Mother Nature's Medicine

Mother Nature is one of the greatest healers the world has ever known. Her work can be found in the pharmacy, the examination table and the recovery room. It fills the aisles of health food stores and grocery chains. More immediately, it dwells in a lonely garden path, within a fragrant orange grove, on a fallen-needle path of pines.

Ironically, Mother Nature is both the purveyor of health and the cause and deliverer of decay. She is constrained by the laws of death, but confirmed as the harbinger of life. She is, so very often, the prescription of Heaven. 

This is not a political truth or an advocate’s plea. It is a reality that most of us have recognized at some point in our lives. And yet, with only a few exceptions, we as Christians clearly draw the distinction between valuing the Creation and worshiping it.

Our sacred history is celebrated mostly in church and temple. Of course it also includes many exceptions – in garden, mountain and grove. But for some reason we become wary of those who take their religion to the wilderness.

So it is with a bit of suspicion or with an inherent hesitation that some of us admit how much we need the natural world for our own peace of mind. We shouldn’t need to feel this way. Admitting that we love to walk in the woods shouldn’t make us feel like we’re admitting a sin.

Take the masculine hobby of hunting as an example. It is filled with men that love being outdoors. It is also filled with men that have learned that it isn’t polite, in mixed company, to brag about their trophies. Neither do you hear these men talk about how much they love the wind in their hair, a beautiful sunset, or the honking of geese. Yet these are all very common feelings of most hunters.

I have felt, on a number of times, like I had to explain my political position at church or in a social gathering after being caught enthusing over a trip into the wild. Just recently I had an influential member of my community come up to me at church with surprise written all over his face. He had just learned how conservative I am on many issues. “Sam,” he said, “all this time I thought you were a tree-hugger.”

Because this sort of thing happens often enough, I have learned to boil my feelings down to a couple of simple points. I seek out nature because of a real curiosity about the created world. But I also seek out nature because of its profound ability to heal.

I recognize that other people do not share my fascination with animals and plants. Try as I might to convey my enthusiasm for beetles, these people only recoil at the sight of long antennae and stout mandibles. These individuals seem to survive happily behind manicured lawns in town.

Yet in spite of differences in our individual preferences, Mother Nature remains one of the greatest healers of all of us. This is just as true for the committed urbanite as it is for an aboriginal shaman. And no matter how blind we are to anything that isn’t man-made we can fix our lives and our relationships more often than we realize if we would just let go of the control we impose upon the world and let the natural rhythms of nature teach us a thing or two.

There are several extreme examples of this in a little book by Diane Ackerman entitled A Slender Thread.  This is a book about the author’s thoughts and phone conversations while volunteering at a suicide prevention center. As this fascinating book unfolds, it becomes clear that psychological health is a fragile thing indeed.

Ackerman shows that one of the best ways to help someone experiencing a deep suicidal depression is to get them out in the natural world. Dealing with these cases on an individual basis becomes very situational, but there is no doubt about the benefits of the real world.  

This can be frustrating to many people used to our world of quick fixes – to a world that has come to rely on modern medicine and a pharmaceutical solutions. Unfortunately mental and emotional angst is not always so easily cured and sometimes Mother Nature is a tremendous help.

On one occasion a woman, that Ackerman refers to as Louise, calls and admits that her life is in ruins and she is ready to end the suffering. Ackerman listens to her problems, coaches her and then listens some more. She tries appealing to Louise’s need to care for her teenage daughter. This doesn’t work. Then she asks the woman if she happens to be outside. As it turns out, she is.

“Look up,” she tells Louise, who laughs just a little at the beautiful cloudy sky. The conversation then turns to other natural things. Louise mentions a tree. “What kind is it,” asks Ackerman.

“It’s a gingko, it has fan-shaped leaves,” answers Louise. The conversation then turns more directly to botany and the disaster is averted, at least for the time being. For some reason (deeply embedded in human nature) the sky and a tree were capable of grounding this troubled woman.

The most obvious reason for this is that we are natural beings ourselves. It is true that sacred literature teaches us of our unique position in the world. Clearly we are different than other beings. And yet we are still created from the dust of the earth. Physiologically and anatomically we belong to this earth just like the squirrel outside the window or the dogwood blooming in the spring.

And so it should not be a surprise that we respond to the ways of nature. And it shouldn’t surprise us either that our manmade world – a world that takes us away from nature – might just be the cause of many of our ailments.

This was brought home to me a few years ago in a conversation I had with Reese Nelson, Professor of Horticulture at BYU – Idaho. Reese had grown up in the rural town of Grantsville, Utah amid old poplars and sagebrush and had learned to appreciate the rhythms of rural life.

