reveals another wilderness, that of the human being. Chapter Three explores the relationship between these two wildernesses and shows how much the one affects the other. I will introduce you to the wilderness temple and what it offers those of us who visit it. In Chapter Four, “With the drawing of this Love and the voice of this Calling,” as T.S. Eliot wrote in “Little Gidding” in Four Quartets, “We shall not cease from exploration / And the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time.” ^^ The power of our hearts to transform the world around us is tremendous. I will propose that we build our altars there and offer to God, on behalf of creation, a sacrifice of ourselves in a spirit of thanksgiving. Finally, in the Postscript, I offer one among many tools that we may use to heal the human/nature divide. I sincerely believe that this journey of ours will save the world.

So what’s in our pack? Many things, really, but there are a few items that are essential for this trip into the world of spiritual ecology. First of all, we will need a compass for the spiritual life in general. I have therefore provided below some basic notes about spirituality, especially as it relates to ecology. We will also need some knowledge about what we will encounter along the way and how these things will speak to us. In spiritual ecology, everything proclaims a spiritual, as well as a material, reality, and this multivalent dialogue is what I call a sacrament. Therefore, we will need some knowledge about sacraments. Finally, a healthy dose of reality is always essential. We need to make our journey knowing well the dangers of the wildernesses we enter, and so I offer some notes drawn from experience about that too. And with these three things in our pack we are ready to step “Through the unknown, unremembered gate / When the last of earth left to discove / Is that which was the beginning.” ^^

WE FALL DOWN. WE GET UP AGAIN.

Years ago I served as a part-time chaplain at a correctional facility just outside Victoria, BC. The customary dress for an Orthodox priest is a long black cassock and a large silver or gold pectoral cross. This is what I always wore to the prison, not only because it is customary for a priest to dress this way in my church tradition but also because I knew that I was immediately identifiable as a priest to the inmates. Most of the older inmates knew exactly how to address me and rarely had questions, though they almost always had requests for prayers or blessings. The younger ones, however, looked on me with curiosity and caution (“Here comes Blackrobe,” I remember one announcing) and often approached me with a challenge of one kind or another, which I always welcomed.

During one visit, a young inmate started a conversation by saying, with a tone of defiance, “Hey, father, I consider myself a spiritual man, not a religious one.” He had no idea that I had heard that phrase – spiritual, not religious – so often that it felt to me like a well-worn cliché. I replied immediately, “Good! I’m not a religious man either!” The inmate looked surprised; I could see the wheels spinning behind his eyes. I explained that religion is a set of beliefs and practices that govern a relationship between human beings and the god or gods they worship. The underlying presupposition here is a separation between humans and the gods, one that needs laws and practices to hold together, like a separation agreement between two estranged, divorcing parties.

I explained that my own experience of faith and church life (in the Eastern Orthodox Christian tradition) is that life with God was no more a religion, in this context, than a marriage. Certainly there is a covenant between two married people, a binding agreement to live together, but the practices and customs within that marriage are simply the day-to-day expressions of a life lived in union. The experience of most people engaged in faith traditions around the world is largely the same, namely a rich relationship with the divine in which rituals emerge from within the relationship rather than being imposed from an outside source in order to govern it. When I had said all of this to the inmate, he thought for a moment and replied, “Hm. All sounds like a lot of work. I’m happier divorced!”

The truth is that people today tend to create a false dichotomy between spirituality and religion, the same way we started to separate science from religion at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. What I usually hear (in order of frequency) is that religion is 1) responsible for too many wars; 2) out of touch with modern life; 3) too exclusive and intolerant of other faiths; 4) too full of rules; 5) prone to reject alternative lifestyles; 6) hierarchical; 7) favours men over women; 8) an opiate for the masses and 9) in opposition to the purity of nature. There is a grain of truth in each of these statements, as anyone honestly engaged in their faith tradition will aver, but experience has taught me that too often these are platitudes that deflect attention from what is really being expressed, which is “I want a spiritual life on my own terms.”

