Where the Wild Things Are
Mark 1.12-13
Wilderness. The Outback. These things evoke something within us and within people around the world. From the deserts of the red centre to the great reef of the eastern seaboard, from the grasslands of Africa to the peaks of the Rocky Mountains, wilderness connects powerfully with something inside us. In a world that is increasingly built-out, developed, farmed and‘domesticated’, wilderness reminds us of significant things. Of the beauty and power of ‘nature’ (if you have one outlook on life) or ‘creation’ and even the ‘Creator’ (if you have another view of life). Wilderness reminds us of the way things were. It evokes how much has been lost, and gained. It is a very powerful value, a profound metaphor, within our society. We have a Wilderness Society. We have great political battles over the preservation and management of ‘wilderness’ areas. We can take Wilderness holidays. Tour boats ply the Lower Gordon River in the South-West Wilderness in Tasmania and the tropical waters of the reef. Buses and four wheel drives thunder across the deserts. Australians and our overseas visitors want to see wilderness!
What do we go out to see? Do we see a scenic vista, like a postcard writ large in 3D, something for our eyes to consume? Do we see a world packaged for tourists to look at, but never look into? Do we see something to photograph so that the surface becomes our possession and travels home with us?
Or do we enter beneath the surface so that the miracle of wild nature opens us to the wonder of existence? Wilderness reminds us of how small we are and how deep life is. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard is one of the great literary explorations of nature. The book enters into the complexity, the beauty and the wanton savagery of nature in a way that is utterly transforming: “Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery.”
Such are some of the modern intimations of wilderness. But Wilderness, the desert, ‘the lonely place’, also plays a big part in Scripture. Ishmael and his mother were turned out into the wilderness to die, but the Lord rescued and cared for them. For forty years the children of Israel wandered in the Wilderness. The Old Testament prophets were no strangers to the wilderness. The Wilderness was part of their formation: for ‘out of the deserts the prophets come’. Isaiah prophesied the great miracle that God would make the watered places barren and create pools in the wilderness. “Make straight in the desert a highway for our God!” was his cry.
And the Spirit drove Jesus into the wilderness where he was tested for forty days and forty nights. Matthew and Luke tell us something of his trials but Mark says simply “and he was with the wild beasts and the angels ministered to him”. Throughout his ministry Jesus went out into the Wilderness. He prayed in lonely and desert places. On more than one occasion when his disciples wanted to find him they had to go and search the wilderness.
And after Jesus, when the church came out of the catacombs and into the Court of Constantine, St Anthony and St Benedict went back into the desert, away from the settled life and comfort of the cities, to found western monasticism. They went to where life was a struggle, where their theology said the demons and the wild beasts lived.
What do we find in the wilderness? For many modern people the wilderness is the carefully planned holiday, the inspiring experience of nature, a rest from the burdens of urban life, finding the wide open spaces of freedom. Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the Romantics set the tone with reflections on the beauty of nature and the ‘nobility’ of the unspoilt ‘savage’. Driven out of society, which he regarded as brutal and rejecting, Rousseau engaged in ‘a long and happy reverie, seeing myself surrounded by greenery, flowers and birds, and letting my mind wander over the picturesque far off shores, … I could not draw a line between fiction and reality, so much did everything conspire to make me love the contemplative and solitary life I led in that beautiful place.” (Rousseau: Meditations of a Solitary Walker, p. 39). The contemporary descendent of the Romantics comes with four wheel drives and cameras and satellite phones and all the gear that technology has given us to tame the bush, but the same love of beauty and sense of contentment.
And this is good! In a world filled with plastic junk and spanned by Golden Arches, such an experience of nature is food for the spirit. If we really attend closely to the experience we might just learn that “Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery.”
Yet for most of us our experience of wilderness is manufactured, ‘produced’, made safe and saleable by a system focussed on control. There is the awful danger that we will mistake the tourist destination of the modern wilderness for the place that Jesus entered, that we will equate the experience of the tourist for whom wilderness is a nice holiday for the experience of the early monks for whom wilderness was the fire of struggle and the forge of prayer.
Modern humanity makes things safe, manages risk. Wilderness, like life, is well supervised, predictable, and harmless. That’s the goal of governments, department stores, national parks and even churches. Wilderness is controlled and packaged.
But Jesus was with the wild beasts, and the angels ministered to him. Wilderness is where the wild things are. Jesus knew there was no life without struggle, and no truth without danger. He knew there was no prayer without the roaring of the wild things around about and no real life without the mysterious ministry of the angels.
But we live in a world wary of wild things and agnostic about angels. Sane wilderness administrators will banish the wild things and abolish the angels.
There are two types of wild animals in the wilderness, the shy ones that hide from us, and the fierce ones that hurt us. Jesus went out to be with them both, and so must we.
Learning to live with shy and hidden things is at the centre of the spiritual life. Why? Parker Palmer puts is well:
If we want to see and hear a person’s soul, there is a … truth we must remember: the soul is like a wild animal – tough, resilient and yet shy. When we go crashing through the woods shouting for it to come out so that we can help it, the soul will stay in hiding. But if we are willing to sit quietly and wait for a while, the soul may show itself. (Parker Palmer: The Courage to Teach, p. 151)
Being in the wilderness with things that hide from us teach us how to give space to things hidden from us and find fellowship with that which flees from our presence. St Godric stripped off his clothes in the 12th century to swim naked with the sea otters off the coasts of Northumbria for hours on end. It was play. It was joyous celebration of God’s creation. And it was learning how to live with his own soul.
