Weavings article

CONFESSIONS OF A RELUCTANT PRIEST

OR “WHAT DO YOU DO OUT THERE ANYWAY?”

by Kurt Hoelting

It must drive my kids crazy when their friends ask, “What does your father do?” To be honest, the question drives me a little crazy too. There just isn’t a stock answer. I do so many different kinds of things under the same wide banner that it can be a stretch from just about any angle. What does commercial fishing in Alaska have to do, for example, with being a Buddhist meditation teacher? And what does guiding Alaskan wilderness sea kayaking expeditions have to do with being a clergyman?

Fair questions.

It wasn’t always so complicated. I found Christ in high school through an evangelical youth group, and for a while it made perfect sense. It was a good start, a genuine spiritual awakening, but born-again Christianity didn’t quite hold up in the heat of my turbulent college years during the Vietnam War era. It just didn’t have the theological bandwidth I needed. I went on to Divinity School at Harvard, but by then I’d cast a much wider net into the river of spiritual inquiry. My evangelical friends fretted over me, but it was already too late. I learned Transcendental Meditation, flirted with becoming a Trappist monk, and went off to Alaska in the summers to fish for salmon. So much for keeping it simple.

In the end, I did get ordained as a Congregational minister, but my career in the conventional ministry was short and sweet. I spent two years as a campus minister in Eugene, Oregon. In retrospect it was an awkward time in my life. I felt kind of cornered, but didn’t really know why. I was still living someone else’s life. It was what you were supposed to do with a degree in theology, and I didn’t think I really had a choice. I always felt caught between the counter culture I identified with and the constricted expectations that go with the territory of being a minister. I never could get the pieces to line up.

It was during this time that I was introduced to Zen meditation by a group of Trappist monks at a monastery in rural Oregon. I’d felt the pull of Zen through books I read by Alan Watts and Gary Snyder, but nothing could have prepared me for the reality of spending long hours sitting still on a cushion. My first intensive Zen retreat just about killed me. I’d never done anything so grueling in my life, even commercial fishing in Alaska. The strange thing about it was that I fell in love with the practice anyway. The graft took. Something in the straightforward purity of the effort itself cut through my tired old quandaries about “belief.”

The change didn’t happen overnight, and I was never faced with an explicit choice–this or that. My Trappist friends showed me how seamlessly the two traditions could coexist. Zen just seemed to move in with me in the months that followed. We became friends and roommates. To my amazement I found myself meditating regularly in my apartment, and I did more Zen retreats. The teachings rang true in a clear, uncomplicated way, and the ritual structure felt grounded and honest. I didn’t have to believe anything. I just needed to practice. What a relief! I took some time off from the ministry, and the time quickly stretched into years.

I moved to Alaska and started commercial fishing full time. It was my fallback trade of choice, and like Zen, it asked for everything I had. As a way of life, fishing was full-on, unsentimental and tough. There was no way to fake my way through it, and the dangers were real and ever present. So were the moments of stunning clarity and beauty. Every time we left the docks and headed back out to the fishing grounds, we were swallowed by a Pleistocene world so huge and full of life it made me forget I had ever wanted to do anything else. Fishing was its own kind of religious experience, a perfect complement to my Zen practice. I didn’t think I would ever need more. My own daughter was shocked to learn, at age ten, that I had once been a minister. That’s how completely I let the subject drop.

But the subject never completely dropped me. Matters of the soul were always lurking somewhere on my radar screen, despite my best efforts to keep it under wraps. When you’re baiting halibut hooks on the fishing grounds, or overhauling a salmon seine before the season, it’s usually best not to go off on the Gnostic Gospels of Nag Hammadi, or the fine points of the Vimalakirti Sutra. I knew that. But when you’re stuck on a boat for weeks at a time, you slip up sooner or later. It wasn’t unusual at such times for a fellow crewman to turn to me and say, “You know, Kurt, you’re really a good pastor.” This bothered me a lot. I didn’t travel hundreds of miles from the nearest church to get fitted for vestments. What do oilskins, halibut slime and twenty-foot seas in the Gulf of Alaska have to do with being a pastor?

