Reading and Re-enchantment with Dr. Doug Sikkema

Transcript

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Intro

All right. Thanks so much, Jack, for the introduction. I am having to leave right after this, so I hope I can chat a little bit. I have to make my way to my mother's birthday party, and I think if any group understands that, maybe appreciates it, it's you guys. And I just want to say, like this has been probably the most delightful conference I've ever been a part of. From the music, the devotions, the collegiality, it's really a wonderful group. And I love that you guys practice what you preach. And even this morning in the sort of few little movements we had with singing, with the beautiful liturgy from Saint Macrina and then Jack's talk. A lot of those ideas I'm hoping to address this morning.

So that one verse we all sang together. I don't know about you, but I had sort of those visceral goosebumps Matt was talking about. “Be Still My Soul; the waves and wind still know. His voice who ruled them while he dwelt here below.” I want you to keep that in the back of your mind and then the picture study we had where we looked at that man sort of looking at the books and the world kind of grows dim, and we kind of talked about, well, does reading actually make us escape from the world? I think Jack just gave us a good reminder. It doesn't, right? 

What time is it?

So that's going to be the focus of our talk today: reading and re-enchantment. How do words make us belong to the world? And I know it's still early. I'm only on my third coffee. So you guys might still be waking up. How do we respond as Educators to our time? So I just want us to think about this question together. One of the things we have to do as teachers, as educators at any level, whether you're a homeschool mom or dad, whether you're a teacher in primary secondary or post-secondary school, is read the times, right? Read the times and then respond to them. What are the characteristics of the age that we live in, and there's a lot of answers to this question and obviously this morning we're not going to be answering all of, or looking at all the answers to this question, but I want you just to, just throw out a few of the ways you would answer this question. What time is it today? What is the age that we're living in? What are some of the features of this age? As we think about educating our kids, what are we responding to?

Some answers...

Yeah,  attention deficit, right,  we're distracted by so many things. Yeah individualism. Relativistic. Disconnection. Okay, post Christian secular. Pragmatic, Utilitarian. Okay, I just threw up a few answers we could think about and some of them already came up but polarization, inflation - my goodness, the price of gas to get home scares me. Uncertainty. Right? And I mean what age hasn't been filled with uncertainty, but I think we're feeling it especially more these days right? Where is all of this stuff going especially with war and rumors of war and where is that all going to play out? What kind of world are we actually passing on to our children? It can be scary. Right? We heard post Christian or secular. We're living in a secular age. Well, what exactly does that mean? I'll touch on one feature of that this morning.

There's sort of rot in the church. There's rot outside of the church, but what's going on in the ecclesial community? We have pluralism, globalism, polarization, wealth and decadence and let's not be so pessimistic on this beautiful morning. There's also a lot of opportunity. There's things that we can be hopeful for, and I do want to suggest that some things are bad in the context that we live in. But there's always hope. And I love one of my favorite writers Wendell Berry. He says that

“Hope as a virtue for a Christian is not an option and it's not contingent on circumstance. Hope is actually a condition of life we’re called to.”

Right, it's a discipline. It's a habit of being so we don't really have an option. We have to be people filled with hope, so I hope that at the end of this talk, you're also filled with hope as to addressing the age that we live in and responding to it.

Our focus

So the two areas that I'm going to be looking at this this morning in terms of how do we answer this question? What time is it? Are one; We live in a time of techno industrial advancement. And two; we live in the anthropocene, a word which may or may not be familiar to you. And then I make a tie both of these. They're very closely related. I'm going to tie them both to this idea of a disenchanted secular age that were we're moving through. And we might think that we're so unique because of the digital revolution that's happened. But I want us to consider that the world that Mason was writing in and reacting to, a world sort of seeing all the effects of the Industrial Revolution, was just as unsettling, filled with just as much upheaval as we might face today with our kids with phones and screens. Right, steam engines, rail cars, manufacturing, mining, the whole upheaval of how Urban Landscapes were designed where people went to work. All of that was was a drastic change from everything that had come before, so the upheavals that we think are so unique to us have actually been shared by people in the industrial and post-industrial world. And I want to actually explore that even though there's obviously very different things between a steam engine and a rail car, a train and our smartphones. They actually do very similar things to us. They're kind of like amplified versions of the same thing in terms of how they're forming us.

