“‘Not this,’ ‘Far farther,’ or ‘Yonder.’” (C.S. Lewis)
The black bear sat in a tree next to the eighth hole of the golf course where I worked, its legs dangling like a comically oversized toddler. I was nineteen years old, working a summer job at the foot of Cheyenne Mountain in El Paso County, Colorado. Cheyenne Mountain is a 2,920-meter-tall peak rising out of the High Plains of eastern Colorado. Once, a great forest of ponderosa pine, rocky mountain juniper, aspen, and bristlecone cloaked the steep slopes and provided a home for much wildlife. But most of the trees were cleared long ago, and wildlife sightings are rare now: deer scat on a dirt path, the distant yap of coyotes or prairie dogs, rumours of mountain lions. It was a shock to encounter a black bear in a tree next to the green.
In the first two articles in this series on the Christian doctrine of creation, I named wonder and grief as characteristics of our modern relationship with the other-than-human world. Both emotions were with me on the mountain with the black bear. Wonder at its wildness and deep-buried strength; grief that it was perched so precariously at the edge of an artificial lawn, among remnant trees. But there was also a third feeling with me that day: deep longing. In ways that I would have found hard to articulate then—still find hard to articulate—I longed to go with that bear into its wild wood, to somehow (what am I saying?) enter into its life and share it.
Grief, wonder, and longing are key contours of the modern emotional landscape out of which our questions, anxieties, and hopes about creation arise. This is the context in which I want to explore the Christian doctrine of creation. But I want to suggest also that these complex emotions don’t just provide the context for our questions but hint at what answers we might find. They are intuitions into reality. They point beyond the limits of our modern, materialistic worldview, serving as chinks in the armour, whispers of a deeper reality. Materialism, which sees the world as deriving its meaning only from human purposes and holding no depth beyond what we can see, measure, and manipulate, cannot account for the intensity of our emotional responses to nature. Grief recognises a loss deeper than utility. Wonder perceives a world saturated with meaning. Longing also knows something about our world.
Longing, like grief and wonder, is a complex emotion. It takes several objects and comes to us with various strengths and textures. Many of our longings are shadows of our grief. We long for our bent world to be set straight, for time to be turned back like a film run in reverse: to see pollutants drawn out of the air, plastics strained from the great bowls of the earth’s oceans, for eroded top soil to tumble backward out of the rivers and the clotted deltas to cover again the earth with life-giving fertility; for forests to spring up and clothe our mountains.
We long to be made right with the creatures with whom we share a common home. Communing with animals is one of the deep desires of the human heart, J.R.R. Tolkien once suggested, the motivation and pleasure behind so many stories we tell about talking beasts. We long for the end of our “species loneliness,” to pick up again our part in the “great conversation.”1 It is a particular irony of modern life that, having explored, charted, and found a use for nearly every square centimetre of the earth, we nonetheless feel bereft of a sense of belonging. Many of us feel uprooted from any meaningful and enduring connection with the places we live, our kith and kin among flora and fauna.2 We long to feel ourselves natural parts of a larger harmonious whole.
As we will see in future posts, these longings resonate with the Christian understanding of creation. We were made for communion with the creatures of our common home. Something has gone out of the world, and everything in creation is straining forward toward that good end where things will be put right.
But there’s another dimension to longing, one that surfaces most powerfully in the presence of natural beauty. C.S. Lewis captures it well:
We do not want merely to see beauty…. We want something else which can hardly be put into words—to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it.
This resonates with my experience. The bear lounging in the tree, the lavender light of the Rocky Mountains at sunset, the flash of iridescent blue-green as a kingfisher threads through the air—these moments evoke a yearning for something more, a desire to merge with the beauty I behold. I catch myself stepping forward, reaching out. This longing points beyond the materialistic notion of beauty as merely subjective—in the beholder's eye—suggesting instead a deeper dimension to our reality, a source and home for beauty outside ourselves; ultimately, as we will come to see, in God, “beauty’s self and beauty’s giver” (Gerard Manly Hopkins). Beauty, like wonder, beckons. We sense there is something more, a “deeper country” as Lewis elsewhere calls it. We long to find it.
Our longing, then, is not merely for a restored nature or relationship with other creatures—it is yearning to enter through creation into the life of its Creator. The natural world means more (but not less) than itself. This, at least, is the case I want to make in further posts.
Christian doctrine can return to us our experiences of grief, wonder, and longing clarified, deepened, and transformed. In the coming posts, I want to explore the “deeper country” revealed in Christian doctrine and suggest how it might transform—deepen, enliven, make beautiful—our being in the world.
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“We are talking only to ourselves. We are not talking to the rivers, we are not listening to the wind and stars. We have broken the great conversation” (Thomas Berry)
In his book Wild Places, Robert Macfarlane writes:
On almost every front, we have begun a turning away from a felt relationship with the natural world. The blinding of the stars is only one aspect of this retreat from the real. In so many ways, there has been a prising away of life from place, an abstraction of experience into different kinds of touchlessness. We experience, as no historical period has before, disembodiment and dematerialisation. The almost infinite connectivity of the technological world, for all the benefits that it has brought, has exacted a toll in the coin of contact. We have in many ways forgotten what the world feels like. And so new maladies of the soul have emerged, unhappinesses which are complicated products of the distance we have set between ourselves and the world.
There is a reality! And one of creation’s very purposes is to beckon us toward it.
Do you feel this is a separation seen across all cultures, or is it mainly western based cultures that have ripped themselves apart from nature? I’d also be interested to hear your thoughts on when this rupture happened- my impression is that previous people walking the earth lived alongside the natural world, their rhythms were intertwined.