Later, when I started a wilderness guide business, I blew my cover even more by concocting a form of wilderness retreat that was guaranteed to raise eyebrows. My clients included groups of rabbis who I took on weeklong kayaking trips in Southeast Alaska. We did the kinds of things you would expect of a group of rabbis on a wilderness expedition in Alaska. We rose at 5:30 a.m. for Buddhist meditation, followed by morning minyan (Jewish prayers), breakfast in silence, and paddling in silence through a coastal wilderness filled with sea otters, salmon, and humpback whales. We made time in the afternoon for Torah lessons on environmental themes, dinner in silence, then more meditation around the campfire before bed. It wasn’t long before they were telling me what a good rabbi I was. Something is definitely wrong with this picture. My Jewish friends even took to calling me the Tebenkoffer Rebe, in honor of the Tebenkof Bay Wilderness where we traveled for these offbeat, hybrid wilderness retreats.

As a general rule, Alaska’s working culture doesn’t leave much room for this kind of extravagance. My unconventional approach to eco-tourism spawned some wild rumors back in town, but also some grudging respect. One skeptical shop owner stopped me on the street in Petersburg and asked, “Kurt, what do you do to those people out there?” As I pawed at the sidewalk with my boot, trying to figure a way out, she answered her own question, and her answer surprised me. She said, “I always know when one of your groups comes into my shop after a trip. They’re just glowing.”

I may be a slow learner, but there is a thread in all this, and I might as well face up to it. In the broadest sense of the word, I am a priest after all–a Zen-fisherman-rabbi-priest–with a passion for blending contemplative practice with wilderness exploration. I know it’s an odd combination, but in the context of my abiding love and concern for the fate of our endangered planet, it starts to make a certain amount of sense.

Let me explain what I mean. What follows may also help explain why I didn’t fool many people when I pretended to be just a fisherman.

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No one who is paying attention can doubt that we humans have fallen on hard times in our relationship with the living earth. Signs of ecological imbalance and decline are everywhere. But people of faith generally have been among the last to connect the dots. Somehow, in the early going of the ecology movement, “the environment” got stuck in the domains of science and public policy. Environmental protection became a matter of changing laws, not hearts, and it didn’t register widely as a serious moral concern within religious circles.

There are different reasons why this may be so. One has to do with belief. Another with practice. One is bound up in theological and scriptural interpretation. The other is a matter of psychological and biological realities that pre-date traditional religious institutions by thousands of years. It is the latter–the domain of practice, and of psychological bedrock experience–that is of greatest interest to me, and that may offer the most promising possibilities for building understanding between people on differing sides of the religious divide.

Clearly, global warming is the mega-trigger that has set off a new wave of concern, helping us transcend the divisiveness of mere belief. I can feel the changes viscerally as I watch familiar glaciers receding year-by-year in Alaska, or gaze out on the Olympic and Cascade Mountains that ring my home in Puget Sound, stripped of “permanent” snowfields for the first time in my fifty-seven years. I can feel it in the storms that sweep off the North Pacific with greater force and frequency every year. I hear it in the buzz of conversation where I never heard it before. Global warming is upon us, and like the passengers on the Titanic, called from their cabins to the upper deck in the middle of the night for “complementary drinks,” it is beginning to sink in that we have a serious problem on our hands.

When Al Gore accepted the academy award for An Inconvenient Truth as Best Documentary in 2007, he repeated what has been his mantra for three decades. Only this time the world was listening. With Leonardo DiCaprio at his side, and a billion people watching, he proclaimed that the climate crisis is not a political issue. It is a moral issue. In the heart of Godless Hollywood, he publicly appealed to the spiritual side of our nature as the best hope for mustering the will to act on behalf of our endangered future.

This is hardly news to those who have been following the growth of climate science over the past twenty years. In fact, much of the substance of Gore’s current documentary is present in his 1992 book Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit, including a rousing appeal to the religious community to step up to the plate. But now, with the carnage of Hurricane Katrina still festering in the Gulf States two years after the fact, and the ten hottest years on record standing between us and the publication of Earth In The Balance, America’s faith communities are finally starting to take notice.