What we form will form us

So I want to begin with this line from Andy Crouch. If you haven't read this book Culture Making, I'd really recommend it to you. And there's a few other books from Andy Crouch that I'll be referencing this morning. But Andy Crouch says in this book,

“Culture is what we make of the world in both senses of that term.”

So, I wanted to start with this because I think we can have this kind of Luddite anti-technology sort of stance. And don't get me wrong. Sometimes, I think I want to kind of take the Mennonite option and throw it all away, move somewhere way up north in Canada, and get a horse and buggy. My kids would not love that. But, there is this stance that we don't like technology and we would just want to throw it all away, and Andy Crouch begins his argument saying, “Culture is actually something that we're all called to do. So, we make of the world in both senses of that term.”

So all culture then is sort of two different things if we kind of break that out. What are the two ways that we make? Well, number one, every technology, from the machine engine, to the smartphone, to the pencil, to the kickstand on our bikes, is just a rearrangement of nature. It’s a rearrangement of nature. The Greeks had two words that I think are important for us to to think about here: one is the word for nature, which was Phusis. P-H-U-S-I-S. And that's the world of change and decay. It's a world of physical reality. And when that gets rearranged and reorganized they called that techne, which is where we got the word technology from. So all technology is just a really interesting rearrangement of the stuff of the Earth. Now, what does it mean that we make in two ways? So we make this stuff, right, if we explore long enough we get like plastic water bottles and we get podiums, we get microphones. We get all this stuff. It was all kind of latent in the wild of the Garden of Eden. It just took us thousands of years to keep playing around with it and coming up with this stuff. But what does it mean we make it two ways? How do we not just give form to the world, but we also give value we give meaning to it?

So what Crouch means is that we don't just take stuff and make it, we also give and ascribe value to it socially. So take the example of gold, right. If you dig around long enough, you might find gold, right? If you play around in the garden long enough, you find this gold and you can mint it into coins. Well, why does a coin have value? Right. Well, it has value as a currency because we as a community ascribe it value. Right? If I just cut off some bark of a tree and I said, "I'm gonna say this is worth a thousand dollars and go to the store," No one believes me, right? That's worth nothing, and I don't want to get into bitcoin and what that might suggest of this because I don't understand it, but value is something that's shared communally, socially.

All right. So I want us to keep that in mind as well - that we give the things that we make a kind of value by holding it together in our attention, and this will have some interesting connections with with language. Now the flip side of this is that these tools that we make, the things that we discover, are not neutral. Okay, so that when we make these things they make us. Okay, when we form something they start to form us. And they transform us. So the things we make will make us. I love telling this to my students in Humanities 210 I teach. It's called Understanding the World Through Art, and it helps them sort of see and read their world as a kind of strange place. That these tools they think they have so much control over are actually shaping them. Shaping all kinds of behaviors and thoughts and desires in them. 

Reading our phones to read our hearts

So, I wanted to try this and of course of all the mornings I don't actually have my phone on me, and I was supposed to have it because I was supposed to keep track of time. I need to make sure you guys get out on time so you can check out of your hotels. I want you to, if you have a phone with you, take it out. And I want you just, to the people around you, to read your phone. Not read what's on it, but interpret it, and I want you to ask the question, "How has this device changed our stance to the world. How has our device changed our stance to the world?" So take out your phone with the people around you - just start to interpret it. What does this phone say about what we love, our hearts desires? Okay. I'm gonna give you like two minutes -- and be positive, too.

All right. I know it's not quite two minutes. But I because I didn't have my phone on me. I didn't realize we’re already at 9:24. So I'm gonna try to keep it moving a little bit, but great. I love the energy. I love the discussion. What are some of the things you guys came up with? What are some of the ways our phones form us?

