Some Thoughts on Cooperating with Nature
Essay Posted January 23, 2007 by James E. Nelson
Snow has fallen in Siouxland for the last two weekends. There were eight inches the first weekend and a bit over five inches this weekend. It also stayed below freezing throughout the week. As a result, there is a lot of snow piled up around town.
I love freshly fallen snow and freshly scooped walks and driveways. The unsullied snow is beautiful, but the piles of freshly scooped snow along the walks and driveways adds an orderliness that improves the beauty of the scene. It’s similar to a white picket fence and freshly cut grass in front of a modest home, or a long driveway leading to a southern mansion, open yards on either side with only a stately line of hickory trees lining the driveway to offset the openness. It was also one of the most beautiful aspects of Kentucky: The rolling fields of grass divided up with orderly white fences, the horses grazing near an oak or beech tree standing in the field.
While living in Louisville I also became acquainted with “tended woods,” something that I had seen without knowing what I was looking at. A wild wood is woodland or forest that simply grows naturally. Especially in the south, the undergrowth in a wild wood is so thick that it is often completely inaccessible. A tended wood, on the other hand, is open and airy. The trees in a tended wood are given space to grow so they can become robust and fill out to their full potential. Much of the undergrowth is removed so that there is space to move about beneath the trees. At the same time, not too many trees are removed so that the canopy of leafy branches overhead remains thick. A tended wood is shadowy and covered over with tree branches (with an occasional meadow opened up), but it is also open. One can look beneath that canopy and see a long way into the wood. Tended woods are inviting. They simply call out for picnics and quiet walks at sunset. On a hot day they appear cool and comfortable. On a blustery winter day they look strong and imperturbable.
All of these things — scooped walks, white picket fences, Kentucky horse farms, and tended woods — have this in common: They are natural, but they are not wild. They are all marked by an interaction or cooperation between humans and nature.
We have watched the growth of Northwest Arkansas over the last decade. The area is currently in a phase of development where large hills are leveled, the dirt being dumped into the neighboring valley (with proper drainage carefully installed first). The result is vast tracks of absolutely level red dirt. No doubt the next time we are in Northwest Arkansas, those tracks of dirt will be covered with concrete and asphalt. Beautiful (and occasionally architecturally stunning) buildings will rise from the parking lots. The result will no doubt be a remarkably beautiful business park complete with fountains and statues. And while beautiful, it will not be natural. Rather, it will be a monument to human ingenuity and aesthetics.
A pristine wilderness is beautiful in its own way. A well designed city is also beautiful and indeed magnificent in its own way. There is something equally awe-inspiring (albeit, in two very different ways) in a city skyline rising out of the prairie and a mountain range rising out of the plain. But when those two sensibilities (the natural and human achievement) come together, the results can be utterly sublime. And this is why I love tended woods, Kentucky horse farms, and a freshly scooped sidewalk and driveway. Human achievement is orderly. Nature is beautiful. When the two come together, the result can be an ordered beauty that exceeds both order and beauty by itself.
When I was a Presbyterian minister I was involved in the Pastor-Theologian (or Pastor as Theologian) program called The Company of Pastors, and through that, I got to know personally many of the staff in the Office of Theology and Worship of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) Presbyterian bureaucrats (in contrast to average Presbyterian pastors and church goers) have a well-earned reputation of being silly bleeding heart liberals. But the Office of Theology and Worship was nothing like that during the two decades I was a pastor. They were truly Reformed but equally well versed in the Church Fathers.
Every person on staff at Theology and Worship advocated the need to use wine and leavened bread at the Lord’s Table. (By the way, this is nothing new. The Orthodox Church has taught this from the beginning. It's one of the many areas where we see a confluence between Protestantism's ongoing search for its roots and Eastern Orthodoxy.) Since this is what I was taught at seminary, their strong advocacy of both wine and leavened bread resonated in my mind. The Lord’s Super is a sacrament in classic Reformed theology. It is a real union of heaven and earth in much the same way Jesus Christ was fully God and fully human. Classic Reformed theology is unambiguous on this point. Jesus Christ is really and truly present in the sacrament.
And just as Jesus is truly human and truly God, so the sacrament is truly shaped by God (the grapes and the wheat) and shaped by humans (the fermentation and leavening processes). Grape juice and unleavened bread (God-given gifts unadulterated by human creativity) speak to a nervousness about the utter humanity of salvation (or a misunderstand of the relationship between sin and human nature, but that’s an essay in itself). Wine and leavened bread point to the absolute need of both the divine and human.
And this brings me back to scooped walks, white fences, and tended woods. There is a synergy that results in something greater than the parts when humans put their creative and ordering touch on that which is natural. Don’t get me wrong! I don’t think there’s anything sacramental about scooping snowy walks, but a well tended yard—in winter or in summer—points toward the magnificent gift God gave to us when he said, “I have done great things on my own, but I’m going to do my greatest work in cooperation with humans.”
Copyright © 2007 James E. Nelson (Just Another Jim). All Rights Reserved.
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