The God of Wild Places, Discovering the Divine in the Untamed Outdoors by Tony Jones

Remarkable is this journey laid bare, of an educated theologian and preacher who learned to allow deep woods and moving waters to remind him he is, foremost, human. With a litany of personal challenges, a failed marriage and a deep reconsideration of his path to the pulpit, Mr. Jones allows the circumstances of his life and discovery of what’s outside the rectory door to develop a direly needed achievement of personal balance. He takes us from bible camp, to Rome, to sleeping on couches then eventually, to South Dakota cornfields where dogs flush pheasants to be hunted by man. The God of Wild Places is part of the Tony Jones journey, written with a reflective ease through some rough waters, past and present, universities, courts, basements and back waters. It’s the unease of our inherinant frailty surfacing, that common Homo sapien denominator, which made me love this book.

Tony Jones, author and real life human

The God of Wild Places began for me with an early feeling of familiarity. He and I share a love of outdoors, canoes, dogs and shotguns. I have stumbled then fallen over several of those roots and stumps of which he writes. There is familarity with his friends and families with their unfortunate and inevitable health troubles. Mr. Jones’ work is a walk, a hike I suppose. He walks us along his paths, through trees and troubles, littered with the detritus of storms and family, where the hazards of falling are ignored at the walkers peril. To be fair, his travails are not unusual or more consequential when compared to others. Divorce is not uncommon, neither are custody battles, financial troubles, disolusionment with life choices or being eviscerated on late night internet chat rooms. But what Mr. Jones does quite well, is share these paths without preaching, as he has been trained to do. This is no mea culpa memoir to expose his faults then accept God again in the Boundary Waters. He shared and I absorbed without morbid curiousity of his challenges. I kept reading because he writes with honesty; his path to discovery might be our own path forward. We all can’t paddle three day trips or shoot well enough to justify pheasant hunting in South Dakota but we can find our own way outside to see nature and God.

You need not be an outdoorsman or woman to appreciate his journey. Through a litanty of difficulties and personal introspections, Mr. Jones followed his heart and a seemingly preditermined religious artery, earned a PhD, lead his own church, got married and had three children before the air came out and his life all but imploded. On the Writing For Your Life podcast, Mr. Jones said, “My career was gone, and I just started going in the woods. I started hunting and fishing, going up to the Boundary Waters Canoe Area, and paddling a canoe. Those were the things that brought me the life that I used to get out of organized religion.” 

Writing begets challenges. Writing about personal experiences invites great risk. What I read in The God of Wild Places, written by a man blazing a new way, was the discovery of powerful traditions. Even as a child, Mr. Jones was taken by the traditions of the church: robes, pulpits, vestibules, candles and prayers, all elements of how the ordained lead their flock to and through a life with God. When the tradition of marriage started to crack and framed parchments lost significance, he began to discover other traditions of his youth: being outdoors, fishing, seeing stars on a very dark night, fireflies. There are fireflies searching for mates in fields not yet mowed by John Deere hunting subrubanites working to flatten and tame every last inch. And the fireflies? They are magical.

“They paved paradise…” Joni Mitchel

Outdoors is where he discovered God was all along. Mr. Jones aptly ackowledges that most of us who pray tend to look upwards. I do it. When something wonderful happens to me or my family, I look up and say, “Thank you.” When I’m in my canoe, working against a smallmouth bass, where pines grow right to edges of streams and all hear is water on the hull, I say, to my self, “Thank you,” without looking away from the fish. Why? Because as Mr. Jones reminds us, the God we know and worship or perhaps simply acknowledge, is all around. Neither up nor down.

“Wild places put everything in perspective, and wild places demanded my concentration.”

Honestly, I didn’t care for his use of the word “chaotic” when referring to wilderness. I use that word when describing our country these days, with its divisions, angers, prejudices and building waves of acceptance to be rotten to those we have decided to look down on and even prey on, so didn’t see a relation. Until I did. Chaos can make us crazy or help us solve problems. Chaos brings us spiraling down, chaos builds us up to wisdom. There is chaos in wilderness; it’s how we receive and deal with it that changes us, or we perish like other animals. Reflecting on his words, I came to realize the solace he seeks and embraces in wild places, I was fiinding in his writing because we share DNA and we are not so far apart.“But now I can stand in the middle of this forest and recognize its beauty. My life is scrubby and thorny, but it’s also verdurous, beautiful in its own way.” Mr. Jones reminded me that we are not unique or alone when it comes to loss, mistakes and personal chaos.

“Each failure carries the seed of its own redemption, because no failure-even death-is final…Each failure bears the seed of new life, the rhythm of regeneration that receals the regenerative love of God.”

By his final pages, it becomes clear that Mr. Jones’ path to personal discovery and comfort has come at great expense for an enlightenment reward. He left his many pulpits to kneel in canoes with no phones to call his flock when conditions worsened because it was precisely on that precipise of fear and collapse when he discovered God. Maybe, at our weakest, sobbing on a living room carpet, distraught by all life’s pressures, we ask for the presence of a higher power. Maybe, crawling over a blowdown, wet in the feet and cold in the hands, two miles from a truck, with a few pounds of pheasant on our backs, still warm from the ancient predator/prey struggle, we don’t ask for anything. And then God comes to us.

“And that’s a big part of it: remembering that the peace doesn’t live in the wilderness, waiting for me. I’m bringing the peace with me-it’s inside of me.’

The God of Wild Places is a must read for its discussion of spirituality, God, trees, peace, summiting life’s many obstacles and the pure awareness of being human, with all its challenges and joys. .

Tony Jones, author, pastor, reclaimed amazing human

“Firelight dancing across his face, Paul swept his arms across the lake beside us, raised his palms to the starry sky, and said, “How could you be out here in God’s creation and not be in a constant state of prayer?

Amen.

The God of Wild Places, Rediscovering the Divine in the Untamed Outdoors by Tony Jones is published through Rowman & Littlefield Publishers and is available at bookstores, small and large. Hardback, $24.00. eBook, $22.50