These are really important things to pay attention to right? Read them, interpret them. Why are we doing this? What's behind that? And absolutely I've noticed that with myself even it's a lot easier to use my phone for everything but actually talking to real people. Because, it's kind of inconvenient, like it's nice to... I can actually communicate on my own schedule, on my own time. And if my brother texts me in the morning, I'm even there to respond right away. I'm like, I'll respond to this after lunch or maybe I'll ignore it. I don't have to, right, and it puts me, I know I sound awful, but it puts me at the center of reality, right? Okay, what else? 

Yeah, and I was really late to the cell phone game. My wife and I were married for almost eight or nine years before we finally caved and bought our first phones, and it was so interesting that it was like anytime my phone rang or we had a landline rang. I was like, oh something's wrong and now it's like if my phone's not beeping with a text. Like hey, it's like something's wrong. So it's just completely shifted how we think about it. 

Okay, I'm sure you guys have a lot of other interesting insights. But this is a really important thing for us to do. Our culture is not just a compendium, a collection of ideas. And sometimes we can think that right like our culture is just the great thoughts of people right? It's the Industrial Revolution and it's Francis Bacon and it's Rene Descartes and absolutely philosophy and the intellectuals are important. But it's also a collection of things. It's a collection of made things and those made things, like interstate highways, like supercomputers, like smartphones, are part of the things of our culture that we make they show what we value and they reveal and this is, to John Ruskin's point, they reveal what we love and what we worship. Okay, the things that we make reveal something about what we value what we want as a collective.

What our tech says about our hearts

So, I'm taking these four ideas from the most recent book from Andy Crouch called The Life We're Looking For and he says not just our smartphone but, a lot of you have kind of pointed this out with a smartphone, but a lot of our technology in the kind of post-industrial age, the world that Mason's living in, is actually just the sort of grandparent to the world we're living in and have sort of four key features: one is that we want effortless superpower. Okay, we want that. We want to have all this power that makes us bigger than ourselves, moves us beyond a human scale. But without having to use a lot of effort. 

And I drove here and I'm grateful for some of this power, right? I can get here in eight and a half hours in my car. I can get here even shorter if I fly. But what happens in my actual physical body is all I have to do is push a gas pedal, right? So again, it's a remarkable ability that we have. But what does it do to my full personhood, my strength, my vitality? Why is it very different than walking, than running, than biking? Right? What do some of our technologies allow us...and we don't have to extend any effort? We love unlimited connectivity and you guys have talked about this right? We want to be connected to the world. We want to connect to other people, we say, but really our phones and several devices help us to sort of enact this individualism right to put ourselves at the center of reality and to be in the stance of control. We desire, and we will never say this, again we might not like actually articulate this, but we like the distractions. We don't like to be bored. We don't like to wait.

And I know I'm a hypocrite. I'm the first among sinners right that if I'm in line or if I'm even driving now and I have my phone -- what can I listen to, what can I like keep up with right? Why are we not allowing ourselves to just have that quiet silence and stillness? And we long for and this is the key point that I want to get to this morning. We want this kind of power over nature, and I don't even think we fully realize that we have the kind of power of classical gods in our pocket, right? We swipe a finger and a book lands on our front porch right with the nice smiley face of Jeff Bezos, right? So it's amazing, but do we actually realize all the hidden costs of that? What are the human and natural resources that are being marshaled to appeal to my appetite? What happens to all the waste? Do we care? Do we see that, right? But again, like Zeus, like Athena, we can command reality. And our kids and I imagine this community is not too keen on giving very young kids phones. But if you do, our kids who see us, or they see us using them, they see that we have this kind of effortless superpower over the material world and that's forming us as part of something we desire as a culture.

So, what does this actually say about our hearts? We want this effortless superpower, but is it actually making us more human? Does it enhance, to use Mason's words, our personhood? Okay, is this actually our growth potential to good or towards evil? And I'm not entirely pessimistic I wouldn't say throw out the phone. There are good uses for it. But, is it actually making us more human? Unlimited connectivity. Right, so we're connected to everything, but are these real living relationships? Are these things that catalyze in-person dialogue, real phone calls with real voices with real humans in real places, or do we increasingly isolate, alienate and live in these kind of buffered zones where we project an image to the world and it doesn't actually reflect a reality?

