One of the best parts of my summer has been guiding people into the Boundary Waters. These “Mindful Paddles” (organized through Points Unknown Dog-Based Adventures) are only four hours long. People who sign up for them are from all over—Iowa, Delaware, Illinois—all inexperienced. They’ve heard of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. They are curious—they want to see for themselves what it’s like.
Our trips go like this: I pick them up and we drive together to an entry point. As we drive I tell them about Sigurd Olsen and The Wilderness Act of 1964, about how he had the foresight (and did the hard work) to pass legislation setting aside certain lands specifically as “wilderness.”
Many participants have visited national parks: we talk about huge groups of people coming to see Old Faithful or the Grand Canyon. I point out the difference in wilderness areas, which are designed to preserve a sense of solitude, fulfilling the words of The Wilderness Act itself: to be places “where man is a visitor.”
The Boundary Waters is the original wilderness area, and also the most used of the many wilderness areas across the country. Most people who love the outdoors have heard (or read) about the Boundary Waters.
But it’s different being there. As our canoes pass the border into wilderness, I tell my fellow paddlers about some special restrictions we have moved into—an ethic of “leave no trace,” of quiet, of limited group size, and of self-propelled motion. I point out to them that when we go into wilderness, we cede control—we cannot turn on the heat or the air conditioning; if it rains or storms, we cannot dash inside; the wind comes up, and there’s no off switch.
These short trips into the Boundary Waters are not the same as going in for a week, and yet they give people a feel for, a taste of, wilderness.
It strikes me that an experience of wilderness has a lot in common with an experience of God.
You can read all you want about religion—many different religions or just one. You can know theological doctrines and even the Bible.
But entering into an experience of God is where the reality begins to hit.
The great theologian, Soren Kierkegaard, understood this. In his extensive writing, he considered the relationship between religion and reason. Reacting to Immanuel Kant’s argument that morality and religion must be based on reason, and Georg Hegel, who held that reason must be used to process truth, Kierkegaard argued that reason simply will not and cannot get a person to ultimate reality.
Our human minds, while wonderful, are not capable of grasping metaphysical truth. We are called, then, says Kierkegaard, to recognize the limits of reason and accept that there are paradoxes and mysteries beyond our ken. This is Kierkegaard’s famous “Leap of Faith.”
Kierkegaard goes on to argue that purely rational truth-seeking is too passive, to un-involved with outcome. Reason is about control— seeking truth within our human minds. Faith, like going into wilderness, requires a giving up of control—( which many would argue is an illusion, so not much of a sacrifice!). Faith requires a person to “stake their life” on the mystery of religion.
“Absence of evidence,” according to Kierkegaard – the fact that no rational evidence can be supplied for the existence of God—is not “evidence of absence.” We cannot prove or disprove God’s existence, and to act as if we can, is the height of hubris.
Kierkegaard was writing at a time when people hoped that reason and the human mind would bring about a world where everyone was fed, educated and lived in peace—two world wars shattered that illusion. Looking around us, we ought to know the limits of the human mind.
Those I take paddling know “about” the Boundary Waters. We paddle in— looking and listening—and they experience a different way of being, something way deeper than reading “about.”
On these Mindful Paddles, people catch a glimpse of wilderness— pitcher plants and sphagnum moss, beaver lodges, sun rippled from water onto tree trunks. And not just sights, but sounds—of wind in white pines, loons calling, sawyer beetles munching on wood. And the feeling—paddle-moving water, walking over a rooty, rocky portage path, and cool water on warm skin. There might be tastes of blueberries or the smell of crushed bog myrtle.
This experience, this small plunge into wilderness, I hope, will call them back to a world beyond their everyday lives. When they are surrounded by beeps and notifications or stuck in traffic—I hope that other reality beyond will echo in their minds and hearts.
The “leap” into wilderness or faith requires choosing to set aside control and reason that sense that we can get there on our own. It requires a “dive” into the wilderness, or the wildness of God.
Each month a member of the Cook County Ministerium will offer Spiritual Reflections. This month’s contributor is Mary Ellen Ashcroft, Vicar of Spirit of the Wilderness Episcopal Church.
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