“O Wisdom, come and instruct us in the way of prudence, that we may care for your world with justice and compassion, through the one who is the true Wisdom that undergirds all things, Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.”
Repent, says the prophet. The axe is at the foot of the tree. And so during Advent we dwell on the prophet’s frightening words. Or we pretend to. Some of us hold on to our fantasies that the earthquakes and darkened sun and rumors of war are only metaphors. We’re fine, actually. We’re coddled by the comforts of affluence. Advent texts about apocalyptic destruction float right on by—just metaphors to tolerate on the way to nativity’s sweet glow.
Wake up, says the prophet. You think you’re fine, but you’re not. The ax is at the root of the tree. It always is.
Calvin University’s annual lessons and carols service two weeks ago focused on those wild, apocalyptic Advent texts. The theme was “Welcome All Wonders: An Apocalyptic Advent.” Images of cleansing fire, clashes of kingdoms, destruction and judgment, desperate longing for a Savior-King who would set it all to rights… someday.
During the service, I let the scripture texts and gorgeous music swirl around me as I thought about how non-metaphorical these apocalyptic texts seem right now. Even in my relative security and privilege, I feel the rumblings of threat and destruction, lies and violence, blindness and fear. The glorious promises of healing can seem so remote, so theoretical.
Welcome to reality. The stories of scripture, we should note, come almost entirely from the point of view of people wandering, people in slavery, people in exile, people terrorized by empire. Not living under those conditions seems to be the exception in human history. Humans really do love to dominate each other and the earth. We really do love violence and power and greed. History cycles round and round to demonstrate this. The evidence is always available.
Maybe God is ready now to burn it all down. I wouldn’t blame God if that’s the plan. But the scriptures seem to describe a God who is more interested in controlled burns. At least, that’s what I hope I’m reading there.
You may know that ecologists and forest managers are re-learning the ancient indigenous wisdom of controlled burns or prescribed burns. I’m trying to learn more about them. The idea is that periodic controlled burning renews ecosystems. In federally managed forests, for instance, many decades of fire suppression policies (to preserve timber for harvesting) turned out to be a bad idea, because the forest floor just accumulated more and more dead trees and duff over time, which meant that when natural fires did come, they burned hotter and farther and more destructively. Allowing—or creating—periodic smaller fires would have cleaned out some of the debris and kept natural wildfires smaller and less hot. Trees would have thrived better. The same principles apply, as I understand it, in prairie ecosystems.
Plant and animal species within these ecosystems have adapted to periodic burning to the point where it’s necessary. Some plants—pyrophiles, pyrophytes, and conifers with serotinous cones—need fire to reproduce, or they’re built to fuel fire, or they’re fire resistant. Lots of creatures depend on fire, too. Michigan’s little Kirtland’s warblers, for instance, only nest in young jack pines, which means they need fire to create baby trees so they can create baby birds. These days, management policies commonly involve prescribed burns to clear undergrowth or get rid of invasives or help release the seeds waiting patiently in the seedbed for their opportunity.
Kirtland’s warbler. Image credit: Joel Trick/USFWS, wisconservation.org
I wonder what needs a controlled burn in our culture right now, in our churches?
The trouble with controlled burns is that you really need to know what you’re doing. You need to know exactly what to burn, and when. You need to carefully monitor the perimeter of your planned burning zone. You need to control the fire so that it doesn’t get too hot—if it gets too hot, you can burn roots and fungi and seeds in the soil and kill the incipient life there. The smoke can damage your lungs. And of course, the wind is always a worry. You can’t control the wind, so you have to stay completely vigilant.
I’d like to play out the metaphor here and plan some controlled burns—I can think of plenty of things I want to burn away from the church, from our political life, from our greedy human hearts. But I worry that we humans don’t have enough prudence to manage that metaphor very well. We’re much more likely to commit arson. Our supposed controlled burns often run on hate, and they turn into genocides, or they run on greed or ignorance, and they turn into pollution and desertification and biodiversity loss.
So I’ll switch up the metaphor. Let God do the metaphorical controlled burns. Even there, I don’t love the idea of God engaged in purposeful destruction–well, except of the things I want destroyed, of course. In any case, our role, instead, could be to build the metaphorical soil for resilience to withstand the burns. That seems doable. What would this entail?
In my conversations with faith-and-climate people these last few weeks, we have been reminding each other how grateful we are for each other, for these networks we’ve built. We’re discouraged, because the road ahead will be harder than we had hoped, but there is a lot of good news, the work continues, and we hold each other up while doing it. Our goal now: deepen and spread and strengthen our networks.
In other words, build the soil for the future, metaphorically speaking, by working on the mycorrhizal networks underneath the surface. Mycorrhizae are those billions of microscopic interactions where fungi and plants interact in a symbiotic relationship. Ecologist Jonathan Thompson explains: “The fungi grows in a thin sheath around root tips and acquires all its food from the tree—sugars and carbohydrates mainly. In return, the fungi assist the tree in gathering water and provide essential phosphorus and nitrogen that the tree could not acquire on its own.”
Beneath the soil surface of a place like a forest is a vast network of life, turning the whole forest into, essentially, one huge organism. Trees communicate with each other through this network. Resources like water and nutrients flow around the system as needed. Maybe you’ve heard the rhizosphere referred to as “the wood wide web.” This underground life strategy is ancient, 400 million years old. It is more or less the foundation of life as we know it on this planet.
So. I want to work with all the prudence we can muster on those symbiotic networks. Definitely in a literal sense. Shifting to regenerative (rather than extractive) land use that cultivates the ongoing health of soils is a crucial pillar of an overall climate mitigation strategy. But I mean metaphorically, too. Through healthy networks, we can flow all kinds of resources to each other: our skills, our hopes, our energies and work, our kindness and love.
And we can plant seeds, deep in the seedbed nourished by this rhizosphere. Seeds of beauty, mutual aid, truth-telling, visions of the world we long for, tiny signs of that healed world the Savior is supposed to bring. We’ve already damaged so much. Our careless fires have gotten too hot; we have destroyed things to the point where some species and systems will not survive.
So I’m trying, here, to talk myself into hope through metaphor. I want to believe that whatever arson humans are currently perpetrating on this earth, God wants to tamp down and manage as a controlled burn. We need to help.
Burning is always scary, but history is full of it. I am trying to hope by the grace of God that the burnings we are now facing—literal and figurative—are not so hot that all the roots get damaged and the seeds of new life die. How hot this gets, how extensive, the way the winds blow—I can’t control all that. I try to fire-tamp whenever I can. But I want to focus, too, on actions that feed the foundation of life, reaching out to extend and strengthen the networks of goodness and planting whatever life-bearing seeds I can. We can pray that harrowing times will clear the way for that new world we long for, in Advent and always.
Come Lord and wipe away
The curse, the sin, the stain,
And make this blighted world of ours
Thine own fair world again
Image credit: tallgrassprairiecenter.org