Attention, the word Jack used, and it comes from Mason, we're going to get to this, this idea of these little tentacles reaching out to the world, right? That's really what our attention is. Our attention reaches out to the world beyond our heads. And what happens when we lose that ability or we're constantly distracted by all these different things? What happens to those tentacles, and those tentacles are deeply tied not just to attention but to affection, to love. And can we love the things we don't pay attention to? Can we love the things that we're constantly distracted and looking away from? 

And then finally we have this freedom from and this power over nature. Okay, and and don't get me wrong, it is addictive, we want this. But what does this actually do? What are the costs to our home? And I don't just mean our home in the sort of small space of the four walls that we share with our families but the home of the natural world that we were made for. 

Welcome to the anthropocene

So, Andy Crouch says, and I think there's a sort of poignant point, he says though that we have lost much of the world as well with all of this tech and he's not, again, anti-tech. He says there's lots of good things we can use with this. But what are some of the costs? We are rarely overwhelmed by wind or rain or snow. I think somebody used that word of wonder. Where's the wonder? Where's the mystery? We rarely see, let alone name, the stars. We have lost the sense that we are home, at home and on a pilgrimage in the vast mysterious cosmos anchored in a rich reality behind ourselves. We have lost our souls without gaining the world. So this connects us to this new Epoch we're living in called the anthropocene and you probably recognize that word - that the heart of it sort of the anthropos, which is Humanity or man. This geological Epoch was coined in 1967 by the Dutch chemist Paul Kritzen, and basically the idea is that we're in a new geological Epoch in which the fingerprints of us, technological culture making creatures, is so dominant that we not only rearrange the natural world for ourselves to make tools for use. But we actually can affect weather patterns. We can change the human genome from the multi -  from the atomic level all the way to the cosmic level - our fingerprints on everything changing things. And this comes with sort of a mixed feeling of absolute wonder and awe. It's kind of the enlightenment promise of what we can do when we really unlock the mysteries of the universe and also horrific dread, right? And we say what have we done and that can mean kind of anything right? What are we capable of? Well nuclear annihilation and nuclear power and we have both sides of these coins and the power that we have is being amplified and amplified. 

Wirzba says, in this book The Sacred Life, that part of the anthropocene is this continuing, he calls it, malaise or uneasiness, because there's been this great disembedding, is that especially people who live in developed countries, so the USA, Canada, much of Western Europe. But, we have this posture to the world where we exist over and against it. And again, these are not just ideas that start with like Rene Descartes or Francis Bacon. They're actually in the very things we make. The things we make actually work to separate us from the world. He says the anthropocene sees us as disembedded autonomous agents manipulating the world, and its value is only in how we can use it.

So what led us here? Well, Wirzba says,

“The path that led us to this epoch is a refusal of creatureliness. It's a decoupling of freedom from fidelity, from loyalty the nature of this refusal is complex, but one way to characterize it is to observe how the expansion of human power has often been accompanied with a diminishment of respect for the creatures and places we have power over, a diminishment that is deeply lined to a refusal to see where one is and who one is with.”

All right. This book is remarkable. It's a little bit more on the academic side, but if you want a really good grasp from a very thoughtful Christian philosopher about how to think about the ecological world that we're currently living in, I really recommend this book. And again, it doesn't end on on despair. It ends on optimism because, as a Christian, he says this world, despite what we're doing to it, is still underwritten as the logos. It's the creative expression of God. 

Disenchantment

Now the anthropocene and our technology, I think, come together to give us this, again, answer to what time it is. It's a time of disenchantment in the secular age, and I don't have time to unpack all of this. But one of the the things it means for us to live in a disenchanted age is that we don't really believe that there are these spiritual forces still at work in reality. We've been sort of disenchanted. T. S. Eliot, I think, says It best in his poem. He says that the wasteland, the nymphs have departed. The nymphs have departed. And if you're a fan of fantasy literature, you know, like in Tolkien when all the elves are kind of leaving Middle Earth, it's kind of this sad moment of, well, the Earth that we're going to inherit which is this Earth, all the kind of magic, has been removed from it.