During his graduate work at Idaho State University, he came up with a plan to see if he could measure the benefits of nature on a group of college students in a fairly stressful situation. He decided to create an area on one side of the university’s testing center with an abundance of ornamental plants. Then he arranged for the testing center to randomly assign some of the students taking a math exam to this area.

Reese’s design was straightforward and yet fairly convincing. He was able to show that students taking the exam near the plants were both calmer and scored higher than students that took the exam away from the plants. The differences were not enormous but they were real (and they were conducted on enough students to be scientifically valid).

After thinking about this study I realized that I already believed its basic conclusions. The natural world can calm us down and help us regain peace of mind. One particularly telling example of this happened at the time I lost my job a number of years ago. This was a very stressful time and for years, even after finding other employment, I was anxious much of the time. The experience had left me quite vulnerable and numb, both mentally and emotionally.

Fortunately, I was able to escape to wild places often and this helped a great deal. I also learned that a bracing bath in a cold stream (or in a cold shower) did wonders. The sudden (and uncomfortable) sensation of the frigid water left me wide awake and acutely aware of the moment. During the time of the bath or shower, and for over an hour afterwards, I felt very much alive.

I became convinced over the years that mental, physical and emotional health all require that we interact with the natural world. When we fail to do this, we build instead a wall of unnatural barriers between us and the way we were meant to live.

Consider all the things that fill our lives today that were not part of the world our ancestors lived in – not part, that is, of the world in which we were created. We live in buildings that are kept at constant comfortable temperatures. We only walk a fraction of what we used to. And when we do, it is in shoes that keep us from strengthening our feet. We travel at speeds and at heights that our bodies do not understand completely – not to mention the shock of changing time zones so suddenly.

We eat foods that are saturated with refined sugars and carbohydrates that our ancestors often considered to be rare delicacies. We sit around most of the day in postures that don’t match our bodies’ needs. We breathe a myriad of chemicals that have completely unknown effects on our bodies. And we fill our heads with an almost constant stream of noise and visual stimuli that are quite unnatural. Is it any wonder that so many of us struggle?

The reality is that our many technologies, for all of their conveniences, almost never reach us at a visceral level. And if we never allow the natural world into our lives; then, by definition, we are living unnatural lives. 

My favorite example of the healing power of nature is the classic children’s story The Secret Garden written by Frances Hodgson Burnett. The story is about three children that circumstances bring together in a setting of Victorian gardens.

Mary Lennox is a spoiled and petulant girl who loses both of her parents in a cholera epidemic in India. Because there is nobody left in the household to take care of her, she is sent to England to live at Misselthwaite Manor in the home of her uncle Archibald Craven.

Mary hardly ever sees her uncle who travels a great deal after having lost his wife. And Mary’s sour disposition doesn’t win her many friends in her new home. Even so, Mary becomes captivated by a young boy named Dickon who loves being outside and who has a patient way with animals and plants. When Mary discovers that Dickon feeds and plays with animals, she is so fascinated that she manages to stop being mean and the two children become friends.

After arriving in Misselthwaite, Mary begins hearing cries coming from someplace within the large house. Despite warnings that she is never to venture into unbidden rooms, Mary sneaks around searching for the source of the sounds. As it turns out, the cries have been coming from Mr. Craven’s invalid son Colin, who is confined to his room and almost never leaves his bed.

Colin is a very spoiled boy who insists on getting his own way. He is not expected to live very long and the household has been instructed by Mr. Craven to humor the boy until he dies.

When Colin meets Mary for the first time, he is both frustrated and pleased that she is not afraid of him and will not be intimidated by his domineering ways. The two children become friends and Mary tells Colin of all the wonderful adventures that she is having outside with Dickon.

Eventually Mary tells Colin about a great secret. It is a hidden garden that she has discovered outside the manor. This garden was the former treasure of Colin’s mother, but after her death it had been closed. His wife’s death, in fact, had been such a blow to Mr. Craven that the garden was abandoned and the key was thrown away.

Through the passing years, the outside door to the garden had become hidden in vegetation and nearly forgotten. It was only by chance (and the instincts of a robin) that Mary found the key and the door. Then, together with Dickon and the forbearance of the gardener, the two children set to work rehabilitating the long abandoned wonderland.

When Colin was finally trusted enough to secretly join Mary and Dickon in the garden, his spirits greatly improved and he began to heal. But this was all kept highly confidential among the three children. Finally, at the end of the story, the family learns that Colin has been sneaking outside and has been healed in the secret garden. He can stand up and walk and his complexion is ruddy and full of health. He is no longer expected to die. In fact he stands to inherit Misselthwaite Manor.

My wife, Kathy, and I read this wonderful book together some time ago. And as it happened, we finished it on Easter morning. We couldn’t help but notice the impressive moral implications. The theme of renewal and healing was so obviously and effectively portrayed that the connection between nature and Christianity seemed the most natural thing in the world.