Michael Leunig expresses this truth about the inner life in his wonderful prayer for ideas:
“God help us with ideas, those thoughts which inform the way we live and things we do. Let us not seize upon ideas, neither shall we hunt them down nor steal them away. Rather let us wait faithfully for them to approach, slowly and gently like creatures from the wild. And let them enter willingly into our hearts and come and go freely within the sanctuary of our contemplation, informing our souls as they arrive, and being enlivened by the inspiration of our hearts as they leave.
All this learnt in the wilderness, from the wild things that hide there. These things are not valued by the rational world, by the economy, by all the forces and logic of civilisation. The mysteries of the soul must be respected like the elusive creatures of the bush and in the quiet encounter with wilderness we learn something of how to meet them.
But the wild animals are not just retiring and shy. There are wild animals that hurt too. Jesus went out to be with wild beasts. The 4th century monks went to live where the demons and the wild animals prowled around. We moderns don’t like hurt, and we try to control the risks of wilderness. Yet the primal quality of wilderness does break through our defenses from time and time. A ute pulls alongside a Kombi van on an isolated road and flags down the backpackers. A dingo prowls around a child’s tent near Uluru. These are the nightmares of our culture, the repressed and feared realisation that we are living where the wild things are. And in the heart of wilderness lie very wild things indeed.
In the Tanami Desert of the NT just off the Tanami Track lie the ruins of Mt Doreen station. The station was a place of hardship and oppression of the Aboriginal people. I visited this place in the mid 90’s. As the last light of the late afternoon slanted across the desert we stood among the ruins of the old homestead building. Mt Doreen had been a hard place – the land and the people were pushed the limit. My guide a missionary of long experience told me it was owned by a family of violent men who visited their violence upon the indigenous people who worked there, especially through the sexual abuse of Aboriginal women. For the first years of his service in the region he doubted the stories of abuse because where are all the half-caste children that would have resulted? After many years the Aboriginal people told him the truth. Those children didn’t survive. They were killed soon after birth. As the later afternoon sun stream down on the endless plain in a glory of gold he told me the story. All around us in the terrible beauty of the desert were the buried bodies of innocent babies, victims of a cycle of violence that runs back through abused black women and abusing white men to God knows where and God knows when. We were standing where the wild things are, the wild things of lust and rape, of abuse and murder– the wild things of racist oppression.
We try to make wilderness safe, to manage our encounter with the wild things of life. But the wild things still find us in life, and not just in the outback or the desert. In the sudden and senseless death of someone we love, the wild things find us. In the unexpected collapse of a marriage, or the loss of a job, we find ourselves where the wild things are. In the murder of someone we someone we work with at Stuart Flats as happened to some in this church last Friday, we are in the territory of the wild things.
And of ministering angels! If Jesus went out to the wilderness to be with wild beasts he was also met by angels who ministered to him. In the wild and dangerous things of life he fashioned his prayer but he also experienced the loving and supporting presence of angelic beings, those who bring the presence and the comfort of God.
Wilderness is where the wild things are. Its not just the pretty bushland that lifts our spirits. Wilderness is the hiding of subtle things that grace human life and it is the howling of the wild things that threaten human life. It is there we must learn to pray, to train our lives in the ways of Jesus, and it is there we will meet the angels.
Where is the wilderness today? Paradoxically, today it is often in the heart of our cities. The things that grace human life are hidden by efficiency and industry – there is no room for their shy and gently presence to emerge. The things that maul human life are howling around us far more in the city than the gentle landscape of or ‘wilderness national parks’. A great wilderness was to be found in the lane behind my former church fifteen feet from the back door. It was the wilderness of drug addiction. You couldn’t get to your car after worship without walking past it and feeling its danger.
Several hundred metres to the south of this place lies another urban wilderness, a wilderness in which a man was murdered on Friday. You needn’t travel far: another wilderness lies just behind us on the hill, the wilderness of politics and policy. There are wild things at work on that hill. There decisions are made about war and detention, and what price will be paid for every decision and who will pay it. And there are angels too – protective presences, moral courage – but despite all appearances, its not a pleasant garden, it’s where the wild things are.
There are people here today who are living where the wild things are. The wild predators of disease, and betrayal and bereavement they can be more terrifying and painful than any shark or crocodile.
Jesus calls us to follow him. Can we follow without some engagement with the mystery of wilderness? Can we follow Jesus without calming our frantic lives to the point where the hidden and helpful things, the touch of angels, the life of the soul has a chance to emerge and heal us. Can we follow Jesus without opening our lives in some way to threat, to the presence of the wild and hurtful things with which we must wrestle? From the beginning of the story God has led his people into such places, and through such places they have struggled and grown, and learned and ultimately triumphed. So let us go to these places - in the bush, and in the city - and let us learn to live where the wild things are, where Jesus is found, and where his angels find us!
Preached Canberra Baptist Church 13th November 2005 - Jim Barr