Cubswn

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Some of you know of the poet and naturalist Gary Snyder, who won a Pulitzer prize in 1975. I especially love an essay of his called “Crawling,” in which he describes moving on his belly through a forest in the Sierra. Since the forest there is checkered with patches that have been burned or logged and are now almost impassable with thick new growth, most hikers stick to the old logging roads or trails. Pioneer that he is, Snyder preferred the road less traveled and set off through the woods on his hands and knees. Shimmying under fallen trunks and squirming his way through fields of prickly manzanita, he was always happy to find a patch of snow that would let him slide on his belly for a ways. At one point he came face to face with a pile of steaming bear scat and, a little further on, with a prize boletus mushroom. “You can smell the fall mushrooms when crawling,” he wrote. “You brush cool dew off a young fir with your face.” The trick, he says, is to have no attachment to standing, to trade that in on a desire to explore the world up close.

Reading him, I decided he was a good homiletics instructor. What would our sermons sound like if we approached the text that way? What kind of revelations are we missing in this world because we insist on walking upright, while so much life takes place closer to the ground? In a time of famine, our role as scouts has grown more serious than ever. Hungry people have no use for agricultural analysts. They need someone actively involved in the search for food. It is not enough for us to claim to know people who knew people who once crawled on their bellies before God. Our job is to be those people ourselves, exploring the territory on our own hands and knees so that we do not miss a single mushroom. When we stand up to speak, it would be good for us to have twigs in our hair — better yet, an alarming shine on our faces — so that our listeners know where we have been (and whom we have sought) on their behalf.

If we really love them, we won’t bring them back much to eat. If we did that, they might mistake us for the Food Giver. Each of us has the opportunity to reverse what happened at Mount Sinai, if we dare. Instead of volunteering to protect the people from God, we can step aside. We can invite them to go explore the territory for themselves, offering to crawl alongside them if they wish, until they discover whatever it is God gives them to discover. Our speech does not have to be polished at this point. It simply has to be true — not true about God, necessarily (how would we know?), but true about what it is to be human and hungry in a fallen world full of wonders.

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• May 06, 2013, 9:21am

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