Into Local Waters: Rewilding the Study of Christian Spirituality

In May 2012, a friend and I took an eight-day bicycle trip from Pittsburgh to Washington, DC. Our trek along the Great Allegheny Passage trail began through the valley of the Youghiogheny River in Western Pennsylvania. Tall trees shade the trail, an abandoned rail line; the shale hillsides were alive with water full and high and fast, so much water that it seemed to spring from the rock into waterfalls joining the river. All this water brought wildflowers: lady-slippers, trillium, buttercups, thick stands of mountain laurel and rhododendron. The creeks were full of turtles and choruses of frogs and toads, air alive with dragonflies, butterflies, and songbirds. Up, down, and on either side—in sound and sight and the sparkling (or rain-spattered) waters of the great river itself—life was teeming.

At some point late on the first day, as we became increasingly immersed in this river world, the path moved under a high overpass. Far above us, motorists on I-70 were rocketing along at 65 mph, most presumably hardly noticing that a river snaked far below. Passengers would have had to peer over the overpass rail intently at just the right moment as they zoomed past to have seen our bike path at all, let alone the two of us on it; and from that distance and speed all the wet complexity in which we were immersed and the creatures so vivid for us would have been at best a green blur disappearing as quickly as it had appeared.

I-70 is the interstate whose steady hum [was] audible from my backyard in Columbus, Ohio, and it gives travelers easy access to the seminary where I [taught]. I travel[ed] it regularly. So the experience of seeing that highway from far beneath—from within a world to which I less often give myself permission to spend time—was striking. From the Youghiogheny River valley, in the beautiful living thickness of the world itself in all its created reality, the oblivious world of the interstate seemed impossibly remote, even alien. We were perpendicular—cross-wise—to it in direction, and hundreds of yards beneath it in plane.

The River Monster Lower Swallow Falls

© William Fultz II

CONTEXT

That day on the Youghiogheny River gave form to a perception I am coming to call perpendicularity: the experience of the disconnection between much of contemporary human life from the living reality of the natural world.¹

We know the staggering dimensions of this alienation: the extent to which our current economic system and worldviews fail to take account of our planet’s limits and our own place in the larger biological world on which our lives depend. We recognize—most of us, now and then, maybe in a rueful way—the extent to which our fossil-fueled lives charge along in more or less complete experiential detachment from the rest of the biosphere. We try to take in the scientific data tracking the effects of our global economic engines, culminating in the 2014 IPCC report of the searing future we face if current greenhouse-gas emissions continue: “the likelihood of severe, pervasive and irreversible impacts for people and ecosystems.”² What’s going on down there, way below our interstates, off the edges of our screens, beyond our earbuds? The cascading patterns of disruption of our planet’s core life-support systems, whole species and ecosystems wiped out and gone forever—exacerbating human trauma, dislocation, war, famine, and economic exploitation—and the astonishing beauty of the natural world itself, in its still-sustaining wildness and diversity and abundance: all this complexity and mystery of the biosphere is out there, both transcending us and withering under our attack.

To face and respond to this reality of climate chaos precisely as scholars of religion is the challenge Laurie Zoloth outlined in her 2014 AAR presidential address: to recognize this emergency for what it is, the shattering “interruption” of our ordinary scholarly priorities and projects, the shock of our lives jolting us all into...