And in fact most of us already believe this to be true. But the relationship between Christianity and nature is a complicated one. We see it tangentially in Christian romantics like William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. In America’s Christian culture we have the examples of William Bartram, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman and John Muir. Each of these nature writers drew heavily from their Christian heritage.

Yet, even as Christianity has been the vantage point from which much of our natural interest derives, we don’t often find the likes of a Saint Francis who was as clearly passionate about the Creation as he was about the Creator. And even though Jesus Himself clearly loved sparrows and the lilies of the field, we find little of this dual appreciation throughout Christian history.

Part of the reason is clear enough. Christianity has a long and complicated history associated with nature religions. In the beginning of the Christian Era, the Roman Empire’s religious diversity included several cults and religious groups that worshipped some aspect of the natural world. Magic and pagan worship such as the Bacchanalia (celebrating the wine god Bacchus) were practiced along with the more popular Olympian deities imported from ancient Greece.

Much of the natural world – including trees, mountains and springs – was worshipped by these non-Christian groups. Yet in spite of this perceived (and undoubtedly real) threat, these early Christians refused to distance themselves from the same natural objects that their pagan rivals worshipped. Springs were particularly important to both groups – with references to springs in the Bible having particular sway among the Christians.

Robert Bartlett points out in his recent history of saints and martyrs that these early Christians often built churches over sacred wells. Bartlett makes the ironic observation that, “despite all this evidence for saints as opponents of and substitutes for the holy springs, the saints left their deepest mark on the landscape through their association with wells and springs.”

This complicated Christian relationship with nature and pagan nature worship continues to our day. The religious scholar Peter Beyer, in an attempt to get a handle on what he considers to be an abstract mix of religious practices, places several groups in the broader category of “Nature Religion”. These groups mostly tend to be critical of Christianity and it is easy to see that there still exists a substantial divide. These groups include modern witchcraft (Wicca), Neo-paganism, aboriginal spirituality, portions of some environmental groups, and even some feminist and New Age groups.

This tension is not going to disappear anytime soon. But, in fact, neither will the Christian love of nature or the very real healing power of the natural world. Our Christian heritage and belief in the importance of the Creation are more venerable and real today than are its rivals.

I think this is abundantly clear not only in our history but also in our literature. The Canadian novelist Lucy Maud Montgomery put it quite simply and elegantly in her classic story Anne of Green Gables. You will recall that Anne was an orphan who came to the town of Avonlea by mistake. Matthew and Marilla Cuthbert had originally asked for a boy that could help with the chores.

Anne was about to be sent back to the orphanage but Matthew had sympathy on her and persuaded Marilla to keep the young (and at times exasperating) girl. Anne loved Avonlea, with its woods, flowers, lakes and meadows. Through the years she became the pride of both Marilla and Matthew. But she always had a special place in her heart for Matthew. And when he died, it nearly broke her heart.

A few days after the funeral, Anne found herself talking with Mrs. Allen, the minister’s wife. She was concerned that she was beginning to enjoy nature again and wondered if this didn’t imply disrespect for Matthew. Mrs. Allen assured Anne that, on the contrary, Matthew would want Anne to continue enjoying the beauties of the natural world. “I am sure,” she told Anne, “we should not shut our hearts against the healing influences that nature offers us.”

Perhaps no better call to nature exists than this simple line form a classic Christian story. The beauty of it stems from its universal truth and applicability – no matter what our heritage and faith may be. Mrs. Allen knew it. Anne knew it. And so do most of the rest of us. God’s creation – fallen and imperfectly understood as it is – can make all of us feel a lot better.

References. Diane Ackerman’s book A Slender Thread, Rediscovering Hope at the Heart of Crisis was published by Random house in 1997. A good reference dealing with the health needs of our ancestors is John Durant’s book The Paleo Manifesto, Ancient Wisdom for Lifelong Health published by Harmony Books in 2013. My copy of The Secret Garden was published by the Folio Society in 2006. Reese Nelson’s work on restorative environments can be found in his dissertation: Mitigating Stress in College Students by Enhancing Testing Center Environments through Passive Interaction with Plants. Idaho State University, 2006. Peter Beyer’s article, Globalization and the Religion of Nature can be found in Nature Religion Today: Paganism in the Modern World (compiled by Pearson, Roberts and Samuel in 1998, and published by Edinburgh University Press). For a summary of the early Christian perception of nature see Chapter 15 of Jim Bartlett’s Why Can the Dead Do Such Great Things, Saints and Worshippers from the Martyrs to the Reformation (published by Princeton University Press, 2013). Anne’s conversation with Mrs. Allen in Anne of Green Gables is found in Chapter 37 (The Reaper Whose name is Death).

