Last week, as Martin and I flew into Denver on our way to the Aspen Summer Words literary festival, we could see giant billows of smoke from the High Park fire outside Fort Collins, about sixty-five miles to the north. The fire has burnt more than 100 square miles over the last several weeks and, as of this writing, is still not completely contained. We met a cabbie who said philosophically that Mother Nature would have her way and that people who lived in fire hot spots should expect to get burned out. We talked about people who build houses in hurricane zones or on fault lines and concluded that human beings could be a little slow on the uptake.

At the festival, we had the great pleasure of meeting Luis Urrea, one of the keynote speakers, and his wonderful wife Cindy. In a session with H. Emerson Blake, editor of Orion Magazine, Luis recounted meeting a group of curanderas in Mexico several years ago. They immediately sensed that he was accompanied by the spirit of a Sioux warrior, although they were puzzled by the word “Sioux,” which they hadn’t encountered before. Luis was puzzled as well: he had been in the company of Sioux shaman not long before who told him that he was sending a warrior spirit with him for protection, but Luis had understood this in a metaphorical way. The curanderas assured him there was nothing metaphorical about it.

When they found out he was a writer, they were disappointed. They had seen that he was a communicator of some sort, but they told him that he was really a healer. Sorry, he said; if I could cure people, I would, but I can’t. You’ve just been lazy, they told him, but if you won’t do that hard work, we guess your writing can work to heal the spirits of those who did not die in peace. Don’t be lazy now, they said. There is work to be done. Sick souls rely on art, on works of beauty, to lead them into health and peace. Art, they told him, cures by lighting bonfires in the soul, in souls that were filled with deadwood before they died, deadwood that holds them back even after death. This is not metaphorical: get to work. And he did, writing books that depict the ways of thoughtless devastation and grace. His own soul having been kindled, his work is like a taper that readers can use (or not) to light their own souls on fire for the work of justice, beauty, and harmony.

But how does lighting that flame cure a soul? As a culture, Americans tend to focus more on curing disease in bodies, and for most of us, putting ourselves into the care of the medical profession is an act of faith whether we call it that or not. I go to a doctor, and if I trust her, I do what she tells me to do and take the drugs she tells me to take, even if I have no idea how those drugs work. I also look for a doctor who sees beyond the complex systems of the body to the unique conformation of my very particular life, sometimes called the soul; who helps patients as they walk through the fire that comes with confronting pain and mortality.

In Christianity, curing souls—traditionally the work of priests—involved discerning the movement of the Spirit within a life. This process is now more commonly called spiritual direction. As is the case with other religious traditions, the Christian discernment process calls followers to maturity through the Three Ways of purgation, illumination, and union. Purgation is often associated with dust and ashes, with desert and fire, with wandering lost in the wilderness, with penitence. T. S. Eliot ends his great aria of the Three Ways—confusingly called Four Quartets—with the conviction that, even in union, the fires of purgation are present, though transformed:

A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.

According to Urrea’s curanderas, the care of the body, the cure of the soul, and art are intimately interrelated. Many physicians will not wish to have their work compared to curanderismo, the work of folk healers who use herbs, water, mud, and esoteric knowledge to effect their cures—and I understand why. If I had a child with a serious medical condition, we’d go straight to a medical doctor, not to a shaman. And yet Western science seems to be realizing the need to see the human body as more than the sum of its physically constituent parts, to tend to the fractured realities of psyche, mind, genetic inheritance, environment, and time and place in history, the unique friction that some of us call the soul (though naming it feels reductive). We are beginning to acknowledge support groups, meditation, Eastern medical practices, massage, hospice care, and more as legitimate tools in the medical kit, even though Western metrics cannot easily measure their efficacy. We are starting to see that curing bodies is sometimes inextricable from caring for souls. Curanderismo has worked with this humbling understanding for centuries, even millennia. The controlled burning of deadwood in the soul—the tinder-dry fuel of fear, pain, and isolation—is not new work to the best of medical doctors. They still try to help if those flames begin to burn out of control.

Given the actual fires roaring through Colorado right now, it seems silly to claim for anyone besides firefighters the distinction of pulling people through fires. But there are people who pull us through fires that are metaphorical and utterly real and destructive. But artists, like firefighters and physicians, walk people through fires, whatever their source, and fire is, after all, a vital component in the maintenance of any healthy ecosystem. I love the idea of bonfires in the soul. It’s just the kind of image toward which I’m likely to gravitate. It’s beautiful. Poetic. Religious under- and overtones. Words that can drift in and out of my head like smoke, eventually leaving nothing behind. If taken seriously—more than literally—they’re a call to get moving. There’s work to be done.

What we’re reading
Heather: Luis Alberto Urrea, The Hummingbird’s Daughter
Martin: Candice Millard, Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President

As I dog-paddle through the sea of books threatening to drown not just me but the overwhelmed shores of my bedside table, I found these sentences: “For those who draw near and offer themselves before God, satisfaction of hunger is neither an end in itself nor a wholly ‘secular’ event…. [E]ating is a worshipful event, even revelatory; it engenders a healthful knowledge of God.” When I read this, I thought, “Ah, I am a member of the tribe that believes this.”

I briefly met Ellen F. Davis, author of Scripture, Culture, and Agriculture: An Agrarian Reading of the Bible and professor of Bible and practical theology at Duke Divinity School, when she spoke at our church about ten years ago, and I immediately developed a helpless intellectual crush on her. The crush is not diminished by the fact that Our Hero Wendell Berry wrote the foreword to the book and is quoted at the beginning of each chapter.