And we might think well, hey, I'm a Christian. I believe in creation. I believe in angels. I believe in demons. I'm not disenchanted, again, go back to your phone. Go back to the things that we use. Our worldview, our default assumptions, are actually embedded in the things that we use and the things that use us. Our social imaginary understands the world to be sort of this inert mechanistic place. So it's sort of this dead, lifeless silent planet. And we can use it again and manipulate it to our will. The world should be master tamed and controlled and we have this new stance towards it, right. That we can know everything and, I forget who made the point, but I have this sense that I can know anything because Google is only one swipe away and that idea that even if I don't know something, somebody else will know what or I'll know what in time is part of this kind of hubris of the disenchanted stance. There's no mystery, awe and wonder towards it. We can find out the answer. Earth, in this kind of picture, is a theater for man's power, human's power, power over and against it

Okay. Again, this is kind of the depressing part, and we'll become more positive. So, how do we respond if we kind of read this moment that we're living in? And I should mention sorry. I did sort of, I'm kind of moving a little bit faster than I was planning to, but one of the things that we have to also be aware of is this is not just like a benign reality. That we have made air toxic, that we have made waterways so contaminated that we can't drink from them or swim in them, that we have removed mountaintops to get coal, that our nitrogen fertilizers have made hypoxic zones in the Gulf of Mexico, are things that we all have to reckon with. And again, I'm not denying that there's lots of positives to our technological accomplishments, but there's also a lot of hidden costs and consequences that we like to be sort of willingly directed away from thinking about

How might we respond?

So, how do we respond to this? How do we respond to this time? Well, I think one of the things we could do.  I love this picture. Nothing screams relevant educational theorist like a bunch of ladies in their black cotton dresses doing some exercises, I think. But, seriously, education is the science of relations. and yeah, you guys we could unpack this more but. So it's the science of relations and I do think this is why Mason, and what you guys are doing and what you're doing with nature study is so absolutely important today because in the world of rapidly changing technologies, the world of the anthropocene, the disenchanted age, the ability to get our students in relationship with the natural world with others is of the utmost importance.

So this is a letter that Charlotte Mason wrote and it's actually, I think, what Jack was referring to when he talked with these sort of tentacles and this what she says,

“An infant comes into the world with a thousand embryonic feelers. He sets to work to fix with amazing energy. He attaches his being to mother, father, sister, brother, cat, dog, spider and fly, earth, air, fire. That's  a little dangerous, but and water. Later, we step into educate him in proportion to the range of living relationships we put in his way. Will he have a wide and vital interest, fullness of joy in living. He must learn that no relation with persons or with things animate or inanimate can be maintained without strenuous effort.”
~ School Education p.186-187

I want you to really think about that, right?

What does Andy Crouch say we want with our technology? Effortless superpower. And what does Mason promise us? A really full life that takes work. It's hard work, right. It's not just going for a stroll about in the natural world. It's taking the time to do the work.

“He must learn the laws of work and the joys of work. Our deadly error is to suppose that we are as showman to the universe and not only so that there is no community at all between child and universe unless we set it up.”
~ School Education p.188

And that last point she's kind of getting at, we don't always have to be the ones leading them and it's very similar and we'll get into this to how she talks about even literally reading stories and poems. Don't be the explainer. Let them encounter it. Be the guide as you need to but then also give them that space that time to go out and to walk through it.

The art of naming

All right. So what does this all have to do? How are we doing for time? Okay, I'll hustle. What does this have to do with words and stories? What do words have to do with the world? There's a few things I want to point out. One is the art of naming. When you take your kids out into the forest or the city or wherever you are and you're teaching them to name plants, animals buildings, you're actually participating in a beautiful living relationship with other people and with the past. So the idea that the word, so the world, is the ongoing sustaining presence of the logos, which we talked about a little bit last night logos and poema. The logos is the word that John uses for Christ. He says in the beginning was the logos and the logos was with God and the logos was God. And what he means by that is the creative Word. And that's so interesting because all the way back to Genesis, which is what John is trying to do with his gospel where he's going to give us another version of Genesis 1 verse 1, in the beginning God created the heavens and the Earth and how does God create he says he speaks. He says let there be, and that creative voice is God using language to make the world.