The crux of this disconnect, from an interfaith perspective, is spelled out by Mary Evelyn Tucker and John Grim, co-chairs of the Forum On Religion and Ecology:

Until recently religious communities have been so absorbed in internal sectarian affairs that they were unaware of the magnitude of the environmental crisis at hand. Certainly the natural world figures prominently in the major religions: God’s creation of material reality in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam; the manifestation of the divine in the karmic processes underlying the recycling of matter in Hinduism and Jainism; the interdependence of life in Buddhism; and the Tao (the Way) that courses through nature in Confucianism and Taoism. Despite those emphases on creation, many religions turned from the turbulent world in a redemptive flight to a serene, transcendent afterlife.

The questions arise, then: If religions are willing to stand by and witness the withering of the earth, has not something of their religious sensibilities become deadened, or at best severely reduced? Why have religions been so late in responding to environmental issues, and what are the obstacles to their full participation? Has concern for personal salvation or redemption become an obstacle to caring for creation? Why has apocalyptic thinking come to interpret ecological collapse as a manifestation of the end time?

Why indeed? These questions, after all, have been around for a long time. The basic premise that human beings are part of the natural world, that we evolve in dependent reciprocity with the rest of life on earth, has been a core axiom of Western science at least since the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species in 1859. A religious man himself, Darwin was saddened by the firestorm of controversy that erupted over his theories. Few of his religious critics today are aware that he was studying for the Christian ministry himself before he blundered into the job of naturalist on the voyage of the Beagle. Throughout his journals and writings, Darwin held fast to a spirit of reverence for God’s Creation, even as he broke with literalist Christian interpretations, concluding his famous book with the words, “There is a grandeur in this view of life, –from so simple a beginning, endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”

Who could have imagined how stubborn this controversy would prove to be? A hundred and fifty years later, we continue the war of mutual incomprehension between creationism and evolution, or more broadly, between religious and scientific ways of knowing, as if they did not arise from the same source of intelligence, both holding essential but different dimensions of the truth of our lives.

This ongoing ideological war has proven an immense distraction in our efforts to raise environmental concern to the moral stature that it deserves within our faith communities. As Tucker and Grim seem to suggest, we continue to squabble in the kitchen over our particular slice of theological pie while the whole house, literally, burns down around us.

But that is clearly changing, and none too soon. In the wake of intensifying climatic disruptions, even the most conservative religious groups in America are starting to rethink their positions on environmental stewardship. With consensus building on the reality of human-induced climate change, and a host of other environmental challenges bearing down on us, we seem to have reached a tipping point in our culture. The remarkable success of An Inconvenient Truth, and the dramatic results of the 2006 election here in the United States, bear witness to the fact that this turning has begun.

Christians might say we live in a time of metanoia–the Greek term in the New Testament usually translated as “repentance”, and understood as a radical change of heart and consciousness. Metanoia points to a turning of heart and mind so deep that it cannot fail to manifest as a change in behavior as well. Within Judaism also, such change of heart has always been a prerequisite to atonement.

But where does the will to transform our lives actually come from? This is the question that animates my work with religious leaders in Alaska. It is the question that brings me back into conversation with the wisdom traditions I thought I had abandoned years ago. We are in a time, it seems to me, when we must do whatever it takes to jolt our attention back to the bone-level sanctity of life. The climate crisis is showing us that everything worthy of our love really is on the line right now. This is a time to seek solutions that cut across all religious, political and ethnic boundaries.

The Harvard biologist E. O. Wilson, in a letter addressed to a Fundamentalist Southern Baptist pastor, put it this way:

The more we learn about the biosphere, the more complex and beautiful it turns out to be. Knowledge of it is a magic well: the more you draw from it, the more there is to draw. Earth, and especially the razor-thin film of life enveloping it, is our home, our wellspring, our physical and much of our spiritual sustenance.”

