Rewilding

 

The grass in the ‘orchard’ is so long that it has collapsed onto the rhubarb. I chuckled to myself the other day in taking the compost out to the heap and having to step through this rewilded area, remembering my dad’s comments about someone walking awkwardly as though stepping through a field of corn. That someone is now me, and I am sure it is not an elegant look.

Speaking of my dad, an ex-Marine who lived the adage ‘once a Marine, always a Marine’, he was a ‘short back and sides’ every three weeks at the barber sort of guy. The long hair of the sixties really ruffled his feathers, to mix metaphors. He liked his garden cut twice a week in the summer, and trimmed at the sides. He would hate our efforts at rewilding.

I have to admit, I’m suspicious that Don’s enthusiasm for this is an excuse not to have to cut the grass. I’m also slightly apprehensive about the sort of wildlife we might be enabling and attracting: in the midst of our family gathering last weekend, a shrew sauntered right through our midst across the slightly shorter grass in front of the house.

Rewilding, I discovered on google, is not just a trend to enable natural biodiversity to flourish. It is also a term applied to human health, and its advocates recommend dips in icy rivers or cold showers, daily exposure to early morning sunshine (challenging in Scotland…), and eating ancient grains and game. Hmm.

If we can rewild our environment and rewild our bodies, what would it mean to rewild our spiritual life? I imagine it involves embracing sabbath rests while also allowing harvesting a picnic in the field despite it being sabbath, receiving sabbath as a gift from God and not a duty to be performed. I wonder if it could also mean throwing off some of our institutional church do’s and don’ts, and going straight to the Source in prayer and scripture. Jesus called us to follow him, not to establish a structure of judgment of others’ lifestyles and a protocol for worship preference.

Maybe we are being nudged towards embracing those whose worship styles irritate us like the grass drooping into the veggie patch, whose ideas seem like rodents in the garden, but whose love for Jesus inspires their actions.

I am going to linger in these thoughts today, asking God to show me how to rewild my spiritual life. How about you?