One of the first things Adam and Eve get to do in the garden is name things. They actually get to participate in the creative utterance of language. And God is freeing them up to say, "I've spoken this world into being, I've used my language, these trees, these rocks, the water you see are not just things that are dead. They're my voice. They're my song. They're my poem, and now you get to actually join to the music. So what does that funny looking thing with the long neck? What is that thing with the big long nose? What are those things swimming in the sea? Name them." And that name is not just unique to Adam and Eve. They're not alienated. It actually gets passed on to their kids and their grandkids and each of them get to name the things that are developing and changing, new things that they're discovering, they get to sort of partake in this as well.

You and I still today get to learn those names, be part of our heritage of understanding, our history connecting us to other people. Emerson says that language is the fossil poetry of the Mind. And I love this because we often don't think about this and I know I mentioned this last night, this idea of putting pressure on our words and poetry helps us do it, stories help us do it. But if you start to delve into the history of language, it's just remarkable that we just take for granted that when we're talking, even now, the words that I'm saying have Greek, Roman, Indo-European, French, German, right? All these different roots, all these different heritages, and and we speak them all the time without really even paying attention to it. It's like walking through the city of Rome not looking at the ruins, right? That's what it's like every day when we talk and we just don't pay attention to our words.

Now, the art of naming also is really significant because what it does when we name things or we know the names of things, it gives us a heart for those things. Robert McFarland. He's a writer I would really recommend you read if you haven't yet. He wrote this book called Landmarks and in that book, he travels to all these really remote places that we'd probably look on Google Maps and say, "Oh, that's the middle of nowhere. That's a nothingville."  And he says it's remarkable when you go to those nowhere places, and I'd actually encourage you just as a practice to do this, those places you might have like, oh, that's the middle of nowhere get in your car or drive or bike or walk. Go there and there's something there. And what he finds though is that these people have remarkable vocabularies for their places. He goes to this one island and there's peat farmers and these peat farmers have 83 different words for peat  moss. And he's blown away. So he starts to gather all of this language, and he says this is a counter desecration phrasebook because some of these places that we say are the middle of nowhere we think nothing's going on there, have been used for dump sites, have been used for nuclear bomb testing, and have been completely decimated, and he says if we can just recover the language, the names, of places, that might actually be the kind of thing that will move against the desecration we're so willing to commit against these places we think have no value.

All right. Mary Oliver, a friend of ours who we met last night, she has this poem. I think it's really helpful to make the transition I want to make between naming things and the book of the world. This is from her poem called "Breakage:"

“I go down to the edge of the sea.
How everything shines in the morning light.
The cusp of the welk,
the broken cupboard of the clam,
the opened blue muscles,
moon snails, pale pink and barnacle scarred --
and nothing at all whole or shut but tattered, split,
dropped by the gulls under the gray rocks and all the moisture gone.
It's like a schoolhouse
of little words,
thousands of words.
First you figure out what each one means by itself
the jingle, the periwinkle, the scallop
full of moonlight.

Then you begin, slowly, to read the whole story.”

The world is a living book

So what this means is that when we're naming things, we're teaching our kids to name things. We're also giving them part of a larger story, right? We can treat the world as if it were a living book. As if it were a living book, and there are passages where you can sort of see Mason's kind of Quaker, Protestant heritage coming through, and she talks about the natural world as a kind of second revelation of God, right? There's scripture and there's nature. There's the world that reveals to us something of God. Marilyn Robinson again in Gilead says, "this is an interesting Planet. It deserves all the attention that we can give it." And I want us to really press on that a little bit because, why is it so interesting?