Though many people of faith shy away from the language of environmentalism, there are other ways of naming the challenges before us. The language of ecological science is one way, especially if it is rendered with appropriate humility at the depth of our ignorance about the natural world, as Wilson does. Many Jews and Christians prefer to speak in terms of our biblical responsibility to “Care for Creation.” The Creation Care movement bases its appeals on biblical scriptures that emphasize our responsibilities as stewards of God’s Creation. The Evangelical Environmental Network, for example, has broken with other conservative Christian groups by declaring that their mission is to “Build our Lord’s kingdom by active service to restore and renew the works of his hands (Matt. 6:33; Eph. 2:10).” As the stakes mount, a new pragmatism, and a new eye to shared core values across old divides, has begun to engender a new respect between religious and environmental leaders. As an example, a collaborative effort between evangelical Christians and traditional environmental groups recently proved decisive in the effort to block a weakening of the Endangered Species Act by the Bush-controlled Congress.

Such emphasis on scriptural integrity is important. It is in the DNA of our religious culture. But texts alone–language by itself–and appeals to external sources of scriptural authority, may not be sufficient to motivate the scale of change now needed. Wilson has suggested that we will not work to save that which we do not love. And mustering the will to love the planet as a whole is no easy assignment.

Most people of faith care about the fate of the planet. But they may not know why they care. Our traditional scriptures offer timeless wisdom for our personal lives, and an excellent code of ethics for those who share our religious or denominational loyalties. But such scriptures may offer little help in opening our hearts to the cries of entire natural systems now in danger of extinction. In fact, the archaic language of scripture is just as easily bent to justify anti-environmental longings for an impending Rapture.

Part of the problem, as Wilson points out, is that our Western scriptural traditions are direct offspring of a Neolithic preoccupation with escape from Nature. They are offspring of an urge to rise above the demands of mere survival that held sway during most of our early tenure on the planet. As a commercial fisherman I understand well where this impulse to flee from nature comes from. I have been in my share of harrowing situations on the high seas when my life really was on the line. In the face of death, Nature is anything but a benevolent ideal. It can transform lightening-quick into a callous destroyer. Aboriginal humans understood this much better than we do.

Our unconscious minds still harbor an ancient fear of primal nature. Armed with this unvanquished fear, we soldier forth into the twenty-first century with a Creation Myth that is still commonly interpreted to give humans a God-given status above the rest of nature (see Gen. 1:26-28). This enduring mythic posture, however much we may disavow it intellectually and scientifically, remains powerfully woven into our cultural identity, our increasingly global commerce, and our nearly total commoditization of the earth’s resources. As a basic element of cultural self-understanding, this myth is as difficult to uproot as it is out of touch with the way ecosystems actually work.

This is a big problem, if our goal is to love our planet home as we would love ourselves. Yet it is more than a problem of biblical exegesis. The challenge we have of disentangling ourselves from outmoded biblical understandings–and in the process finding our way to more ecologically grounded biblical interpretations–is compounded by the growing epidemic of “nature deficit disorder,” a concept that Richard Louv has recently popularized. This is where biology and psychology become so important to the religious conversation. As biological diversity declines across the planet, and human populations flee from working landscapes into the cities, our practical connection to the sources of ecological literacy decline in direct proportion. Our desire to care and respond appropriately to the dismantling of God’s Creation, however sincere and scripturally based, loses its psychological mooring and much of its motivational power. It is difficult to even know how to care for Creation if we become what Robert Lawrence France has called “sensual eunuchs, impotent to the callings of the wildness within and as a result, the pull of that which resides outside.”

Our religious preoccupation with scriptural texts does not, by itself, address the causes of nature-deficit disorder. I suspect it was this intuition that originally lured me out of the pulpit and onto the fishing grounds in the first place. As important as it is to re-think our scriptures in light of new ecological understandings, it is the natural world itself that remains the “Text behind the text”. Nature has always been our primary teacher through which language, meaning, and scripture must continually be grounded, just as our physical bodies are born from and return to the material matrix of soil, air and water. To remember why it matters to care for Creation, and to access deeper currents of love on a level commensurate with the challenges before us, we cannot abandon our kinship bonds with the rest of life. We have not evolved beyond the need to enter the Garden directly, reclaiming elements of our own biological and psychological ontology that have been stripped away from our awareness by the razing of the Garden itself.