The prevailing desire is to assemble a set of beliefs, informally, of course, that are gathered from any spiritual resource regardless of context; that make no unreasonable demands on how we want to live; that are accepting of all peoples and faiths, though obviously rejecting faith traditions that make exclusive claims about God; and that ultimately make us feel better about ourselves. Yet such an approach, in my opinion, does not arrive at a spiritual life at all. If there is one thing the saints and holy people of every faith tradition agree on, it is that the spiritual life begins only when we have set aside our own terms and conditions. I have never found a story or example in recorded history of a person embarking on a spiritual journey and finding that it was exactly what he or she expected.

On the contrary, the journey is a harrowing experience, “costing,” in T.S. Eliot’s words, “not less than everything,” ^^ and when the divine is encountered, everything changes again. In story after story, whether historical or mythical or in between, we find one simple axiom: a god in our own image is not God. It might be more convenient to shape God in our image, but any authentic encounter with the divine actually shapes us.

Spirituality is hard because it demands that we question everything we think we know on a daily basis, whether we hold to the teachings of a particular faith tradition or not. But it is also hard because it requires discipline, vigilance, humility, love, patience and gratitude. Tall order, I know. Luckily, spirituality does not require success. There is an apocryphal story about a pilgrim who made a journey to one of the desert monks in Egypt. He asked him, “What is the monk’s life like?” The spiritual master replied, “We fall down, we get up. We fall down, and we get up again. We do this every day.” It’s the getting up part that I know from experience to be the most difficult.

However, let’s address the falling down part first, since it raises one very important question: Fall down from what? The answer, unequivocally, is love. I do not mean romantic love, which is as changeable and unpredictable as the weather. I mean the love that “bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things” (1 Cor. 13:7). Some in the Greek world called this love agape, the highest of the four loves – storge (familial love), eros (romantic, erotic) and philia (friendship) being the other three in ascending order. ^ ^{This agapic love was, in fact, rarely discussed in ancient Greek culture, despite having a category for it, because it was very difficult to attain and express and was thus perceived as somewhat impractical.} ^

However, when the early Christians needed a word to express divine love as they saw it expressed in Christ’s sacrifice on the cross, they readily chose agape for its unconditional, universal and divine qualities. The same love is expressed in Buddhist teachings, where it is classified as freedom. All love that inspires freedom from passions, from lust, from neediness, and which does not require the love of another in response, is considered the highest state of spiritual freedom for the Buddhist. Every other virtue – humility, patience, peace, kindness etc. – is the fruit of this kind of love, which is the branch and root of life. This is one reason why, in the Genesis story, the eating of the forbidden fruit in the garden was such a serious act of treason: it was an act against the agapic love of God in favour of self-love, since it was self-referential and utterly self-directed.

My experience as a priest and confessor has taught me two things about this love and its specific application to the spiritual life. First, it is very easy to talk about in wonderful ways as long as it remains in the abstract. And people do so ad nauseam. But when actually applied to other people and our environment, this love becomes our hardest, most demanding undertaking, and we realize why it is the highest of the loves and the foundation to any authentic spirituality. But, secondly, I have learned that there are two kinds of human responses to the manifestation of unconditional, free and agapic love. We either take it for granted, or we simply can’t conceive of it and therefore either reject it or test it. In the case of the latter, we want to prove that all love has limits and will ultimately fail us, whether because we have been abandoned or have experienced trauma as young children, or because all we have ever known is human love, which always has limits and conditions. Either way, when we cannot love as God loves, or shy away from it for whatever reason we may have, we fall down.