And last night I know Matt and I kind of geeked out about commas and whatever around poems, but you can give a lot of attention to a poem but not unlimited. And I actually think you can give an unlimited attention to the natural world and it is never the same. And the only reason that it can be like that I think is because it is the expressive utterance of an eternal, omnipotent God and it's sustained every moment by his ongoing active attention. There's this excessiveness to the world that actually can bear all the attention we can give it and then some. Right, every single morning actually is subtly different than the one that came before it every single minute. Every single moment is different. Well, why is this? Because the world is not the theater of our power. It's the fear of God's glory. And if we can recover that idea for our children, it really knocks us out of the center that we want to be in, and scripture’s actually filled with this idea. One of my favorite books is the book of Job and what God says to Job at the end of all of his questioning is, "Where were you when I laid the foundations of the Earth? You weren't there to observe it." Right, so we have the Earth and we have God's relationship to it and man, don't get me wrong, is the crown of creation. We are stewards of it. But God exists in relationship to his whole created Kingdom, right? Apart from us.

He doesn't need us, right. So this world is a theater of God's glory and what He does is actually invite us to participate in it, to bring about its life, but he doesn't need us and I think that's the sort of necessary corrective we need in the anthropocene as if the world's values dependent on how we made use of it. It's not. 

All right. John Ruskin said, and he was talking about painters here,

“If we pay attention to the world, it reveals to us nature is never distinct and never vacant. She's always mysterious, always abundant. You always see something but you never see it all.”

And, again, that again speaks to this kind of excessiveness of the world.

The summons of the wor(l)d

Okay third and finally, then I will wrap us up. One of the things that's remarkable. Although when we encounter the world and I think Jack was getting to this a little bit, we talked about the phenomenology which is pay attention to your experience. What happens when you experience a natural world? A few months ago, when spring was just emerging in our backyard, my daughter ran into the house and she had her little notebook and it just said, "The rain has come, I saw some moss, there was a daisy," and it was like and she's like it's a poem. "It's my spring poem," and she hung it up on her table. I was like that's amazing. And I mean the idea though that there's something in us that wants to respond. Why is it, why do we want this creative response? And I'm sure you guys have had moments like that with your students, with your children. What is it about the world that makes us as humans want to respond? I mean, I have two dogs and they haven't ever come in with poetry. They haven't ever done anything, right. And the animal kingdom doesn't do this. It's unique to us. Monet, Vivaldi, architecture, music, painting, how we build - all of this is a response to the world that we inhabit. 

And the reason it's a response, I think, is again to quote Rowan Williams, he actually says the world is not just the word of God, although it is that, it's a summons and I love that. So if you think of it as a song, it's a poem. It's also a summons. And doesn't that describe our God? He actually wants relationship with us and he's saying come have fellowship with my creatures, with my kingdom, with me, because I want you. And when we think about that, when we respond with music, with art, with painting, with a poem, we're actually creating as a response to our Creator, right? We're creating, as Tolkien would say, in our derivative mode as sub creators and I think it's a beautiful thing. We should encourage that at any time we get a chance with our kids. 

Now one of my favorite sort of responders to the creative summons of the world is Annie Dillard, and I'm sure many of you are familiar with her work. This comes from a wonderfully titled book called Teaching a Stone to Talk and I, my only quibble is, I think she should have called it Learning to Hear What a Stone Says, but she says I'm teaching a stone to talk and this is from a passage where she's looking at weasels and she sees the skeleton of a weasel clamp onto the neck of an eagle. And so that thing, it clamped onto it so tight that it actually couldn't release its jaw and it died and this Eagle is now stuck with the skeleton dangling from it for the rest of its life. And this is what she says,

“I would like to learn or remember how to live. I come to Holland's Pond not so much to learn how to live as frankly to forget about it. I don't think I can learn from a wild animal how to live, in particular shall I suck warm blood? Shall I hold my tail high, walk with my footprints precisely over the prints of my hands?”

And this goes to my first talk about when we read are we just imitating? Right? What does it mean? She's kind of thinking about that. Can I imitate the world? Is that what I have to learn from it?

“But I might learn something of mindlessness, something of the purity, of living in the physical senses and the dignity of living without bias or motive. The weasel lives in necessity. We live in choice, hating necessity dying, at the last, ignobally in its talents. I would like to live as I should as the weasel lives as he should. I suspect that for me the way is like the weasels, open to time and death, noticing everything, remembering nothing, choosing the given with a fierce and pointed will.”

