Mary Oliver once said, “This is the first, the wildest, and the wisest thing I know: that the soul exists and is built entirely out of attentiveness.” (1) If she is right–and she so often is–then we shape our souls by what we give our attention to. On a recent hike, I found my soul being shaped by the open petals of a spotted geranium, the fernleaf phacelia that lined the trail away from the first cave we passed, a cave that appears suddenly as you move down the gulf. My friend and I had been following a stream down the gulf and it abruptly fell over the edge of a rock ledge that formed the top of the cave. The water pounded the rocks about thirty feet below before disappearing into the cave itself. A short scramble down a steep boulder field brought us in front of the opening where the temperature abruptly dropped about ten degrees fahrenheit from the cool air coming out of the mouth of the cave and the spray from the waterfall itself. After the sweat-inducing work of the past few miles, the natural air conditioning felt like a gift.

Here was a taste of the grace in the wilderness described in Jeremiah 31:2. In this chapter, we find the people of Israel surviving great violence and escaping to the wilderness to find rest and respite. It is from the wilderness that restoration of Israel begins, much like they were formed as a people through the wilderness trek in Exodus as they left Egypt to find a home. But before they were ready for a home, they had to come together as a people and discover who they were. And that work happened in the wilderness.

A Facebook acquaintance posted a picture of a retreat they were attending about finding God in the wilderness or something to that effect, yet the picture was of a number of people sitting in folding chairs around circular tables in a gymnasium. It looked about as far from wilderness as I could imagine and commented so, tongue in cheek. The person who posted it commented back that it was about spiritual wilderness, but they got my point.

We emerge from Lent, and many people relish getting back whatever they gave up. “The wilderness is over! Rejoice!” seems to be the implied message of Easter Sunday. And yet I believe we’ve been fundamentally misunderstanding the idea of wilderness and our place in nature, and therefore damaging our conception of ourselves and our conception of God.

Too often we see wilderness and darkness used as negative spiritual metaphors. And yet wilderness is where we meet God, where God provides for and extends grace to us. Darkness is the place where all life begins: whether a seed sprouting deep in the earth, or an embryo in the dark waters of a womb. Relegating these words to the negative means we miss out on the grace of the wilderness and the intimate dialogue with God found there. We also miss out on the beginnings of life itself.

We don’t have to look very far to see examples of this in Scripture. God called Moses out of a burning bush as Moses was herding his sheep in a wilderness area. Then as Moses led the people of Israel out of Egypt and through the wilderness, they were cared for directly by God providing daily food and water for them. God led Elijah into the wilderness and provided food for him twice daily via ravens. John the Baptist lived in the wilderness off the land by foraging. His entire ministry takes place in the wilderness, drawing people out to the river to hear his message and be baptized. Jesus starts his ministry in that same river, being baptized by John. In his ministry, Jesus is found in wilderness spaces both with and without the crowds: the miraculous feeding of the crowd that followed him out is a direct call-back to God tending the people of Israel in the wilderness on their journey to find a home.

We have overlooked and mischaracterized the wilderness in our current spiritual vernacular and by doing this, we do ourselves and our lives with each other and God great harm. We put ourselves above nature, using words such as “‘...exploit, manage, [and] conserve:’ all things that power does to the powerless” instead of words like “...relate, connect, and reciprocate. This trio of words more than implies mutuality: it enacts it.” (2) The wilderness helps us to truly come home to ourselves–to our real selves–and live with openness and authenticity.

Our spiritual lives will remain incomplete until we see that we are part of nature–not above it–and the wilderness is a gift. As one Midrash says “​​Anyone who does not make himself open to all [hefker, literally ownerless] like a wilderness cannot acquire wisdom and Torah. (Bamidbar Rabbah 1:7)” (3) What does it mean to be “open to all” like a wilderness?

There’s a famous “bald” on the Appalachian Trail called Max Patch. While there are many mountain tops that are treeless and thus provide three-hundred-sixty degree views, Max Patch is one of the largest and flattest summits in the entire mountain range. Because of this, it can accommodate many more campers than most of the “bald” peaks. And because of this, it is now closed to camping because it was so misused and mistreated that it now needs a rest period of several years in order to recover. I mention this because before we dig into what it means to be “open to all,” I want to bring to the fore that being open to all doesn’t mean allowing ongoing abuse.

Rather, I think we need to initially be open to all as Max Patch was, but recognise that those who misuse the invitation cannot be allowed to continue. That being said, I believe there’s a great benefit to openness as a stance. After all, it allows for things you never would have imagined. The Book of Common Prayer gives us these words to pray for the natural order: “Grant that, as we probe the mysteries of your creation, we may come to know you more truly, and more surely fulfill our role in your eternal purpose.” (4) As we probe the mysteries of creation, then we come to understand God and ourselves more fully. The two things are inextricably linked here in this prayer. As a prayer-book people, prayers like this are theological clues to how our life with each other and all of creation is supposed to operate.

We open ourselves to the wilderness, to creation, to our fellow creatures, choosing this mindset of openness realizing there’s always room to learn more, experience more, and be more. We allow ourselves to experience and participate in the connectedness of everything. Just as the forest forms a cooperative collective that shares resources and information among individuals and even species, so we too can share with creation resources and information to the enrichment of all. Scarcity is manufactured by those seeking to hoard resources for themselves: there’s more than enough to go around if only we can be as open to sharing as the trees in the forest. If we can learn to find symbiosis like the trees (5) and the mycorrhizal networks (6) beneath the soil. If only we can learn to cooperate instead of compete. After all, it’s only when we can learn to be open to all like the wilderness can we really understand God, ourselves, and our relationships. And it is only the actual wilderness that allows us to fully reach this understanding. The wilderness is never easy, and yes, sometimes it can be scary. But experiencing it allows us to grow beyond anything we could imagine without it.

1. Mary Oliver, "Low Tide," Amicus Journal, Winter 2001.

2. Anna Elisabeth Howard, “What is the Verb?” Coffee, Shalom, and Everything Between, May 1, 2023. https://aehowardwrites.substack.com/p/what-is-the-verb.

3. Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, “Wilderness and Revelation,” https://www.rabbisacks.org/covenant-conversation/bamidbar/wilderness-and-revelation/?fbclid=IwAR0v2hmgqlbGFSJGO3QvLyVpMEdYA9_eljYDIgz6yDLkMZWUeFIouT55wvg

4. Book of Common Prayer, p. 827

5. Suzanne Simard, Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest, (New York: Vintage, 2022).

6. Merlin Sheldrake, Entangled Life: How Fungi Make our World, Change our Minds, and Shape our Future, (New York: Random House, 2021).