The getting up again, however, is exactly what comprises the spiritual life. At first it appears easier to stay down. We might feel shame, guilt or despair, all very heavy forces indeed, and sometimes just getting up in the morning is more daunting than we have the strength for. But here we have to ask ourselves, Whose ideals are we supposed to get up for? Whose expectations are we trying to live up to? Usually they’re our own or someone else’s. Our main focus in getting up again must instead be the truth that we are loved; that we are capable of love; and that all our errors of judgment, our pains and aches in life, exist within the boundless and unconditional love that some call God, others freedom, others the universe, but which all faith traditions and experienced holy people proclaim as existing. Certainly, we must address seriously and take ownership of what we do. This is called being responsible for our actions, and learning why we fell to begin with helps us learn how not to fall again. But rising again to receive and emulate the love of God means that we leave our burdens on the ground around us. “The angels can fly,” as G.K. Chesterton quipped, “because they can take themselves lightly.” ^^

So the spiritual life is about love, rising to it again when we fall or are hurt, seeking to embody through our experience of it the virtues it inspires: forgiveness, patience, honesty, freedom, empathy, strength. To embody this love, we must be willing to endure the experience of having our core beliefs challenged, especially if we adhere to any specific faith tradition. Spirituality is not for hobbyists. We engage with the spiritual world every time we reach beyond ourselves, every time we encounter and form relationships with other people. This is why it is so worthwhile to explore what our spiritual approach to the environment looks like, because however we got here, we belong to a complex, plenitudinous ecosystem that extends beyond us limitlessly in all directions. If it’s possible to say that spirituality begins the moment we enter into a relationship (with God, with each other, with our pet, with a garden), then how great is the need for spiritual ecology? We are, after all, in a relationship with every living thing on this planet, even if we can’t see so far as to know it.

SACRAMENT AND ECOLOGY

The first time I realized that the universe had something to say to me, I was 12 years old and hiking in the Kananaskis region of the Rocky Mountains. My family and I had spent a long weekend trekking to a remote lake high in the alpine, reached only by a steep shale traverse up a mountain pass. The pass presented itself only at the end of an already long day of hiking and climbing it seemed to take forever. When the trail levelled, however, and the view opened, my eyes widened at the sight waiting for us. An alpine meadow stretched as far as I could see, flanked by two snowy peaks and crammed with red paintbrushes, purple crocuses, blue forget-me-nots and shooting stars. The wildflowers were bright with sun under a wide blue sky and swaying this way and that in the haphazard breezes from the slopes. There are moments in life that are different from any other; they seem fixed in time and history, like waypoints in a journey. We arrive at them without warning, stumbling, and depart a different person with new purpose, with transformed vision and self-revelation. I had seen such beauty before, but in this moment I suddenly felt like Keats’s “Watcher of the skies / When a new planet swims into his ken.” ^^

What I had stumbled into as a dorky pre-teen boy was indeed a new planet, not a different one, but I saw this planet through eyes of wonder and awe. I remembered a quote I saw on a greeting card as a boy that claimed, “If we would see this world as the angels do, we would be ravished and enraptured as the angels are.” I was seeing like his angels and wondering how I could have missed until now the radiant inner world around me. I say inner world, but perhaps inter-world would be a better spatial designation. This world, of which I had known only the natural part until now, was as much a revelation of individual elements as one of a complex network of relatedness. Each flower seemed to proclaim itself, but in relation to all the other flowers and the scenery in general. Everything around me was communicating and I felt invited to join the conversation. “It is a blessed thing,” observed John Muir, “to go free in the light of this beautiful world, to see God playing upon everything as on an instrument, His fingers upon the lightning and torrent, on every wave of sea and sky, and every living thing, making all together sing and shine in sweet accord, the one love-harmony of the Universe.” ^^

This “see\[ing] God playing upon everything as on an instrument” is essentially seeing the world as sacramental and is vital to spiritual ecology. I know well that the word “sacrament” is most often associated with Christianity and it certainly has a lot of baggage that goes with it. But spiritual ecology, indeed spirituality in general, is nothing without it. Simply put, a sacrament is something that reveals the sacred. The alpine flowers I witnessed in the Kananaskis were a sacrament, as was the wind in that valley. Perhaps to the flowers and the wind I was a sacrament too. Everything was communicating something of itself, and that something was inherently sacred.

