Wilderness temptation

Grand Canyon wilderness

Sunday Morning. Hallelujah, schoener Morgen, Heute muss Ich nicht besorgen! We used to intone this perversion of a familiar German hymn (Halleluiah, what a morning, I don’t have to help with the chores today!) We still have some of those feelings. Sunday relieves us of our obligations for a short time. Ironically, on dairy farms that surrounded me when I was a kid, Sunday chores looked a lot like the chores of any other morning.

Our Sunday School discussion will focus on Matthew’s telling of the story of Jesus’ wilderness temptation. Dorothy Jean Weaver wrote the student book, I wrote the teacher’s manual and my friend E.T. will guide the discussion. The discourse will likely run the usual course, namely that the story illustrates Jesus’ temptations to chuck his messianic mission in favour of an easier road to power, self-gratification or personal comfort. If it stays there, however, it will miss an important other aspect: the legend of the wilderness temptation is a teaching parable, and we do well to interpret it more personally.

Take the temptation to turn stones into bread. Taking shortcuts to ensure that we in the West will always have food security—indeed the right to gluttony—is illustrated by this wilderness temptation. We have put our faith in chemicals, artificial fertilizers and technologies to such a degree that we are poisoning our environment in the interest of profits and food security while much of the world starves.

Take the temptation to hurl oneself off the pinnacle of the temple in a show of magic and the favour of God and His angels. The US went into Iraq with the “shock and awe” slogan and the prayers that God should “bless America.” While the citizenry cheered—especially the right wing of the Christian Church—the administration and the military “hurled themselves from the pinnacle of the temple” in a show of might and God’s favour. This will turn out to have been an evanescent dream; the evidence is there before us already.

And then there’s the worship of Satan as a route to ultimate power. Much of Christianity doesn’t get Satan as a mythological stand-in for the evil that all of us humans are capable of. At the root of much of our temptation is not a literal “worshipping of the devil,” but a very human “love of money,” and we are currently living through a depression whose very root is that evil, the worship of that “Satan.” It certainly grants power, this obeisance to that demon, but it is, in the end, a power founded on an evil preoccupation. This temptation is very strong and tests all of us one way and another. Our government has currently told us that “the economy is people’s main concern now,” not the environment or the Afghani detainees, one might add.

Matthew’s parable of the temptation is not actually about Jesus, it’s about you and me.

Take Action

Grasslands National Park: top-bottom - rabbit, lichen, Frenchman River, 70-Mile Butte.

We spent the better part of the long weekend exploring the Grasslands National Park near Val Marie, Saskatchewan. You should go there. It’s a phenomenal glimpse into the sights, sounds, smells and feel of the prairies after the ice age and before mankind. Enough said; discover it for yourself, preferably on a hot day in summer when the desert positively hums with crickets and the clicking of grasshopper wings.

We stayed in the Convent Country Inn (http://convent1.sasktelwebsite.net/), an old brick building in which the Sisters of the Assumption of Mary lived and taught school until the end of that era. The food was great, the hosts gracious and the room was a tad warm, but it was a great place to spend the nights. From our room (8; the best room in the Inn we were assured) we could see the Catholic Church and a billboard: “Abortion stops a beating heart; take action.” We wondered as we read the faded words on the weathered billboard what action we were being urged to take. Should we join in the pro-life movement and demonstrate? Should we write to our MP and tell him we’d like to see abortion re-criminalized? Should we refrain from aborting our unexpected pregnancies and urge our family and community to do likewise? What action were we being urged to take?

Everything about abortion is tragic, from the first awareness of an inappropriate, possibly shameful, pregnancy to the contemplation of the probing of instruments and the expulsion of human tissue and finally, to the guilt of knowing that but for this decision, a person would exist who now doesn’t. No one—I’m guessing—is pro-abortion. Pro-choice is a question of who decides what is to be done when unexpected pregnancy presents itself. Should it be the state? Should it be the individuals involved? Should it be the church?

I can only think of one action I can appropriately take in this regard, and that is to support efforts to prevent inappropriate pregnancy. And what form might that take? Education is good, properly done. People need to know how to prevent pregnancy safely. Availability of the apparatuses of prevention is good; I would rather see easily-obtained birth-control pills than abortions, than children being raised by children, or unwanted and resented children growing up in an environment that lacks nurturance. Abstinence is good if it doesn’t become a religion; doing without coitus doesn’t actually cause acne.

What does all this have to do with Grasslands? You’d have to ask the people who put up the billboard, I guess. But the quiet, “natural” unfolding of life in this wilderness said something to me about the tranquility of creation . . . as opposed to the anxieties we humans create, even about as natural a thing as reproduction.