Experiencing God in wildness of nature
Review of "The God of Wild Places" by Tony Jones.
On more than one occasion I have remarked to my students, “the hardest part about preaching heaven in Vancouver, is that most people think they are already there!” As we move further into a North American culture where fewer people are born nominally Christian, many are finding their expression of transcendence, beauty and longing in nature. Tony Jones offers a glimpse into that worldview in his new book The God of Wild Places, by way of narrating his own personal journey, clothed now “in the vestments of the natural world, by walking out of the church and into the woods, and that journey that saved me.”It’s not uncommon here in the Pacific Northwest for many of us to have kind-hearted and morally just “affable agnostic” neighbours, who treasure the beauty of the natural world but are not as keen to connect it to any personal deity. However, as a former pastor, Tony Jones offers us a different perspective than many people I know who have no Christian memory and who find the idea of church going slightly odd and quaint. On the contrary, Tony writes as a church “insider,” slowly working his doxology out while moving from pulpit and pew to deer stand and fishing boat.
While The God of Wild Places is, in part, about discovering the power and beauty of life in all its abundance in the outdoors, this book is also a self-reflective witness to Tony’s journey from his high-profile ministry career to a painful divorce and the end of a pastoral call. At times, the reader may flinch as Tony shares his own unbridled ambition, climbing what we might call the “ecclesiastical corporate ladder,” knowing that from the author’s perspective it was all a carefully constructed ministerial house of cards just waiting to fall.
Memoir or practical theology?
The God of Wild Places is in a way an exodus story, as we journey with Tony from a place of pastoral leadership prominence through a dark valley of self-doubt toward discovery and into a new and clearer sense of call and purpose. I found myself feeling nostalgic as Tony described the revelation of fishing on the Lake of the Woods straddling the Canadian/US border, where I grew up each summer at our family cottage. Tony also takes us out in the fields with his hunting dogs and, in a no-holds-barred way, reflects on what it means to take another creature’s life, and the lessons inherent for those who live close to the land. Tony writes beautifully, in a compelling, thoughtful and theological way.
While this book is an invitation for all of us to consider what revelation awaits in the natural world, in the end The God of Wild Places reads more as a deeply personal account of one person’s journey, awash in confessional tones, girded in hope. As a practical theologian, I was left wondering whether Tony’s heart-felt and honest account was a story of “de-conversion” or “deconstruction.” Unlike my more secular neighbours in Vancouver, many of whom are now raised on their third or fourth generation without religion, Tony’s deep Christian formation from Sunday School to a doctoral program shaped (and continues to shape) his lens on the world. Did he walk away from Christian faith, or just the ecclesiastical apparatus we know as church?
Catechising communities
By the end, Tony’s faith in God found in the natural world feels more like a deconstruction than an outright rejection of the Christian faith. But the reader is left wondering whether a movement out of the church and into the woods can be anything other than a decision to be “privately faithful.” While the natural world can leave us awestruck and humble, reflecting on the relationship between creation, Creator and creature, what role (if any) does a gathered community play? That community we call the Body of Christ, that welcomes us in baptismal waters, catechises us into a bigger story than our own personal one, nurtures us in who and whose we are in light of cradle and cross, all the while providing siblings in Christ who offer support and care, as well as accountability and challenge. What might the church’s response be to those like Jones who have earnestly found God in the beauty and terror of the natural world, but no longer in the heartbeat of congregations that many of us still call home?
The God of Wild Places enchants the reader with its beautiful prose and its call to embrace our creatureliness, all the while encouraging the reader to ponder their own journey through this world, seeking God’s evergreen hope and faithful community as we traverse the space somewhere between a temple and tabernacle faith.
Thanks for pointing out this book to us and for the careful review with its final question.