Master Gardener

The world is gifted with amounts

Of wind and snow and rain

Sometimes they come and stay awhile

Then disappear again

No sooner do they leave behind

A path of wetted earth

Than seedlings and dark dormant buds

Elaborate in girth

Who organizes all of this,

The seasons and the living things

That know just what to do

It’s almost as if every place

Were gardened by a certain grace

That it already knew

The New Mormon Studies Review and the Passing of an Age

I guess I’m getting old enough to understand that I have lived through historically significant times. What used to be current events are now my personal (should I say biased?) memories of the past. I have just recently come face-to-face with this reality as my son Spencer handed me the first volume of the new (and much anticipated) Mormon Studies Review (Volume 1, 2014).

I have been eager to read this new issue for many months now. As a regular subscriber to The FARMS Review (which had just recently changed its name to Mormon Studies Review), FARMS Review of Books, and Review of Books on the Book of Mormon – all of which (together) comprise a continuous publication that began in late 1980’s – I had been receiving notices that the next issue had been put on hold while new formatting and editorial changes were being made. The new Review was scheduled to come out by the end of this year (2013). And indeed it has.

I realize that it may be presumptuous of me to comment on the recent changes. I have never been privy to the decisions that have directed any of the previous forms of the Review. My perspective is simply one of an interested reader – albeit a reader of decades. And it is with this limitation in mind that I consider this important LDS publication through my own historical lens.

In truth, the new publication has left me feeling a bit nostalgic. I discovered the earlier versions of the Review during the formative years of my under-graduate and graduate education at BYU. From an academic standpoint, I have grown up with the Review.

In the mid 1980’s I had just recently returned from my mission and had stumbled upon my first volume of Nibley’s opera while foraging in the Harold B. Lee Library for something religiously substantial to read. This first encounter with Professor Nibley’s work was a real life changing experience for me, just as it has been for hundreds (if not thousands) of others.

This was during the time when the newly formed Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies had joined efforts with Deseret Book to publish The Collected Works of Hugh Nibley. In 1989, the year I graduated with my Master’s Degree, I received a copy of Volume 1 of the Collected Works from my parents for my birthday.

That year (1989) also marked the beginning of the Review (called then the Review of Books on the Book of Mormon). And, in hindsight, it is obvious how I have come to associate both the Review and the works of Nibley in a common light. Both (together) have virtually defined Mormon apologetics for over half a century. Yet this admission almost seems to be an understatement. Beyond defining Mormon apologetics, they have come to define a large part of Mormon scholarship to a rapidly expanding world of educated Latter-day Saints. The Review, in particular, has been one of only a few venues that faithful Latter-day Saint scholars have had available to them.

And this has been beneficial. But, as I can see now, it has also been limiting. It was immensely satisfying to emerging academics, like me, to see that there were legitimate answers to our critics. We could continue our scholarly subjects even as we continued true to our faith. Indeed, our scholarly pursuits could often be seen as strengthening our faith. We developed a real regard for the scripture in the 88^th Section of the Doctrine and Covenants (verse 118) that encourages us to “seek learning, even by study and also by faith”.

I should add here a note on the significance of this to young people of the Church. Most emerging scholars come into their own during the very impressionable years of their 20’s. This is a period of important spiritual development, a period when students rely heavily on mentors – especially academic mentors (such as major professors, committee members, teachers, and other capable adults), and a period when academic zeal can get away from the best of us and relegate the importance of the First Commandment to a side-bar in our lives.

Ecumenicalism can have the unfortunate effect of minimizing faith or of making faith a matter of relative preference. Faithful arguments – especially scholarly arguments in defense of faith – have a way of balancing this tendency. They are also the arguments that endure where current scholarly trends often become dated. There is a reason that Christian apologetics has been around from nearly the beginning of the faith. And it is a needed endeavor among Latter-day Saints today even as it was nearly two millennia ago among the first Christians. 

There is a recognized place for scholarly apologetics among our other Christian friends. The ecumenical journals First Things and Touchstone are two that come readily to mind. These journals are filled with a Christian scholarship that is not afraid to defend the faith. Are we unwilling (or unable), as Latter-day Saints, to do the same?  

Or maybe the time is not right. Perhaps now is the time for bridge-building, for mending some of the relationships that have been strained and broken through decades of misunderstanding. Mormonism certainly lends itself to American ecumenicalism. If we have to put or defensive hats in the closet in order to fully engage with this needed dialogue among our religious peers, maybe it is for the best.

But what is to become of our Latter-day Saint tradition of apologetics at this stage of the game? Will the changing focus of the Review absorb this history of debate into a more conciliatory dialogue? Will Mormon detractors become less vitriolic, or will we simply ignore them? Maybe these are not even the right questions.

