Touching God’s Wilder Side

Last updated on: August 22, 2015 at 12:52 pm by Guest Contributor

Touching God’s Wilder Side 2015-08-22T12:52:14-05:00 Guest Contributor

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Plains Zebra with foal by Geoff Gallice/Creative Commons licensing

The wilder side of God refuses all our attempts at predictability and containment

by Joe McHugh

God and I are infuriatingly slow learners. I’m slow to let God convince me to move in the general direction of virtue, and God still struggles to remember I’m a visual learner. I need a compelling story or an arresting image just to get me interested in what God might bring to the table. Gospel stories, however, can often chip away at my spiritual stand-offishness, because they’re fleshy enough that I can picture them. In other words, they show rather than just tell me how God loves and heals.

Either by accident or by grace, I’ve also recently started seeing startling images of God’s saving side by watching nature documentaries on television. They’re also concrete and visual enough that they can touch my personal and religious imagination with instinctive power. That’s why they can transform, not just inform.

For example, I learned to grieve watching a mother leopard mourn the sudden loss of its cub, and seeing a father zebra coax its foal away from its dead mother and back to protection of the herd showed me how hard God begs us to abandon death and isolation in favor of life and community.

Even the way I pray got a makeover when I watched an orphaned white rhino learn to escape disease-carrying insects and scorching sun by taking time to wallow in cooling mud and water, a habit that turns out to be both refreshing a life-saving. Real prayer, I’ve learned, also does it share of wallowing.

Most recently, a PBS documentary, “Touching the Wild,” with wildlife biologist Joe Hutto, gave me a new image of God’s relentless passion to comfort and challenge us. The program documents Hutto’s six-year stint with a herd of wild mule deer in Wyoming’s mountainous wilderness. He didn’t just observe the deer while there; instead, he lived with them, the result of an irresistible urge to “truly see the world through a wild creature’s eyes.” As he slowly entered into their world, he started seeing his own with fresh eyes, a kind of converted vision that turned his world upside down.

Not only did something compel him to head “out there” into the wilderness, something equally compelling led him back to civilization six years later, enriched and changed, or, as religious folks would put it, permanently converted and eager to engage the world with the deepened creativity he received when he let the unruly and uncharted touch his soul.

What happened to Hutto sounds like what happened to Jesus when he was driven “out there” into the wilderness to be tempted and changed while living with wild beasts. While there, he may have become intimate with God’s wilder side, something that turned his religious vision on its head. It could have led him — compelled him, really — to shake up the religious niceties of his contemporaries by insisting that God was just as present “out there” among the outsiders in the streets as in their staid houses of worship. Read the gospel stories closely and we see a side of God that comes with an insistent, wild ferocity that turns on its head everything we take for granted about what’s holy and full of grace.

We’ve also got something of Jesus and Joe Hutto in us. Doesn’t our faith regularly drive us out into lonely places in the wilderness of our hearts to find new places of grace? If God helps us out there to navigate successfully past temptation just like Jesus, don’t we also run the risk of having our expertly tamed religious world transformed when we start seeing it through the wilder eyes of grace? The wilder side of God refuses all our attempts at predictability and containment, preferring, instead, to goad us into a faith that harbors an impolite edge and resists being domesticated or turned into a cold, controlling dogmatism.

Hutto spent six years in the wilderness, and Jesus was there for a symbolic forty days. For our conversion to take root, we need to put in time out there as semi-permanent residents rather than occasional sightseers. To adapt Hutto language, we need move from being near God to being close to God. Another apt description, I think, of prayer.

Prayer is required if we choose to live in those wild places between the merely natural and the naturally graceful. It’s then that our prayer takes on a discerning quality as we learn to navigate the often-confusing boundary between what we need to fear and resist and what we need to greet and embrace.

We learn these differences the more time we spend exposed to God’s wilder side being tutored on what to keep close and what we need to abandon in favor of faith’s more impolite invitation to let creative grace have its way with us. After all, God is always coming to us as fresh possibility for the future—God’s future and our own.

Toward the end of “Touching the Wild,” Hutto shows his viewers the well-worn paths mule deer have travelled for hundreds of years, full of confidence that they would once again lead them to food and life. But there comes a time, Hutto insists, that these paths turn into dead ends, and the deer know instinctively that they need abandon past habits and take chance on new paths to possible sustenance, a wonderful image, let me suggest, of how faith is always on the lookout for more obedient commitment.
Our “out there” turns out to be that place of possibility between our past and God’s future, and moving forward with God requires a certain comfort with living in the wilderness of Christian hope, the fertile in-between places in which grace takes root in us—the mysterious Holy Saturdays of our souls.

Joe McHugh is a spiritual director, retreat leader, teacher and freelance writer living in St. Paul, MN. He writes regularly for a variety of religious publications and his book, Startled by God: Wisdom from Unexpected Places was published in 2013. He can be contacted at [email protected].

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