And I think it's really interesting when you look at Jesus's sermons. He's says consider the lilies, look at the birds.They have meaning, right, they have a meaning for us if we read them. If we pay attention to them. They can tell us something about life. They bear all the attention we can give them like poems because they are. There's so many words spoken by God for our edification if we're able to interpret and to read them.

Practical Tips

So some practical tips. I have two here. I'm just going to add a quick third.

One, take seriously that the world is the ongoing poem of creation

And when you go to your nature studies, I want you to think about that, right? How are we reading this? And it's not just about a bunch of information although it can be that. This information is actually possible because of this beautiful thing we're doing every time we use language for the world. 

Help our kids respond

Poetry, painting, music - what are the creative responses that our children want to give to the Natural World. Help them respond to the thing that they're seeing. It's a really beautiful practice for them to get into.

The third thing I'll just quickly add is find local storytellers.

In our area, one poet and Storyteller is John Terpstra. He's written beautifully about the Hamilton area in Lake, Ontario. And sometimes we think oh, we have to find Annie Dillard or Mary Oliver. These people have become massively successful. And what's interesting is that they kind of transcend region and they transcend place and good for them. That's good. I like that there's these big writers. They're really good. But there's also maybe really unknown local artists and painters, poets, writers who are giving the kind of collective memory of your place because your job is not to steward the memory of every place because you can't do that. Live within human scale, learn the stories of your streets, your neighborhood because that's our responsibility. Right? If you think of that root of responsibility, it's ability to respond. Right? So we have that power.

Wendell Berry and I, again, I'd be remiss if I didn't just quote him. We’re like an hour and a half from his house and he's a hero of mine. I want just to think about this poem and sort of transition us to a conclusion. "One faith is bondage. Two are free." And I'm gonna over explain here a little bit. "Bondage" has a lot of negative connotations, but what Berry is doing here, he's talking about a marriage and he's saying this bondage of our faith, of our fidelity, is actually what frees us. It's really good for us.

One faith is bondage. Two
are free. In the trust
of old love, cultivation shows
a dark graceful wilderness
at its heart. Wild
in that wilderness, we roam
the distances of our faith,
safe beyond the bounds
of what we know. O love,
open. Show me
my country. Take me home.
~A Homecoming by Wendell Berry

Holding hands with the past

Our hope, where we have to end, is that this world is our home. The papal encyclical by Pope Francis, called the Laudato si’, talks about the world as our home. We have to kind of recover that ancient wisdom. There's two images I have up here - the one on the right, does anybody know the story that’s from? We talked about it a little at the fireside chat. This is Odysseus and his reunion with Penelope and the other image is from Proverbs 31, the eschat haidil, the valorous woman. What I find remarkable about both of these is that in the Greek tradition right, sort of pagan wisdom. Is that the Epic of Peace, which is the Odyssey, is the response to the Epic of War, The Iliad the final vision we get is of a return home right, coming back into fellowship with his wife in their house and the heart of their house is this living tree that makes their bed the source of fertility, of life, of abundance.

It starts at home

The eschat hiale and Proverbs 31, Ellen Davis in her book Scripture, Culture, Agriculture changed how I read this forever. And she said in ancient literature wisdom books like Proverbs would end with somebody worthy of imitation. And you usually you'd have a warrior where you'd have a philosopher and what Solomon gives us is a homemaker. And he says that the heart of the Israelite empire, it's goodness, will be the home. Okay, it'll be people taking care of the home. So it starts at home. It starts at home. Our economy should not destroy our ecology and if we pay attention to the fossil poetry of those words. Oikos nomos, Oikos logos, the words of the home, the names of the home, the law of the home. Those two words are actually rooted in our relationship to our home.

The world and our words are gifts that are given to us. They tie us to each other. They tie us to the world. And it's the ongoing song, if you think about that right, enchante, it's the enchanted space of the song of God  that he sung, it's his poem and we get to participate in it. So, I hope you guys do and I hope you invite your children into this beautiful song as well because that's our hope right? We can be kind of depressed about technology. We can be depressed with all this stuff, but this world is sustained not by us. Thank God. It's sustained by Him. He's singing at every single moment even right now and he'll sing it long after we're gone. So, thank you so much for this time.