The key message here is that nature is communicating constantly. The genius of Indigenous spirituality is that it understands this and listens. The “voices” of the great bear or the caribou, the salmon or the eagle, are vitally important to survival; indeed, these voices speak to us and can even help reveal our identities to us. In Eric Collier’s classic memoir Three Against the Wilderness, about being a pioneering family in the Chilcotin region of British Columbia, there is a description of a wise old First Nations woman with whom he converses about where to settle and how. In this wonderful piece of reportage, we have a first-hand picture of the kind of wisdom these Native peoples, so much a part of the land, possess:

Tucked away within the recesses of Lala’s wise old mind was a veritable storehouse of knowledge concerning the land as it was when the white man first came to it. Though she knew nothing of biology as printed in any book, the everyday chores of an era when she and the others of her tribe were entirely reliant upon the wildlife resources of the land had brought her into almost daily contact with the complex laws of Nature. Lala knew well of the seven kind years and the seven lean years, and her knowledge was not gleaned from a Bible. The interplay of the cycles that have such paramount bearing upon the fortunes of all wildlife communities was as familiar to Lala as the letters of the alphabet to a child of civilization. If Lala’s biological knowledge came to her from the campus of the wilderness itself, she could not perhaps have attended a better school of learning.11

I wish the churches would listen more to this kind of spirituality. Indeed, I wish the churches would listen more in general! Father Alexander Schmemann, a well-known Russian theologian, asked in one of his journals, “what is there to talk about so much in Christianity, and what for?” ^^ What colonial spirituality needs to learn (among other things) from the faith traditions of the First Nations is simply this: stop telling people things and listen to what the natural world is telling us. Theirs is a journey from a human isolation to a harmony with the natural world. I have always picked up a sense from their stories and rituals that it is nature, and not humans, that is the real authority. It speaks to us, and if we listen, we thrive; if we do not, we die. One thing is clear: listening is love in action. We must love the world God created and lean in to hear his voice in it.

I recently overheard a revealing conversation between a young engineer and an older builder/contractor at the racquet club where I play squash. They had just finished their game and were chatting within my earshot outside the court. The older man asked what the other’s summer plans were. The engineer replied that he was heading into the interior of British Columbia to work on a new dam. The older man offered congratulations to the engineer on his first major gig since graduating from engineering school at university. The engineer, however, was more reserved. He said he had visited the place where they were going to build the dam and he was struck by the beauty of the valleys and forests that would soon be submerged by the new lake he would help to create. The other man was dismissive in his reply, telling him this was a necessary loss for progress, adding that “there are too many wacky environmentalists getting in the way anyway.” But the engineer had more to say. He agreed the dam needed to be built to meet the power needs of British Columbians and the Americans who would be buying some of the power generated by it. But he returned again to how beautiful this valley actually was. He spoke as if haunted by it, as if a voice from the valley were calling to him and he yearned to listen but felt he couldn’t.

“Plenty of other nice valleys, though,” the contractor said, and with that the young engineer jumped back with both feet into his life path. He was an engineer, after all, and couldn’t get distracted by these things.

The older man was right, of course. There are plenty of other nice valleys, and it is a ludicrous position to suggest that we not build a dam (and therefore withhold the jobs and the revenues it will bring) just because something is beautiful. What really struck me, though, was the contrast between the pragmatic voice of progress and the still, small voice speaking to the conscience of the engineer. The pragmatism held all the power, but really the small voice was, and is in general, a reaction to the more primal human sense of responsibility to the natural world. In other words, the older man’s pragmatism was used to quell the younger one’s innate desire to listen to what the valley he was about to help submerge had to say. It is far from ludicrous to suggest that something be preserved for its beauty. There may be more nice valleys, but none are this nice valley.