To the extent that the new publication refuses to review misinformed and sloppy anti-Mormon publications, it will be providing a needed service. This I see as a positive development if, in fact, the first issue is any indication of things to come. Sadly, however, I don’t think it likely that deeply flawed anti-Mormon publications will stop being produced. The average Latter-day Saint will continue to be confronted with critics and will need to look for answers about specific texts. I’m not sure that the new Review will meet this need. For readers that want a balanced and nuanced treatment of Mormon publications, the new Review will be a clear improvement. For those needing a simpler clarification of a text – spelled out in more black and white language – some other resource will need to become available. Perhaps we will rely on the internet, and this may be sufficient. But it may also leave many of us disappointed, if not misled.   

The new Review is a publication for scholars – Mormon and non-Mormon alike. But it also serves the Mormon Church as a resource to promote inter-faith dialogue. It is very well named – focusing, as it does, on “Mormon studies”.  But it will not be lost on previous readers that this focus, now long in coming, will be seen to contrast with Mormon apologetics. We will not be seeing any more classic defenses of the faith in this new Review. Any defense that we do see will be more of a nod to scholarly decorum than to a reasoned faith.

In the final essay of the new Review, Blair Hodges finds Mormon Studies extending back as far as Leonard Arrington and Moses Rischin, then proceeding to authors such as Grant Underwood and Jan Shipps, and continuing with Richard Bushman, among others. These are impressive names, for sure, but it is quite a different pedigree from what the “former” Review would claim. As an organ of Mormon apologetics, the former Review carried on a tradition that extended back at least as far as Nibley’s Lehi in the Desert and The World of the Jaredites (published by the Deseret News Press in 1952). 

So while I am impressed with the new Review – with both the wisdom and timing of this new direction – I am also saddened at the passing of an age. And I’m somewhat worried about where this will send our would-be Mormon apologists. Is it too soon to recognize a now erstwhile period of classic Mormon apologetics? Maybe we should call it the “Age of Nibley” – but this sounds too patronizing. Maybe this former tradition will move in another and equally profitable direction. Or maybe the significance of the period, and the demise of classic Mormon apologetics, will go un-noticed and fall from our interest altogether. I guess we will have to wait and see. In the meantime I wish the new Mormon Studies Review and its custodians a healthy and long-lived success. And even more to the point – I look forward to a long and positive dialogue with our non-Mormon colleagues. Bon Voyage!

Real Live Treasure Maps

In Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic novel Treasure Island, the young Jim Hawkins finds a map in the sea chest of the erstwhile pirate Billy Bones. Jim learns that the map is, in fact, a treasure map and sets out with a colorful crew of adventurers to find the hidden wealth.

In Susan Cooper’s children’s classic Over Sea, Under Stone, the Drew children find themselves secretly going through the attic of an old coastal house in Cornwall while on vacation. The youngest child Barnabas happens upon an old manuscript containing a map and an ancient text that lead the children on an Arthurian adventure to find the Holy Grail.

Treasure maps and coded messages make for fun suspenseful stories. They show up regularly in books and magazines targeting all age groups. The film industry also capitalizes on their appeal on a regular basis. The Indiana Jones and Pirates of the Caribbean movies are just a few of the more popular examples but there are many others.

Another genre of treasure maps exist, however, that far fewer people are familiar with, even though they involve very real maps and just as much romance and adventure as their more popular counterparts. I’m referring to the hand-crafted maps tucked away in the notebooks and memories of naturalists and other outdoor enthusiasts. And it is no exaggeration to say that these maps are sometimes guarded with the same level of secrecy as any map pointing to a stash of precious metal.

I’m not referring to the thousands of distribution maps of organisms that occur in the libraries and private collections around the world – the kinds of maps one finds in field guides and in the more scholarly journals describing animals and plants. These maps are very important in showing the geographic ranges of species. And as animals and plants change where they live over time, these maps can help us understand more about them. They are fascinating maps in their own right. But I wouldn’t go so far as to call them treasure maps. They are usually drawn to scale and are widely published – without the sensational aura that surrounds a secret.  

Treasure maps are different. They are not generally printed in color on glossy paper (at least not until the treasure has been discovered or until it has gained a general historic interest). They tend to be drawn in notebooks, on separate sheets of paper, or on whatever writing scraps happen to be available. They are frequently drawn in pencil with thin curvy lines showing streams, natural outcroppings, farms, buildings, meadows, prominent trees, etc., all of which are almost never drawn accurately to scale. And the location of the specific habitat is usually marked with an ex – which is often encircled.

Yet while it is true that these crude methods of crafting treasure maps can add to their mystique, I don’t mean to imply that other maps are not similarly appealing. Most maps are capable of sparking the imagination.

