Be careful of what you ask for...

On Monday I mentioned something about loving a snow day... and then woke up this morning (and got myself a gun?!?! No, no, that's another gig for another time) and found twice as much snow on the ground as there was when we went to bed. (For those who don't get the reference, it was the theme song to the HBO monster show: The Sopranos - and I was/am a hard core fan. So here's the original music clip - kinda rough in a 21st century Beggars Banquet way - but still a freakin' GREAT song!)

So I got the snow day I obliquely asked for, yes? A good time to hunker down for some more Tervor Herriot and his reflections on searching for wildness within the realities of contemporary life: Jacob's Wound is not only well written, it is engaging and challenging.

It is also a careful spiritual exploration of how the loss of wildness in our religion has blinded us to the presence of the sacred all around and within us: in nature, our loved ones, our politics and our psyche. He is precise and respectful with his words, a refreshing alternative to the often enraged polemics of those in the eco-justice realm, aways seeking a way to reclaim what has been plucked out of the Christian tradition.

In this I find a soul mate of sorts - he names what is both healthy and wounded in this faith - and then tries to discern how the integration of wildness, passion and depth might breath health back into that which has grown claustrophobic, weak and toxic. I think of Herriot much like this poem by Jan Sutch Pickard at the Community of Iona:

How can we comprehend it, God, this beauty and this pain?
How does it hold together?
Is there pattern our purpose?

On a still day,
warp and weft glimpsed in the gold threads of the dawn sky,
in the blue-grey restless waters of the Sound,
in our laughter and our tears,
in our life together in this place –
your mysterious weaving of the world.

In the song and surge of the waves
and the living silence of the hills.
In the welter of winter gales
and the sheltering space of the church or home.
In angry exchanges that unravel,
and words and spaces that heal.

In isolation and in solitude.
In welcomes at the jetty
and in saying goodbye.
In the wind-bent trees, blasted by salt
and flowers flourishing in the village gardens.
In busyness that leave no time
and folk making time, here and now.
In the richness of all we have lost.
In discord –
and in ceilidhs music,
stumbling in the dark –
and dancing under the stars.

How can we comprehend it:
Your beauty and ours – who are made in your image?
Our pain and yours – who chose to share our lives?
We cannot hold it together – but it holds us.

Help us to see pattern and purpose,
and our part
in the weaving of the world. Amen.

At the same time Herriot is honestly critical of the cost this blindness has brought to creation. Using the story of Jacob and Esau as a guiding archetype, he builds a case that the duplicity and violence set in motion by the conquest of the hunter/gather society by the agricultural realm can no longer be sustained in the 21st century. From the beginning, Jacob and Esau have been in a wrestling match - in the womb, in the world, in their youth and later in maturity as they wrestling with reconciliation.

The children of Jacob have come lately to the riverside in guilt and fear, our dreams of renewal and prosperity turned to nightmare's of wrestling with ancestral spirit, the hunters' guardian. Plundered gold and silver may have financed the centuries of war among the colonizing empires, but the fight that defines us now is our ambivalent embrace of the people whose blood has known these hills and plains the longest. We can no longer let the missionaries do our spirit grappling for us.

On a blustery and snow-filled day like today, it is clear that there is a partnership to living with this wildness that will probably take the rest of my life to discern. So, for now, I will give thanks for this unexpected retreat and celebrate the snow day quietly...

credits: Di and I took these two similar photos about 12 hours apart.