In fact, this nice valley is the only one of its kind in the universe. We have developed powerful defence mechanisms against, and justifications to subdue, our impulse to listen to the sacred in our world. But it is naive to think that beauty is a luxury we can really afford to sacrifice for energy. What if this engineer followed his heart into the beauty speaking to him from the valley? Remember how Native spirituality listens to nature as a course of survival? It is very reasonable to say that if he had followed it, he might have found other ways to generate power or perhaps discovered a reason why the valley was crucial to the ecosystems around it. Who knows? But listening to the voice calling us to deeper engagement in any course of life is always better than the defences and justifications we throw up to ignore it. I’m not saying don’t build dams, and I, like anyone, support jobs and revenue. I’m saying that the whole thrust of modern Western life ignores, and is manufactured to ignore, spiritual ecology with its sacramental vision. I’m saying that we are so inoculated to the sacred voices of nature that we consider them either imaginary or irrelevant or both. And finally, I’m saying that listening will certainly make us vulnerable to change, but what we hear will only benefit us in the long run.

THE HUNGRY BEAR

Our ecological world view must also answer to the realities of nature. After all, nature itself is very harsh. A hungry bear, with no other options, will attack and eat us without remorse or second thought for our families and friends. The animals themselves do not live easy lives; they almost always meet their end either in the jaws of another animal or through starvation or disease. One trapper told me he once watched a moose become so tortured by clouds of flies and mosquitos that it grew disoriented and fell off a rock face. He had to put the injured moose down himself and then butchered it for the meat. A park ranger in British Columbia’s Manning Park told me he watched with horror as two crows bullied a loon to the point of chasing it down and killing it. They then proceeded to dismember it for no apparent reason. “Nature,” said Alfred Lord Tennyson, is “red in tooth and claw.” ^^ Certainly we humans have adapted so well to our environment that in many cities we are insulated for the most part against weather systems, predators, dangerous terrain and hunger. This fact makes it extremely tempting to write about nature with detachment and pieties, devoid of any real-world application beyond the city garden or rural hobby farm.

I am advocating not just for a spiritual ecology but also an experienced one. There is simply no substitute for getting out into the wild, where we discover immediately that pious descriptions about the harmony and beauty of nature don’t help us survive. We also discover a very different human modality. For instance, in the ecosystems most of us are used to, we have level streets, laid out in grids that allow us to move through our world with ease, speed and safety. When I go into the backcountry, the first adjustment I have to make is to regain my balance, my “bush balance,” I call it. The paths and terrain are not level; there are obstacles like fallen trees, roots, rocks and mudholes. Also, I have to navigate differently. There are no street signs, right angles or traffic rules. I am forced to look at my surroundings – the mountains around me, the position of the sun in the sky, the changing vegetation – in order to determine my direction. Getting to and from a destination without the mediation of signs and grids requires a wholly different set of skills and even instinct. Suddenly I am paying attention to elevation, vegetation, wind direction, constellations and topography, and I am in direct communication with nature, involving more of my senses than I would in the city.

I am not suggesting we abandon streets and sidewalks. I wonder, however, whether we have taken in how different these two ways of moving in the world are and whether we have fully grasped their impact on our daily life. Being confined to a grid, and only moving over level ground without obstacles of any kind, affects our psyches in a radically different way than being in vast, trackless, open spaces, moving over rough terrain (not to mention differences in light sources, food preparation and preservation and clothing needs). When all these things are taken together, we can see that modern life is substantially different for us as a species now than it has been for most of our ancestors.

This gives me pause for two reasons. First, we have no idea what kind of impacts our new, manufactured ecosystem is having on us in the long term. We know, for instance, that fundamental changes in movement over the earth (grids, streets, cars) have contributed to high levels of obesity, which in turn affect our health and the healthcare system. Jerry Mander, in his modern classic, Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television, considers the neurophysiological impact artificial light has had on human culture. He says we simply don’t have enough data yet to understand these impacts. Today we are subjected to street lights, store lights, car lights, ceiling lights, lamp lights and of course the omnipresent screens. This leads to further alienation from the natural circadian rhythms of night and day that have shaped human life down to the genetic level, and further isolates us within our artificial ecosystem. If the fundamentals of movement and illumination have had such a dramatic impact, what about the myriad other innovations that buttress modern life? Plastic? Digital communication? Food engineering? What we do know, and I think every one of us is unsettled by the knowledge of it, is that life as we live it today bears almost no resemblance to life as our ancestors lived it for tens of thousands of years.

