This is a parable.
Or maybe it’s just a metaphor. Maybe it’s a call to wake up,
or lay down
or
pay attention for once.
I think this is going to be a parable about humility and about time, about growth and expectations and where real life is and whether we care to join in or not. We’ll see. But whatever it is, it is a word from the beavers.
Here goes –
There’s an area in Fish Creek Park where if you walk for a few minutes in any direction you will see the work of the beavers from the past few years - chewed up stumps, dams, and ponds. When you get a glimpse of them, you’ll see these awkward animals have huge teeth, tiny arms, a big rump and a tail that is as graceful in the water as it is clunky on land. And it brings out something childlike in us to see them. I go looking for them as often as I can. But they are more than just a nice feature on a person’s nice walk on a nice day in the park.
The beavers are stewards. Not owners, not managers. Stewards of rooted-in-the-ground life.
They are vital and irreplacable. When they are there, life grows. When they are taken away, life shrinks.
Beavers are hosts of liminal spaces. And if we are lucky we might get invited in to learn.
We know these big rodents are builders. They dam up waterways, flooding banks and creating unfurling systems of water channels – like the branches in our lungs like the roots systems of trees. They build with mud, sticks, logs, twigs and grass. They mate for life, having 2-4 kits at a time, that live with their parents for a couple seasons and then move on to find their own place. Their teeth are huge and shockingly orange. Their eyes and mouths are adapted so they can work underwater – with see-through eyelids and a membrane comes down behind the teeth so they swim with branches in their mouths without choking on the water.
But important to know is that the beaver is a keystone species - a species whose activity in an ecosystem enables a flourishing of life all around it. Like the wedge-shaped keystone at the apex of an archway holds that structure together, a keystone species is a species on which the ecosystem largely depends. If the keystone species were removed, the web of life would change, collapse even, drastically…and fast. Beavers, as well as sea stars, wolves, spruce budworms, red mangroves, bees, hummingbirds, Ivory Tree coral, grizzly bears and more, are all keystone species that ecosystems depend on, for life, for flourishing.
A beaver-formed wetland is a liminal place. The complex a beaver unit creates – the dam, the lodge, the deepening waters, the flooded banks--unfolds an ecosystem that is built to re-create. A beaver pond will slow the flow of water, trap sediment, fill up with silt and pioneering plants. The ground around it becomes waterl ogged - your shoes will get wet. New channels of water ribbon and braid away from the source, like a root system reaching farther up and farther in. And after the beavers move on, left behind are lush riparian zones and new meadows that teem with life. Pre-decimation by the fur trade that funded colonization, the prairies and woodlands were dotted with fertile wetlands made by the beavers along the waterways, like beads on a string, gems of regenerative life woven throughout a continent.*
Where beavers are at work, ducks nest in the grasses that spring up at the pond’s edge. Songbirds are in the willows that love the wet soil. Turtles, lizards, snakes, weasels, marmots, mink, raccoons and muskrat and even moose all known to frequently choose to live where the beavers are. Trout spawn in the cool depths created by the beavers; satyr butterfly populations increase where beaver ponds develop.
The slowing down of the water recharges a watertable, pushing water underground for future use in times of drought. The ponds beavers build are natural flood absorbers and natural carbon sinks. The wet, grassy places they leave become naturally fire resistant.
The beavers shape and reshape and reshape again valleys and fields with braided channels and spongy strings of swampy goodness and this is literally what we have built this culture upon.
It’s truly glorious to wake up to the realization that this amount of life is happening a few minutes from home.
I was walking past a swampy beaver habitat, about 30 minutes from my home, navigating the flooded pathway on fallen trees laid down together, the water from the flooded beaver pond pushing through the woods, following gravity down to the river. And a man came towards me from the opposite direction. And he said, “Ugh. Why don’t they just shoot them. Look at this mess.”
Beavers can damage what we humans build. But they don’t care about the beautiful houses and monuments we erect on the waterways. The ecosystem does not care that we need a factory or made a fortune here or built our dream home. They don’t care about the cement we’ve poured to make pathways for ourselves. The ecosystem, of which we are a part, is geared towards life and wants to make more life. And to do that, necessary destruction of the structures we have become used to will happen.
This is how forests grow – the older trees have to come down to make room for the new ones. The big trees have to lay down their bodies and become food for the next generations of microbes, bugs, mammals, amphibians, foliage and then new trees. Their one life then becomes the necessary requirement to make than its own self ever was. And that is incredible to meditate on.
This is a hard pill and a tough lesson if we understand this is the way of life - even in our own monuments and structures. This requires eyes to see that it’s the same lesson Jesus tried to give over and over – Unless a seed falls to the ground and dies, no life can come from it. No fruit. No abundance. No nourishment can possibly happen unless there is a letting go of what was and surrendering our control of the outcomes to the ways of life.
And it requires a humility towards the ways Creator works that we do not cultivate in many of our cultures.