The first gifts that I remember receiving as a young boy were maps. One was a globe and another was a book of antique maps. Before I learned to enjoy reading, I loved to look at them and imagine what unknown places were like. Then as a young teenager I became fascinated with birds, mammals and insects, and I discovered – from distribution maps – that different kinds of creatures could be found in different places not far from my home.

This discovery led me on day hikes and short overnight adventures into the foothills and mountains above my home. I was thrilled to find an abundance of interesting mammals including squirrels, chipmunks, and deer. On occasion I also saw moose, badgers, and skunks. I loved watching the juncos and towhees that were common, and I was thrilled beyond belief the first time I saw an owl – at dusk, as it flew silently over my head. Maps, in a very real way, introduced me to a whole new world.

I began making my own journal entries that occasionally contained hand-written maps of the places I had been. As I go back and read these entries (at least the ones that aren’t lost) I find that the maps are more interesting to me than the texts. I think I understood this at a fairly basic level even as a teenager.

It was then that I began to look at maps a bit more closely. What could I find on another mountain or by a desert spring? What about the many streams and rivers with unusual names that curved in thin blue lines away from mountain peaks? Maybe I would discover a new species near one of them.

Jerry Brotton has recently pointed out that maps have given many imaginative souls the ability “to rise above the earth and look down on it from a divine perspective…”. This comes pretty close to describing the thrill I have often experienced looking at maps and planning expeditions to fascinating places both near and far. I have never really lost my romantic fascination with unknown wild places. Just opening a field guide and glancing through the pages of distribution maps inevitably sets my mind to work planning my next trip.

I have to admit, however, that this sort of thing often gets me into trouble – sort of like chasing a wild goose, as my Mother used to tell me. Just because a map shows the distribution of an animal or plant does not mean that you will automatically find the specific habitat or location of what you go looking for.

Take for example Lewis’s woodpecker. This is a fairly good-sized bird – about the size of a robin – with an attractive red face and pink and white breast. It was named after Meriwether Lewis (of Lewis and Clark fame). A distribution map indicates that this interesting bird occurs throughout the western United States – especially throughout the Rocky Mountains. It occurs over a fairly large area. And yet I have only seen it on one occasion, even though I have been watching birds in the Rockies for decades.

I remember the occasion well. I was at home one weekend working in the yard when my friend Steve – obviously excited about something – found me and divulged his important news. He said that a pair of Lewis’s woodpeckers had been sighted near the town of Mapleton, and he wanted to know if I would be interested in driving down to look for them with him.

I quickly rearranged my schedule and off we went. I remember well the lonely road where we found them. There were a few scattered farm houses about with meadows and fields extending into the foothills of the Wasatch Front. We were driving slowly with heads peering up into trees and into bushes looking for any sign of the birds. Finally Steve spotted them in a distant tree.

They weren’t behaving like typical woodpeckers. They would often be perching on branches instead of hanging to the trunk of the tree. And at times they would fly into the air after insects instead of pecking at the bole for subcortical creatures – like most woodpeckers do.

Both Steve and I were thrilled. The place is marked in my memory like a real treasure map. Sadly I have lost the one I think I drew. Even the two tall cottonwoods and the barbed-wire fence – where the two birds where foraging – remain clear to me after all these years. I remember thinking as we left the site that I had just experienced something unusual, something unexpected. In a way I felt privy to a secret.

Through the years I have marked many of these experiences in my journal – often with lined maps and descriptions on how to find the place again. Many biologists do the same thing, especially if they keep a field notebook, like most field biologists do.

I was surprised many years ago to find that these same landmarks and general features found in field notes are also part of real treasure maps. My brother-in-law, who is fascinated with the history of Spanish mines and miners, introduced me to some of the maps of the lost Rhoades gold mines in the Uintah Mountains of Utah. The kinds of maps that have been found (and, in some cases, recreated) are just what one finds in dozens (perhaps hundreds) of field notebooks around the world. Of course this makes perfect sense. A landmark is a landmark regardless of the treasure.

And make no mistake about it, this information is guarded. Biologists know that many species – especially the less common and unusual ones – can be easily exploited by unethical collectors. And so they withhold information about specific localities where some of them live.

I recall some years ago hoping to find a few specimens of the beautiful tiger beetle (Cicindela pulchra). I knew a place above Fort Collins, Colorado where several had been collected in previous years and went looking for them. In fact I ended up returning to the same place several times over several years (always at the right time of the year when they would be out and active) yet I never found a single individual. It turns out that they had been driven to extinction in that place by over-collecting. It’s no wonder that serious biologists are suspicious about anybody they don’t know seeking locality information. And while the removal of a few individuals from a healthy population may be fully justifiable – even helping to promote understanding about a species – removing too many can destroy the population.

