Faith

I have never been a religious person. Since most of the religious folk I've run into (with some wonderful exceptions) find my orientation abhorent and sinful, I've avoided contact as much as possible. This, I suppose, has made me ignorant of the faithful, those who believe in something unexplainable like a God or even a Son of God for that matter.

But these past three weeks, as I've sat in my class on Life Sciences (a fancy term for biology), I've come to realize I am more faithful than I give myself credit. And in these unintentional lessons on faith, I have been reminded why I did not become a scientist or a science teacher.

I love nature. I love being outdoors. I love hiking in the mountains, swimming in the lake, and camping by a river. I love sweating in hot desert air, feeling the sun on my forehead while paddling a kayak along the inlets of Puget Sound, and tasting the winter of a snowy trail while skiing. Nature is, for me, a wonder and a mystery. In terms of beauty, nothing compares. No human artwork or creation is as marvelous as the broad leaf of a tree, the scent of wet moss, or the majesty of a mountain against a blue sky.

The animal world is as mysterious and beautiful to me as well and I've almost driven my car into a bush or a tree craning my neck to see a hawk or an eagle, a cougar cutting across the road or an elk munching along a wilderness path.

For the past three weeks, our class has unraveled some of these mysteries. We've sat in a hot classroom dissecting plants, harvesting and then torturing fruit flies, and visiting with scientists who are working on their PhD's in plant DNA, attempting to crack the code so more corn can grow with less effort.

I've felt odd in this class not just because I am a history teacher whose interest in science is amateurish, but also because the need to understand the mysteries of the natural world are an insult to my faith in nature.

There, I've said it. I have faith. Just like those God-fearing Christians, I have faith in something I don't completely understand nor feel the need to fully grasp. I have faith that the sun will rise, that rain will come, that plants will grow, that the earth will spin. I have faith that, despite our human limitations and stupidity, the earth will be here long after we attempt to destroy it. I have faith that we are not the ultimate species, that dolphins and whales, gorillas and cockroaches have more savvy and wisdom than all my university education.

So, when we sat in class and listened to the PhD candidate talk about his research in chloroplast DNA, the question that came to mind was, "So what?" Not afraid to make a fool of myself, I asked him that very question. He smiled and went into a lengthy discussion about all the ramifications of his research. In the end, he could do any number of things if he cracked the code of chloroplast DNA from producing more corn to curing deadly viruses.

And then it struck me that not only had he lost his faith in nature, but he was trying to outwit it by creating MORE food for our already overpopulated earth to eat and kill more viruses so we could LIVE longer and therefore eat more food and reproduce more. He did not trust that corn was corn, coded with its very own and incredibly unique set of mysteries that were just wonderful all on their own.

Sure, I know people are dying of starvation and disease. I know I have it good. I know I am in good health and have plenty to eat because I was born in the US to middle class parents who paid for my education and expected me to make something of my life and not go off and fight a war or have to work to feed the family. Not that other parents don't have similar expectations, but I was born with resources, with cultural capital and I know this has afforded me some privileges that most in the world do not have.

Still...aren't there too many of us? Isn't that one of the BIGGEST problems in the world? 6 billion and counting? Not only are there too many of us, we seem to have exempted ourselves from the very laws of nature we're trying to understand. If corn only grows so fast, what does that tell us? That we can only eat so much corn? If we get sick and die from a virus, what does that tell us? Population control? Perhaps the virus is nature's way of trying to equal things out a bit?

I sat in this class and remembered all those other science classes I had to take in high school and college. Dissecting the frog to see how it worked inside only to find out and then throw the poor thing away. The astronomy class where the professor told us about all the theories around black holes and white dwarf stars and how astronomer's "think" it might be this way, but it could be a whole other way and if they were wrong, oops, that threw off everything they believed, but by god they are still going to believe it because they have to understand EVERYTHING.

It's not that I don't think science isn't interesting. I found it fascinating to look at everything with my jeweler's loop, to talk about the great flood that transformed Eastern Washington, to smash open rocks and find leaf fossils, to paddle the canoe out in the middle of the lake and watch the beavers build their dams. But I didn't feel like I had to understand it all, to collect the butterflies in the herb garden and stab them into a little box, or slice open the stem of an exotic plant to I could press it into my lab book.

I just wanted to observe, to watch the flow of the natural world around me, to look closely and say, "Wow, isn't that cool?" and have faith that it was exactly as it should be.

And if it wasn't...I suppose that is where I begin to chase my tail because most of what isn't the way it should be is either an act of nature or an act of humans -- the former I can accept, the latter makes me ill and frustrated because then, to make it "all better" we mess around with it more, bending the laws of nature back against the way we originally bent them to see if we can fix the problems we created and in the end, we just mess it up even more.

Which leads me to question, does WILDERNESS still exist? Is any thing or any where still truly wild? If not, what does mean for my faith in all things natural?

I suppose that is the true test of my faith...to believe that nature will right herself without my having to worry about it all.

Still, I think about this all the time, what am I willing to give up to save her?

Now there's a thought to sleep on...