This is not an “elitist” notion, as many wilderness critics suggest. On the contrary, our need to sustain contact with the world’s essential wildness, whether accessed in a backyard garden or a remote wilderness area, is a matter of non-negotiable biological necessity. Again, Wilson nails this point in his case to the Baptist preacher:

It is not the nature of human beings to be cattle in glorified feedlots. Every person deserves the option to travel easily in and out of the complex and primal world that gave us birth. We need freedom to roam across land owned by no one but protected by all, whose unchanging horizon is the same that bounded the world of our millennial ancestors. Only in what remains of Eden, teeming with life forms independent of us, is it possible to experience the kind of wonder that shaped the human psyche at its birth.

This psychological necessity, and the consequences of its absence in modern life, is something that established scriptures by themselves have a difficult task addressing.

In this sense, loss of biodiversity leaves us not only biologically vulnerable, but spiritually impoverished, adrift on an ocean without navigational charts. As the poet Gary Snyder has put it:

Whether Greece, Germania, or Han China, there were always nearby areas of forest, and wild animals, migratory waterfowl, seas full of fish and whales, and these were part of the experience of every active person. Animals as characters in literature and as universal presences in the imagination and in the archetypes of religion are there because they were there.

From where I now stand, approaching elderhood, I can see my life’s quest in part as a sustained search for antidotes to nature-deficit disorder, so that I might have some direct basis in my own experience for understanding why God so loved the world. We cannot live without the bread of the spirit that is the natural world. My priestly vocation, for its part, has sent me on a pilgrimage into wildness wherever I could find it-on the fishing grounds of Alaska, on mountaineering expeditions, or on the meditation cushion–each offering portals into an experience of transforming presence. It has been a journey into what might be called religion before religion.

And so I find myself, quite to my astonishment, leading contemplative kayaking trips for clergy and rabbis in the remote terrain of Alaska. Whatever it takes, I figure, to reestablish contact with the primal pulse of life, to regain consciousness in the broadest sense. How else can we remember why it matters to care for Creation in the first place?

Close encounters with humpback whales from the perspective of tiny kayaks on an immense sea, the sight of free-roaming bears plucking wild salmon from streams choked with spawning fish, the call of wolves in the night forest, all echo back to a time when humans were less mesmerized by their own reflection in the primordial pond, a time when we actually belonged to this terrifying and rapturous world, evoking deep recollections of what it means to be human in a fully-membered world–a fully “re-membered” world.

Can we learn to belong to Creation again? That may be the most urgent question for all people of faith as we wake up at last to the spiritual implications of what we ourselves have created. Only acts of love for what is left of our wild world have the power to save us now. As David James Duncan has written, “When the rivers are stripped of salmon our identities are stripped, posterity is stripped, unborn children are stripped, all humanity is stripped of a spiritual compass bearing and a means of livelihood as ancient as prayer.”

Maybe prayer itself is the final victim in our current spasm of extinctions. If so, then recovering our capacity for prayer as a full-bodied communion with the rest of life is as essential to ecological restoration as any new law or technical fix ever could be. If we can reclaim the arts of inner habitat restoration that have always kept our human nature aligned with the wild nature that gave us birth, God only knows what reservoirs of healing will be set loose in the world.

Al Gore, Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit (Boston, Mass.: Houghton Mifflin, 1992).

Mary Evelyn Tucker and John Grim, “The Greening of the World’s Religions,” Chronicle of Higher Education (February 9, 2007).

Edward O. Wilson, The Creation: An Appeal To Save Life On Earth (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006), p. 7.

See www.creationcare.org/mission.php

Richard Louv, Last Child In The Woods: Saving Our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder (Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books, 2005).

Robert Lawrence France, Deep Immersion: The Experience of Water (Sheffield, VT: Green Frigate Books, 2006), quoted from “An Oracle of Aqua”, Harvard Magazine, January – February 2007, p. 50.

Edward O. Wilson, The Creation: An Appeal To Save Life On Earth (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006), p. 12.

Gary Snyder, The Practice of the Wild (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1990), p. 73.

David James Duncan, God Laughs & Plays: Churchless Sermons in Response to the Preachments of the Fundamentalist Right, (Great Barrington, Mass.: Triad Institute, Inc., 2007), p. 168-169.