Sermon for the Seventh Sunday after Trinity
How can any one satisfy these men with bread here in the wilderness?
We are in the wilderness, an empty and solitary place, a desert, to be exact, and yet the desert becomes a paradise where we are fed with more than what we need. Wilderness and paradise are powerful and important scriptural images in the Christian pilgrimage of faith. What do we mean by wilderness? What do we mean by paradise?
The latter is a Persian word used in Genesis about creation as a garden, the proverbial garden of Eden “in the east,” as Genesis 2 explains, in which God plants our humanity. That connection between Paradise and a garden which, as Dante envisions, is “full of every seed,” includes as well the idea of trees and a forest such that Paradise is not only imaged as a garden but as la divina foresta, a divine forest in contrast to the dark and savage wood that is wilderness, too; a particularly apt image for Canada. The image of trees recalls us to “the tree of life in the midst of the garden” and “the tree of the knowledge of good and evil” in the Genesis account of the paradisal garden of Eden.
The contrast is between an original harmony of man with the natural world, a harmony with God and with one another, a place of innocence, and the loss of that harmony and innocence; thus paradise becomes the wilderness of our exile. Is our pilgrimage, then, about reclaiming paradise?
We are stardust
We are golden
And we’ve got to get ourselves
Back to the garden
The refrain of Joni Mitchell’s song “Woodstock” seems to make this claim. And in the Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young rendition of her lyrical ballad, it has become, quite “uncritically,” as Camille Paglia notes, “a rousing anthem for the hippie counterculture” in the forging together of the “Romantic ideals of reverence for nature and the brotherhood of man.” Joni Mitchell’s own rendition, Paglia suggests, offers an altogether different interpretation. “With its slow, jazz-inflected pacing,” she writes, it becomes “a moody and at times heartbreakingly melancholy art song,” indeed a critique of the unbearable shallowness of the sixties’ dreams and aspirations; in short, “an elegy for an entire generation, flamingly altruistic yet hedonistic and self-absorbed, bold yet naive, abundantly gifted yet plagued by self-destruction.” Such things haunt our own culture and disordered world.
