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Aspects of Wilderness

Wilderness imagery features significantly in contemporary discourse, as well as in the Christian tradition. A politician is said to be in the wilderness when her career and position in society appear to be lost. A house owner laments that his garden is a wilderness because order has not been imposed upon it – or on the contrary, if he is a bee keeper, he boasts that he keeps his garden as a wilderness to provide pollen from brambles and other plants. In North America wilderness areas are prized by many, and safeguarded by law, as places where human interference in natural processes is kept to a minimum. These examples, taken at random, illustrate the varied connotations of wilderness. The ambiguity of this concept runs deep. I first started pursuing an interest in this subject when I wrote a dissertation on ‘Wilderness in the Old Testament’.1 Since then I have continued to read, and have found the strands of meaning in wilderness even more diverse than I originally thought. In English the word wilderness can mean either ‘desert’ or ‘the wild’ – the sandy, desolate wastes, or any area relatively devoid of the results of human activity. Within the Christian tradition wilderness is often viewed in a negative light. John Bunyan’s classic The Pilgrim’s Progress takes the form of a journey through ‘the wilderness of this world’. In secular literature and philosophy also wilderness is often a negative concept: the wilderness is the desert, a place of deprivation and absence. By contrast ‘deep ecology’ sees wilderness – the wild – as an ideal and, indeed, as the only hope for human survival. In the biblical literature the wilderness is the desert – although this desert embraces a variety of terrain, from the barren wasteland of the Israelites’ wanderings,2 to the somewhat more fecund area of the Judaean wilderness. The ‘true desert’ was also the wilderness of the Desert Fathers and Mothers in Egypt and Palestine. For the early Celtic monks, however, the wilderness becomes the wild but fruitful mountains of Ireland and Wales. And when the early Puritan settlers in North America referred to that land as a wilderness they meant that it was, in our parlance, ‘undeveloped’. In this essay I wish to take soundings in these contrasting ideas of wilderness, and to draw out some lessons for Christian spirituality and practice.