From Dean Ohlman on May 23, 2011

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood it. . . . He was in the world, and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognize him. He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him. Yet to all who received him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God—children born not of natural descent,nor of human decision or a husband’s will, but born of God. The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only,who came from the Father, full of grace and truth (John 1:1-14).

I’m still reflecting on Kathleen Dean Moore’s Wild Comfort: The Solace of Nature. My reading of such a sincere and artfully crafted book on nature brought to mind the significance of the name of this Website: “The Wonder of Creation” not “The Wonder of Nature.” The difference at first might seem small but it is immense in what it implies about both solace and joy.

To most people of a modern scientific bent “nature” means everything material—and “material” defines what is real. Though there might be something we call “spiritual,” it is but a state of mind that has no ultimate reality. The natural is all that really exists. What we call supernatural or spiritual is a human mental invention. At this stage in her life Kathleen and what she reveals about her biologist husband, Frank, indicates that they are naturalists—metaphysical naturalists: those who would hold that the material cosmos is all that exists (or at least what we can know exists). In all her love of nature and nature’s enchantment so beautifully expressed, however, she reveals that she is agnostic, not atheistic. That’s a standpoint that still has hope. It’s probably a temporarily safe middle ground for a philosopher not yet willing to commit. At one point Kathleen makes reference to the philosopher George Berkeley:

The whole of creation is held in God’s eyes, Berkeley says. Divine attention, divine seeing and hearing and even touching (imagine the electricity of this touch) bring the world into existence and hold it there. It occurs to me that if God does not exist, one must suppose the entire onus is on us to hold the world in existence by paying attention. One might need to take this responsibility seriously.

Here she reveals the negative side of her agnosticism: God may not exist. As she reflects on a crashing waterfall she sees the “joke” of the human desire to find meaning in world that ultimately has none:

I should be careful about looking for lessons in rivers. Rivers fall because the rock has disappeared from under them—that’s why. The force of water falling grinds a deep place out of rock and shoves up a weir of stone—and would do, and will do whether we live or die. Rivers flow downhill. Rivers fall off cliffs. You cannot trust them. This is the way the world is. Life is a joke—exactly that joke, all of us falling to our deaths from the moment we are born. Where is meaning to be found in such a world—this world, this black rock, rock wren, heartrending world?

On a walk in which she again contemplates meaning (or the lack thereof) in the behavior of a flock of geese, she asks herself, “Why am I looking for meaning instead of looking for geese? Maybe it’s not what the facts of the world point to, but the facts of the world themselves that should entrance me.”

In an earlier column, I asked how John Muir’s understanding of the Jesus that his mean-tempered and religiously ugly father turned him away from might have been different if he would have met his godly contemporary George MacDonald. I wonder too how Kathleen Moore might be affected by meeting C. S. Lewis whose agnosticism was turned to faith by the Spirit of the living Christ. Perhaps she has read Lewis and been left unaffected. I don’t know. In his essay “On Living in an Atomic Age,” Lewis seems to be addressing Moore:

Nature does not, in the long run, favour life. If Nature is all that exists—in other words, if there is no God and no life of some quite different sort somewhere outside Nature—then all stories will end in the same way: in a universe from which all life is banished without possibility of return. It will have been an accidental flicker, and there will be on one even to remember it.
[Lewis photo source]

Kathleen Dean Moore has not yet reached this conclusion. She still has hope:

If we had no hope, nothing could harm us. We could choose to die by our own hands [one naturalist’s response suggested by Lewis] and by that act, frustrate all our demons. But hope empowers also all the good in the world. Hope keeps us alive, even as we all move toward inevitable death. This is essential. To hold on, fiercely to hold on, even if we believe we are condemned to “a life without consolation,” is the one triumph open to us. In the end, the fact of life so fully seized becomes the consolation.
[Photo source]

Her vacillation between hope and despair, between joy and meaninglessness is indeed heart-rending. She finds solace in nature’s beauty and in music like finale of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony that celebrates Schillers’ “Ode to Joy”—and Lewis responds:

The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn to dumb idols, breaking the heart of their worshipers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of the flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have not yet visited. Do you think I am trying to weave a spell? Perhaps I am; but remember your fairy tales. Spells are used for breaking enchantments as well as for inducing them. And you and I have need of the strongest spell that can be found to wake us from the evil enchantment of worldliness which has been laid on us for nearly a hundred years. (The Weight of Glory Sermon delivered in 1942).

I believe the particular worldliness C.S. Lewis speaks of here is the spell of scientific naturalism and its consequences for mankind and God’s good earth. How I pray that this spell will broken for Kathleen and Frank Moore—and for the millions who have yet to put their faith in the One in which Lewis ultimately—and surprisingly—found true joy.