Davis’s basic claim is that the fertility and habitability of the Earth—and particularly of Israel—are the best indices of the health of the covenant relationship between God and his people. She writes beautifully about that stickiest of words in Genesis 1, when mankind is given “dominion” over the earth. Made in God’s image, we are meant to exercise dominion as God does, and in Genesis 1, the way God exercises dominion is to exclaim in delight over the goodness of his work, and then to declare a day of rest for his delightful creation. Reckless topsoil depletion, toxic pesticides, and Confined Animal Factory Operations, among many other current agricultural practices, would probably not pass the Delight Test.

I read all this with a double vision: on the one hand, I underline passages, write notes, and spray exclamation points in the margins. On the other hand, I think about my neighbors in the Hill Country, many of whom are very conservative Christians, and I wonder how they would react to Davis’s scathing comparison of pharaonic agricultural and economic policies (the ones that made God really, really mad) with the practices of American agribusiness. I’m not sure the book will get a lot of traction here. (Well, or anywhere; the book’s title is so unsexy it might as well be wearing a suit of armor.) And yet it seems to me so clear that Davis’s analysis is Right and needs to be broadcast.

So how do you convince someone you’re right? Well, here’s how not to do it: the way the American conservation movement sounded its earliest notes, at least politically. The current issue of Orion magazine carries a feature story entitled “Conservation and Eugenics: The Environmental Movement’s Dirty Secret.” Charles Wolforth, the author, links Teddy Roosevelt’s New Nationalism, with its emphasis on patriotism and conservation, to the propagation of “higher races,” as opposed to Native Americans, Eskimos, and other “lower races.”

Wolforth writes, “These ideas had been developed at Ivy League and other universities, at museums of natural history and anthropology in New York and Washington, in learned societies and in scientific literature. When… world’s fairs focused on the West, the link between natural resources, morality, and racism was drawn ever more explicitly.” Pointedly, Wolforth quotes from Roosevelt’s New Nationalism speech, arguably the launching of the modern conservation movement:

Of all the questions which can come before this nation, short of the actual preservation of its existence in a great war, there is none which compares in importance with the great central task of leaving this land even a better land for our descendants than it is for us, and training them into a better race to inhabit the land and pass it on. Conservation is a great moral issue, for it involves the patriotic duty of insuring the safety and continuance of the nation.

It also, apparently, involved practicing eugenics.

Awash in my sea of books, I am a descendent of this tribe. No wonder it’s hard to convince many people I’m right.

When I walk through my beloved Austin neighborhood, I’m often beset with the same double vision I have when reading the prophetic environmental writing I’m prone to read. I walk through my neighborhood pleased—delighted—with my wonderful neighbors and their well-tended homes and gardens. As I have mentioned before, walking a couple of blocks can take forty-five minutes or more, depending on who else is out and about and what news needs to be exchanged, which dogs need to be admired, whose children are doing fabulously or exasperatingly nutty things. How can this be a bad thing? And yet I can’t help but be aware of the multitudes of cars, the endless whir of air conditioners, the trucks bearing pesticides that fertilize lawns, the lights that are on all night, the sprinklers running even as it rains. (We, too, are guilty of some of these.) How do you convince people without double vision that the goodness they’re seeing in their way of life is resting on something destructive?

In the fruit of the American environmental movement there is a noxious worm: a sense of righteousness that often gnaws its way into self-righteous tribalism. The ways in which we eat and live are often markers of who we are; when told (or bullyragged) to change these ways, it can seem as if something essential in us has been condemned, most particularly when judgment comes from outside the tribe. Like triumphalist Christians who refuse to acknowledge the ugliness and violence that comes bundled with the hope and beauty of Christian history, triumphalist environmentalism will foment ill-will from people whose health and livelihoods could be enhanced or saved by its message.

Every movement must have its prophets. Traditionally, prophets haven’t been the sort of people you want to invite home for dinner; they eat locusts, dress in skins or nothing at all, sit in cisterns, moan a lot—that sort of thing. The true prophets get listened to not because they’re scare-mongering but because they always have an accurate sense of their tribe’s history, an acute awareness of when it has fallen away from its original goodness. They include themselves in their judgments. Despite their very visible eccentricities, there is an essential humility to them. When I pull up behind a pickup truck with a bumper sticker that says “Drill Here Drill Now Pay Less” (along with a Rick Perry sticker) and my first impulse is to jump out of my car and bash in the windshield, I know I’m no prophet. We’re both driving, after all, and I need that gas as much as the other driver does. I’m not passing that humility test.

So where does that leave my tribe, the irritable non-prophets of the environmental persuasion? As an oldest child, I always like to have the right answer to pass on—and enforce, whenever possible. My tribe is frequently stymied. But here’s one thing: invite someone over for dinner, someone not of the tribe. Feed them something that’s beautiful, that’s grown in accordance with the revelatory economy of food kindly produced. And think about this passage from one of Wendell Berry’s Sabbath poems:

Leave your windows and go out, people of the world,
go into the streets, go into the fields, go into the woods
and along the streams. Go together, go alone.
Say no to the Lords of War which is money
which is Fire. Say no by saying yes
to the air, to the earth, to the trees,
yes to the grasses, to the rivers, to the birds
and the animals and every living thing, yes
to the small houses, yes to the children. Yes.

What we’re reading
Heather: Thomas Perry, Strip
Martin: Russell Shorto, The Island at the Center of the World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan and the Forgotten Colony That Shaped America