Crying in The Wilderness: We Don’t Have to Live This Way

Sunday’s lectionary reading from the Gospel of Mark announced the arrival of a new world. Adroit readers will recognize the parallelism to Genesis 1 and the original Creation narrative. Mark’s Gospel also begins with a proclamation of new Creation and the hope of things to come:

“The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. As it is written in the prophet Isaiah, 

See, I am sending my messenger ahead of you,
who will prepare your way;
the voice of one crying out in the wilderness:
‘Prepare the way of the Lord,
make his paths straight,’

John the baptizer appeared in the wilderness, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. And people from the whole Judean countryside and all the people of Jerusalem were going out to him, and were baptized by him in the river Jordan, confessing their sins. Now John was clothed with camel’s hair, with a leather belt around his waist, and he ate locusts and wild honey.”

This new world was decreed by an odd messenger. John the Baptist was anything but normal. He wasn’t a member of the religious establishment, and he certainly didn’t make polite dinner company. He was weird. He lived on the outlandish periphery, far from the madding crowd. It shouldn’t be lost on us that this prophet wasn’t welcome by the in-crowd. He was even a little hard to take for those harmed by the status quo. His good news was heard on the margins by the select few who had “ears to hear.” I think that is the point.

Just like then, we in the deconstruction community are inundated by the same old voices. Sure, content creators in this space might be singing a different tune, but the voices sound and look the same. Like the cool pastor dude with the bougie mustache on TikTok, or the very Instagrammable podcaster with the perfect smile and aesthetic. Exvangelicals who’ve traded one form of religious fundamentalism for another, people who require you to buy into every single progressive issue or else risk being cancelled by the very community you originally sought refuge in. Platformed, privileged voices talking out the progressive side of their theological mouths—I’ve stopped listening. Maybe I’ve been at this far too long, but I’m just completely bored by the conversations.

In the words of my pastor and friend Jennifer Williamson, “Sometimes we need a new voice to wake us up and change our minds.” In Mark’s Gospel, that voice is John the Baptist. In the deconstruction community, I believe that voice is Derrick Jensen.

Like any authentic prophet, Derrick is weird as hell. He lives off the grid, he talks to coyotes, makes love to trees, and dreams of blowing up dams. I’m not joking. He’s also unflinchingly honest. Raised in an abusive home, Derrick’s childhood trauma awakened him to the understanding that violence is a pathology that touches every human soul and every sentient being on this planet. He’s also not afraid to make you squirm, or to say things that make you gasp. Like, “A primary purpose of Judeo-Christianity has not been to move us toward a community where the teachings of someone like Jesus are made manifest in all aspects of life, but instead to provide a theological framework for a system of exploitation…It is more convenient for exploiter and exploited alike to pretend their parasitic relationship is Natural, ordained by God.”

Or

“When dams were erected on the Columbia River, salmon battered themselves against the concrete, trying to return home. I expect no less from us. We too must hurl ourselves against and through the literal and metaphorical concrete that contains and constrains us, that keeps us from talking about what is most important to us, that keeps us from living the way our bones know we can, that bars us from our home. It only takes one person to bring down a dam.”

It also only takes one voice to wake us up from the nightmare we call normal.

Derrick is an odd duck, but I’m tired of listening to conformers, to voices who want to call into question the theology of domination but stop far short of critiquing the dirty, rotten, domination system they participate in and benefit from. Most of us are too afraid to say anything, or too satiated to give a damn about the eradication of salmon in our rivers, plastic in our oceans, and the ecological collapse of the Natural world. Or the fact 32,000 people die of hunger every day while the rest of us are watching Netflix as we wait in line at the IN-N-Out drive-thru.

We need a new voice to awaken us to our planet’s cries for survival. We need someone brave enough and strange enough to cut through the madness of normality to tell us our culture is insane. We need a prophetic voice calling us to begin again.

I’m not really sure why you are here. I don’t know what you want or need from this space, or if you are paying enough attention to notice what’s really going on. My guess is the vast majority of subscribers will read and yawn, or scroll on to something more titillating. No matter. But for the few of you with ears to hear, I hope you will take the time to listen to this voice crying in the wilderness. A voice preparing a Way through the rubble of our world.

Listen to our latest conversation with Derrick Jensen today. I promise it will be like nothing you’ve ever heard before.

Gary Alan Taylor