Some time ago I was involved with a discussion group considering this very issue. The group was comprised of editors of the international journal Zootaxa. One editor, that was responsible for an interesting but less popular animal group, wanted to get feedback on why specific localities were not listed with the original description of a species. The dilemma became apparent immediately. Locality information should be available, especially in a professional publication; and yet it also needed to be protected, especially when vulnerable species were involved.

This may seem like an unsolvable problem, and yet it has been handled quite nicely now for hundreds of years. Since specific locality data are almost always kept on museum labels near the individual specimen or in the field notebooks of researchers, museum curators get to monitor who has access to this information and who does not. Field notebooks and their accompanying “treasure maps” aren’t available to just anybody.

I don’t mean to imply that only museums keep these valuable maps. This would be impossible given the fact that professional biologists are not the only people interested in finding interesting species, or who draw maps of interesting places. And this brings me to a very important part of the issue: we need more people keeping field notes. We need you to start taking field notes.

Maybe your notebook will be nothing more than a list. Birders are famous list keepers and many of their lists also include valuable locality information. In recent years, there has been an increasing interest in keeping butterfly and dragonfly lists too. Wildflower enthusiasts are frequently good note and list makers – as well as good photographers (and artists). When one considers just how intimately connected many animals are to the plants that sustain them, it becomes obvious how valuable good geographic information can be.

If you happen to stop by the side of a country road to take a picture of a pretty wildflower, why not take an extra minute or two to draw a little map of where you spotted it – and perhaps a note of the date and circumstances. Try and capture any insects that might be feeding on the flowers, or what other kinds of plants are doing. The more you do this, the more you will become drawn to the area and its inhabitants even as you begin making a record that could become quite valuable. And you will have started creating your own real live treasure maps.

Perhaps this all sounds a bit too fanciful. But that is precisely the point. Remember that the word “fancy” has several meanings.  Yes, it can refer to an impulse or a delusion. But it can also refer to a skill, to an inclination, or to a dream. It most certainly refers to the imagination. And it is in this context that the difference between joy and sadness are most apparent. And why shouldn’t we be part of a very long and honorable tradition of adventurers, dreamers and romantics? Being able to appreciate a beautiful sunset or the song of phoebe depends entirely upon your fancy – upon your imagination – just like it was for the artists and adventurers of generations past. And besides, human nature is quite clear on this point: there is no better way to capture this very real and very local fancy than with a picture, a poem, or a map.  

References.

The statement from Jerry Brotton comes from the introduction of his book, A History of the World in 12 Maps, published in 2012 by Viking. My distribution map of Lewis’s woodpecker is from National Geographic’s Field Guide to the Birds of North America (fifth edition). For several images of the Rhoades treasure maps visit utahtreasure.blogspot.com.

What is Love?

Several years ago my aging father made a shocking announcement. He said that when he was dating my mother, and for several years after they were married, he did not love her.  I was so upset by this that I was unable to respond, and my brother and sisters were likewise very uncomfortably surprised. Dad had always been devoted to Mom. Yes, they had challenges in their marriage but it was obvious that they loved each other a great deal. And this love has continued and endures.

How, then, could my father admit to such a thing? I wondered about it a lot. It bothered me for quite some time. Obviously he was physically attracted to Mom from the start. He also enjoyed the love letters he got from her while they were dating – the ones signed Love, Elsa. I was certain that he loved her all those years ago. Was Dad losing his mind?

He did admit that he felt a great sense of duty to take care of Mom. And he asked me years later if this duty might not be a form of love. We both came to suspect that the current fashion of emotional romanticism was a bit provincial – not a bad thing, but not a historically complete one either.

If you look in the dictionary under love, you soon notice that there are a handful of definitions for this very common word. It can refer to an affectionate concern for another person or to God, it can be an enthusiasm for something, it can also be a sexual attraction – or the act itself. Love is a zero score in tennis, a material worn in mourning and a game of chance.

A love apple is a tomato, a love handle is a layer of fat, a lovelock is a bit of hair, a lovebird is a kind of parrot, a love bush is a kind of dodder, a love potion is a kind of charm. And so it goes. Clearly, love is a lot of different things.

Here, then, was a possible way out of my confusion. Dad, who has always been more given to cerebration than to sentimentality, may not have recognized a keen emotional response to Mom at first. But love her he certainly did. My oldest sister is proof of that.

But Dad’s admission implied something more. Something happened after living with Mom, starting a family, and struggling together as a couple with the challenges of life. He learned of Mom’s astonishing compassion for everyone. He learned of her devotion to him, and of her enduring faith that would become tested almost beyond belief. Dad learned that Mom was truly amazing.

I have come to realize that for many people the deep connection that binds us to others is not manifestly emotional. In fact, most of the time we create connections with others that we may not even be aware of. Of course, our experience with romantic love can be emotionally profound. But there are many very important connections that simply don’t fit the category.