Rewilding is a term for letting nature be nature; for letting the processes of life happen. There are signs on an orange plastic fence at the banks of the river that says, “Do Not Enter: Rewilding in Progress” The river’s edge has been too used, too walked on, our pathways and structures have damaged its ability to grow new life. So we have to stop what we are doing and let the land breathe for awhile. Let life do what life does. This sign strikes me as a true invitation for us who value the spiritual life of our culture and our Christian cultures. Humans are technological in nature - in that we will always invent things to use to help us but when we’ve built too much, too fast and when our treasured pathways have eroded the world we rely on and our ideas of what we must have actually hindered life from growing, we need to be rewilded. Not in the sense of being taken back to a pristine origin of things, not in a “back in time” way. But in a “wilded once again” way. Made wild so that the new life, the next generation of life has a chance to grow and connect and offer itself to the world.
When I watch the beavers, I wonder if this is a parable we need in our communal, economic and political lives? And in our faith contexts? Is there something to attend to in the ways of letting go and letting life actually grow in sustainable ways that we can hear from our beaver neighbors doing their rewilding work?
Us humans are a complicated bunch. Along with our propensity to invent and use physical and cultural technologies, we long for meaning. We cannot in any final estimation account for humanity without accounting for the fact that we need purpose, connection, community and a sense of transcendence – an ache to know and be known by something bigger and more beautiful than ourselves. We need a God in relation to us. And so we build systems and categories and theologies and tell stories and listen to our prophets and teach our children to hold that ache in tension with our daily lives. And like any technology we use to help us, it can be good and it can go bad.
For Christians, we’ve received a story about life that is uncontainably wild. The Christian story - where God reaches into the ache and draws it close - is a story of rewilding. The categories of life and death, holy and sinful, right and wrong, friend and enemy are all transgressed in the person of Jesus and transgressed for the purpose of this ache - this ache for love. If I could describe it this way, the story of Jesus at work in the world is a story of getting our hands off the controls and letting people come into right relation with God, themselves, each other and the world. Story after story in the gospels, in Acts, even in the letters and the apocalyptic writings all depict the wildness of the boundary crossing, systematic restructuring, regenerative life of a people who are being rewilded by a bank-flooding Spirit of Life before our eyes.
And yet we’ve domesticated it beyond recognition.
And it’s above my paygrade to psychoanalyse all the reasons why we humans do this – for certainty, for safety, for control, for power. And if I’m generous I could just say - it’s what humans will always do.
But we are watching in real time what happens when we resist life in the church – we take to destroying ourselves. We take our weapons and aim them at each other rather than admit there is more we don’t know. There are those who would rather destroy life, than admit that our ways are not working and that there might be more people, more perspectives, more experiences to be included in the wild life of God. The Life of Faith is being dried up, undernourished, eroded and made unresilient – subject to the least Christ-like forces our world has always offered – power, riches, control, uncompassion, heavy yokes and condemnation. Good fruit is not being born by trying to hold onto the structures we’ve made when life is bursting at the banks, reclaiming the soil and soul of creation.
It is time for the western church’s rewilding. Again. This is the process that has always been at work in the world.
Christians have been called to follow the living Christ - into the wilderness, into the unknown. We are hungry for the work to begin, for leaders to lead, telling us to not be afraid. We ache for love to reach into blocked out places, to see the small shoots that could come up when the old things were felled and composted. We ache to be hear and be heard; we ache to see and be seen.**
Flourishing happens in the liminal places, not controlled ones – at least not for long and not without burn out, unsustainable levels of effort. Flourishing happens in liminal spaces- like beaver ponds – where the boundaries and structures flow and shift. Like churches letting go of certainty of direction and the forms of past generations and letting their banks get flooded.
Now, for me,
When I am experiencing the pain of a faith culture destroying itself rather than let new life grow and when I am caught in the crossfire of men who fight to hold onto their “monuments” of meaning, their legacy projects of systematic theologies and control, can I remember the beavers? Can I cultivate enough humility to remember Creator’s unlikely stewards of new life? The beavers who take down all the things that grew in the last generation, so that life’s needs – diversity, water, air, nutrients – all get a chance to do their “wild” thing, creating the conditions needed for this next generation’s new life?
When I feel the pain of losing the trees I love and the structures that I am used to as they become a swampy space that looks like destruction can I remember that it will grow lush over time?
And that this is the way of Christ? Could this be the unbearable depth behind “Christ is the firstborn of all creation”? Could this be the promise?
Love Poem to a Goofy Keystone Species
Everytime I look at you I remember that God has never chosen likely prophets. But ones often discounted and overlooked. Because God is not interested in a marketing campaign but in real life. And you, dear beaver, herald new life. More than I understand, and in ways I don’t see at first, you herald new life and so when I see you, I am quiet. I am silenced. And I wonder about how much more there is to life and life-abundant that I do not know.
Prayer for New Life
God, who couldn’t care less about our boundaries but always invites us to life, be with us as we let go of forms, structures, ideas and ideals that have hindered your life from flourishing. Be with us as we let things die so that new life can rise up because it’s really scary to us.Call your unlikely leaders and open humble hearts to hear. Thank you for the beavers and for the swampy, life-laden goodness they create. Thank you for this hope, Amen.
* A great book on the coolness of beavers that inspired some of the language and awe here is Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter” by Ben Goldfarb
**My friend Serena opened up a room inside my soul when she said the words “we ache for leadership” and I think about this every day.
***all images taken by me in the wilds of Fish Creek
Love this! Thanks Jacqui!
So. So. Good. Thanks for this.