Rewilding the Way

Note: This was originally published in our bi-weekly e-newsletter, Liminal Spaces. To get future issues delivered to your inbox, sign up here.

Life has become strange, different, and, in some ways, unrecognizable since the pandemic struck. Have you felt it? With most of us staying home and telecommuting instead of physically commuting, it almost seems as if the rest of earth’s inhabitants are breathing a sigh of relief. Mountain goats in Wales have taken to walking the streets, lions were caught catnapping on a once-busy highway in South Africa, and wild boars even crossed the road to get to the other side in Haifa, Israel. Here in Colorado, three rather large mountain lions turned parts of Boulder into their playground. Amidst all the fallout of COVID-19, there’s beauty in this “rewilding” that’s taking place. 

Though an environmental term—meaning letting nature take care of itself and referring to conservation strategies that reintroduce species to their natural environment, restore wilderness areas and the land to its original state, and create corridors to connect these lands and species with each other—rewilding is a concept that just makes sense. “Re-wilding” (try saying it aloud) resonates deep down, bringing to mind a desire to be a young child without a care in the world, full of wonder, running wild and free. It evokes images of returning to Eden, where flora and fauna alike flourished with only minimal cultivation and oversight. It reminds us that too much control, too much domestication, too many constraints cause us to lose part of our essential nature.

The same is true for our souls. When faith only serves to box us in, tame us, and control us, we not only lose part of ourselves, we also lose touch with everything wild around us—including God. Faith as intended is as wild, mysterious, adventure-filled, and exotic as the God at its center.

Our current situation has provided an unprecedented opportunity to rediscover the untamable within, to decolonize our souls, and to free ourselves from a fenced-in faith domesticated by dogma, ideology, and rationalism. We have a chance to rewild our understanding of spirituality by freeing God from the institutional house we built to contain Him. We have the opportunity to trade in our certainty for wonder and our literalism for mystery. We are invited to rejoin the wild, unorthodox way of Christ. We can rebuild our sacred relationship with the natural world. We can abandon our desire to dominate culture and instead transform culture through service and love. As stewards of a once-wild faith that has all but been domesticated, we have a duty to free our faith from some of the repressive, world-denying, and destructive practices that have facilitated our spiritual stagnation. 

If rewilding the environment starts with restoring the world to its Eden-like state, how do we untame a faith decaying under the constraints of spiritual control? How do we tap into our wild roots and reinvigorate our faith? For the next few issues, we’ll examine what it might look like for each of us to recapture and embrace the wildness within, while also learning to appreciate and accept the sacred wildness without.

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