Summer hours continue. Daily Episcopalian will publish every other day this week.
By Sam Candler
I spend as much of each summer as possible on a deep, cold lake in northern Ontario. The true natives of the province call it the “Near North,” since it is not definitively the region known as Northern Ontario, which stretches much, much further up from our little lake. It is simply above the southern, urban regions, and it is above “cottage country.”
Still, it is north enough for a Southerner like me; and it is primitive enough, too. Our cabins or cottages are not insulated; they are simple structures built of varying degrees of aged and weathered pine. We have electricity now, and even some telephones, but I remember summers when most of us did not. The water in our pipes is not drinkable, since it is pumped up from the lake where we swim and motor our boats. The diehards among us still bathe daily in that cold, black lake, no matter the weather: rainy, cold, still, sunny, or windy (and, in fact, it can be quite hot and sunny).
I meet all kinds of people here, from the local villagers who are steady and sincere to summer residents from all over the continent who cover the spectrum of sophistication. Most of us agree that sophistication does not cut it up here, even if we are very good at sophistication in our various roles during the rest of the year.
We are here because life is simple and direct here. Daily needs are clear and straightforward. We need food, water, and a little bit of electrical or gasoline energy (the young water skiers here need much more gasoline energy). We need to tend responsibly to garbage and waste. Our pieces of ground are called “camps.” We need to keep clear of varmints and nuisance animals – from mice and raccoons to porcupines and bears—animals to whom I easily concede ownership of our little cabin. Being here, at most, only two months of every year, we cannot claim ownership; our little place actually belongs to the mice and creatures who live here six times as long as we do! Each summer, we gently re-stake our claim.
In short, I am an outsider here. Maybe that is why I return each summer. I realize again how small I really am compared to the grandeur of this country and this water and this rock and these gloriously green forests. Rock and water and trees.
Last week, I was privileged to meet Joseph Boyden, an author known especially for his first novel, Three Day Road. His family, a First Nations family, is truly from Northern Ontario, where his Cree and Ojibway ancestors trapped and lived simply on the land. Now, Boyden actually lives part of the year in New Orleans, where he writes and teaches.
Three Day Road is a work of fiction, set in World War One, where at least one Canadian First Nations soldier was historically known for amazing sharpshooting. The novel is terse and severe, much like life in these dark woods, but also because it is a novel about war and about hard relationships. There is a beautiful and severe relationship between two brothers. There is a wary relationship between Canadians and others during the war. There is the always tense relationship between First Nations people and the wemistikoshiw, the white man (wemistikoshiw means the white underside of a fish).
My time in this country teaches me the humility of being an outsider. And, during our conversation last week, Boyden mentioned another humble feature of humanity’s relationship with the world. This feature seems to be well acknowledged in First Nations lore, but many of us in more developed, industrial cultures have never realized it. Joseph Boyden, himself a Metis (mixed-blood Indian) said that, “among all the animals in the world, human beings are the only species which no other species needs.”
“Human beings are the only species in the world which no other species actually needs.” That is to say, the bear needs the fish, the fish need smaller fish, the beaver need the foliage, etc., etc. But no other species actually needs human beings for their existence.
That makes all of us humans, it seems to me, rather like outsiders on this planet. Do any other species on God’s earth actually need us in order to survive? (Outside of our domesticated pets?) It is even more sobering to acknowledge that humankind has the capacity to change the earth’s environment to the detriment of our earth animal neighbors. (We share that characteristic, by the way, with beavers, another great Ontario denizen.)
Wendell Berry once captured this situation with an exquisite title to one of his books: What Are People For? That is to say, what values are we meant to provide on the earth? What do we add? What do other species need us for?
The near north area of Ontario –and any area out in the wild—teaches us, then, the challenge of how we might actually add something to God’s creation. If we are not being the actual food for some of our earthly neighbors, maybe we are meant to provide something like true stewardship. Maybe Genesis 1:26-28 really means that we are to provide, not dominion over the earth in a rowdy, tyrannical, irresponsible way, but, rather, true stewardship and tender care of the earth. Maybe the earth itself really needs our husbandry in a conserving way, not in a consuming, self-rewarding way. Eugene Peterson, in The Message (2002), translates Genesis 1:28 as “Be responsible for fish in the sea and birds in the air, for every living thing that moves on the face of Earth.”
I am wary of the human tendency toward arrogance, and I realize that even believing that we are “responsible” carries with it a temptation toward arrogance and hubris. But the ability to be responsible, the ability to see a larger picture and extended time frame, may indeed be a distinctively human contribution to God’s created world. If so, responsibility always needs humility.
Surely our souls need humility. Maybe each of us needs a regular experience of being an outsider, maybe a stranger, in a place whose grandeur and wildness highlights our smallness. That humility might teach us another degree of true stewardship for God’s earth and for God’s people.
The Very Rev. Sam Candler is dean of St. Philip’s Cathedral in Atlanta. He chaired the House of Deputies’ Committee on Prayerbook, Liturgy and Church Music at the General Convention. His sermons and reflections on “Good Faith and Common Good” can be found on the Cathedral web site.