I can remember almost viscerally the days when my brother Michael and I would wander off behind my family’s tin-covered, sanguine colored barn, deeper and deeper into the woods off of Brawely School Rd. The forest, with its gorges and streams, seemed to be endless. No cars, cranes, or even people could be heard. No distractions. Just a childlike wonder for exploration and the deepening woods. We’d catch a family of deer in our periphery — and they’d reciprocate the glance before bounding off. We’d play in the meandering creek beds, walking their miniature shores, knowing so long as we followed them we knew our way home. The thought of it all is almost enough to make me want to be a mystic. Almost.
This childhood, eco-nostalgia isn’t self wrought, however. I have Stephen Prothero’s “Why I Am Not a Mystic”– recently published in Killing the Buddha — to thank for the inspiration. Prothero recounts some of the beauties of Cape Cod that captivated him:
In close, I saw a seal diving and surfacing and diving again. Farther out, I saw a riot of seabirds cavorting with spouts of water. Then came two big black tail fins and, minutes later, a full-body breach of a humpback whale.
There’s something about that quietude of being in nature without distraction that sets the mystic moment. Prothero puts it:
I love the idea of mysticism—the notion that divinity comes to us by stealth, not in words and congregations but in silence and solitude, and when it comes it ravishes us and makes us new.
BUT – In the end, like Prothero, I love people too much. As much as I am drawn to the quietude, I am more drawn to the city. I’m more drawn to Abraham Joshua Heschel, who wrote, “A religious man [sic.] is a person who holds God and man in one thought at one time, at all times, who suffers harm done to others, whose greatest passion is compassion, whose greatest strength is love and defiance of despair” I am more drawn to that than, say, to Henrey David Thoreau, who wrote, “My profession is always to be alert, to find God in nature, to know God’s lurking places, to attend to all the oratorios and the operas in nature.” I love that, but not as much as people.
Moreover, if I were a mystic, I’d have to give up the ego of written word and vast audience I have here on Wheat and Chaff…
Sometimes, though, I wonder if that love of people comes at the neglect of the world I wandered in so freely as a child. I mean, can we clearly separate the two: humanity and the world? What does it do for us to be compassionate to the homo-sapien corpus at the neglect of the very ground it treads? Yes, there is something that separates us from the rest of finitude, but not enough that we’re free of it. Christians often like to say, “We’re in the world but not of it.” Hmm… Why can’t we be? For one, maybe it’s time to stop looking for royal kingdoms in the sky to which we think we’re bound. But what’s more, is once we bring our gaze back down, maybe our sight can go further than anthropo-vision. Maybe we begin to bridge the two: human and nature, seeing the inextricable tellurian links between it all. After all, when I played in those lovely woods, dark and deep, my brother was with me every time. I’m not sure I would have known their joy as much had he not been there.