Recently, I started thinking seriously about what I pack into the backcountry with me. I set myself the task of reducing my inventory by about half. I took my tent poles out, and my cup and bowl (my small pot serves all my needs – cooking, eating and drinking). I kept two pairs of socks, one pair of pants, two shirts, my Tilley hat and a rain jacket. My sleeping bag stayed in the pack, of course, as did my GPS and headlamp (with two extra batteries), my first-aid kit, my small bear-scare device, a hunting knife and a spork. I also researched my menu so I could have the highest-quality food at the lowest possible weight. The less I packed, the more nervous I became. Can I really be OK out there with just a few basics, I wondered? On the one hand, I was concerned about my safety. The wilderness is an uncompromising place; things can go wrong, and when they do, the situation usually gets worse fast. Getting lost, sustaining an injury or having a bear encounter, for instance, are just a few things that can happen quickly and easily and when they do, our lives depend on immediate and knowledgeable action. I have had many such close calls, some so close I still shudder thinking about them.

But on the other hand, I realized that I was packing as if I were going to a foreign world, one in which I did not fundamentally belong. I felt as though I were a deep-sea diver, wearing my pack like an air tank, going into some inhospitable place where I could only survive for so long before coming up for air again in my natural city environment. We live most of our lives in a petroleum bubble, sheltered in almost every way from raw nature. I happen to like my place in this bubble – it’s comfortable and I like comfort – and I can’t see any way to leave it, at least for now. But it does reveal, especially when we leave it and take as much from it as we can carry, just how alienated we have become from the world of nature. I asked myself if I could survive outside the bubble if I took nothing with me. After all, my ancestors survived before the modern world, as did the peoples of the First Nations. Having spent a lifetime hiking and exploring my mountain regions, I really only know of a handful of wild berries and plants that I can eat. I have no knowledge of hunting without a gun, and little idea about how to construct a semi-permanent shelter. I have become institutionalized in the city.

Here arises my second and larger concern, namely that our artificial environment deprives us of a direct knowledge of nature. Most people today know more about their computer operating system than they do about the trees and birds outside their windows. How many of us could name even a handful of the tree, plant, flower and bird species we walk past every day to work or school? And yet I’ll wager most of us could name, and speak at length, about almost every mobile phone and car we see on the same journey. What do we know anymore about the stars and constellations, about growing food, about the migration patterns of birds and animals, about the salmon runs, about the natural trades, like the hewing and shaping of wood, or about the subtleties of seasonal change, wind direction, cloud formation and the tides? This used to be the common inheritance of humankind, but now it exists mostly in the domain of naturalists, scientists and people we consider to be living dangerously close to the fringe of modern society.

This lack of direct knowledge of nature is a serious loss for humanity, one that Jane Jacobs, in her final work, Dark Age Ahead, identified, as the title of the book suggests, as one of the signs of a new age of fatal ignorance. It also leads to an ecological world view that is either too cerebral (romantic or illusory) or materialistic (the world is mine to exploit and reshape to my purpose). This, for me, is why there is no substitute for experiencing the raw realities of the natural world with all its immensity, intricacy, ferocity and beauty. We must even, from time to time, break out of our artificial ecosystem, cozy and amusing as it is, and engage with the environment we belong in and to. When we do so, we recover the sacredness of nature, but not before.

With these three things in mind – the basics of the spiritual life, a sacramental vision and a grounded approach to nature – we are able to take our first steps toward the altar in the wilderness and there is no better place to begin than in the beginning: the origin and nature of the cosmos.