Renovaré Weekly · October 13, 2023

Wildly in Order

Retreat

Nature

Peace

LETTER BY BRIAN MORYKON

When the world feels wildly out of order.

When wars erupt and tragedies abound.

When your own little world, the place you thought you were in control, isn’t going according to plan.

When inner pressures boil over into outer anger.

It’s time to go outside.

Spending time in nature seems like a luxury — a nice add-on to life when the calendar surrenders a few extra hours and our consciences can tolerate such a frivolity in a world that’s up in flames.

But what if time in nature is as essential to our souls as eating is to the body?

Think of Jesus. He has thirty-six months to save the universe and every moment counts. Hurting huddled masses surround him, and he is the remedy. Yet time and again he withdraws from the crowd to climb a mountain or stroll a sea.

If he needed that, how much more do we?

Mark Buchanan said on the podcast this week that being in nature “right sizes” things. It puts problems in perspective. It reveals God’s rhythm and order.

As a recovering perfectionist, I crave order. When there’s disorder inside or around me, I become irritable and controlling and try to force order upon myself and others. That’s when the Spirit nudges me to the woods and stream behind my office. There, roots of trees jut out intertwined above the stream, the underground unveiled mid-air.

There, I come into what Wendell Barry calls the “peace of wild things.” There, I see that God isn’t afraid or in a hurry, that the Kingdom of God is wildly in order, and that I don’t have to carry everything I’ve been carrying — at least not alone. There, I can pray for the wide world and my little world, and enter back into both with a little more hope.

Brian Morykon
Director of Communications

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LET’S DIVE IN...

CURATED BY GRACE POUCH

1.

Nathan Foster talks with Mark Buchanan on a new episode of Life with God: A Renovaré Podcast about the healing gift of nature. Listen on Apple, Spotify, or on the Renovaré website.
2.

Richard Foster invites us to learn from St. Francis and St. Clare of Assisi, who modeled “how to have an ecological sensitivity that refuses to deify creation. Francis could express the deepest reverence for nature… without ever worshiping nature.”
3.

What’s a nature-focused newsletter without a John Muir mention? Here’s a PBS documentary (trailer, full film) to enflesh the man behind the famous quote, “The mountains are calling and I must go.”
4.

Listen to Wendell Berry read his poem, “The Peace of Wild Things.”
5.

You may recognize the word “kingfisher” from Gerard Manley Hopkins’s poem “God’s Grandeur,” but “kingfisher,” “fern,” “bramble,” and “wren” are among the many nature words that have disappeared from the Oxford Junior Dictionary. Recognizing this as a sign of the “growing gulf between childhood and the natural world,” poet Robert Macfarlane and illustrator Jackie Morris created a beautiful book of poems and paintings called The Lost Words “to summon these words again into the voices, stories, and dreams of children and adults alike.”
6.

Read an excerpt from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Annie Dillard’s Pulitzer Prize winning book chronicling a year in Virginia’s Roanoke Valley.

Grace Pouch
Content Manager