Little children, for example, rarely feel emotionally attached to their family the same way that adults do. They still have to learn what their developing emotions mean. But this should not imply that they do not form bonds with their family or that they do not love their family. To a child its connection to its mother is the most profound experience of its life.

In fact, I believe that the connection between an unborn child and its mother – direct from the womb, through the placenta and into the lifeblood of the infant – continues throughout life. Yes the physical tissue is sundered shortly after birth, but there remains an unseen umbilicus that no amount of circumstance can render.

I saw this firsthand a number of years ago while serving in a small church group to help a young man overcome some of his challenges. He had become estranged from his mother emotionally and in a number of other ways. She was very traditional and could not tolerate much of his behavior – some of which was quite improper. For his part, he could not tolerate the guilty feelings that she seemed to always impose on him.

And yet in spite of this very real impasse, the young man could not be helped until he was able to overcome the breached relationship with his mother. Through the years of estrangement, the unseen umbilicus was still there.

In my own life, I have recently come to recognize that this connection doesn’t even go away when a mother passes away. Truly it is a universal umbilicus. It is a bond that never dies. And if I might expand somewhat on the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard’s famous essay – it is a most significant proof that “love abides”.

The Apostle Paul understood very well that love is not always a primrose path or a romantic fantasy. In his unsurpassed description of love (found in the 13^th chapter of the first Epistle to the Corinthians) he compares our experience with love as seeing “through a glass, darkly.”

And recently, Pope Francis has emphasized that love is more importantly tied to truth than to passing emotional experiences.

“Love,” he wrote, “cannot be reduced to an ephemeral emotion. True, it engages our affectivity, but in order to open it to the beloved and thus to blaze a trail leading away from self-centeredness and toward another person, in order to build a lasting relationship, love aims at union with the beloved. Here we begin to see how love requires truth. Only to the extent that love is grounded in truth can it endure over time, can it transcend the passing moment and be sufficiently solid to sustain a shared journey. If love is not tied to truth, it falls prey to fickle emotions and cannot stand the test of time. True love, on the other hand, unifies all the elements of our person and becomes a new light pointing the way to a great and fulfilled life. Without truth, love is incapable of establishing a firm bond; it cannot liberate our isolated ego or redeem it from the fleeting moment in order to create life and bear fruit.”

I believe that love is the value and importance we place on the very significant connections in our life. These connections can be quite different depending on the persons, the cultures and the circumstances involved. In our time, the emotional part of love has taken center stage. This may be fine, as far as it goes. But there is also a danger in this.

When we confuse love with positive emotions only, we can make the mistake (as many people often do) of thinking that we no longer love someone who has let us down. “I don’t love you anymore,” are heart-wrenching words that, sadly, are spoken much too often. And then, paradoxically, after the words are spoken, the confession is followed by the aching of the soul. Clearly the connection was not lost.

The truth of these tragic situations is that emotions between estranged lovers can become predominantly negative, even though connections remain. And it is because the connections remain that estrangements like separation and divorce are always so painful, despite the fact that this so-called emotional love has long since dissolved.

It is this modern confusion that makes Kierkegaard’s insistence that love abides so counterintuitive.  After all, people fall into and out of love all the time – or so we believe. If, however, we were to ask ourselves if connections between people were to commonly disappear, we might be less certain.

There is only one way for the true connections of love to be broken, and that is through selfishness. In fact selfishness, in this sense, is the refusal to form or to recognize the importance of connections at all. To be this selfish is to live in a cloistered sensual existence.

Many years ago, I fell in love with Kathy Vernon. We had dated off-and-on for many months before she agreed to accept my second proposal and marry me. We made our formal vows in the Salt Lake (Mormon) Temple in the spring, when the Utah foothills are covered with fresh grass, when new oak leaves are still glossy green, and when sego lilies are young and unblemished.

We knew so little about life and had to learn many basics of human relationships. We inevitably used each other as Guinea pigs as we struggled together, in the laboratory of life, to learn how to make a marriage work. We had to figure out money matters, marital roles and how to stay strong for each other when our first child lingered for months on the brink of death. Sometimes we managed OK. At other times we didn’t.

We learned that Kathy was used to a staid and practical masculinity. She had to adapt to a new husband who was neither of these. We learned that I was used to open and sentimental femininity. And I had to adapt to a new wife that kept things to herself and wasn’t comfortable looking into the deep emotional lives of others.

Often she felt overwhelmed and I felt misunderstood. But through all of the challenges we discovered something early on. We discovered that we needed each other very much. And we discovered this during those times when the connection between us was strained. Sometimes it was strained because of misunderstandings. Sometimes it was strained because school and work took me away from home for a while. In either case, the estrangement hurt each of us a lot. I came to realize – for the second time in my life – that these connections are very real.

The first time I realized this was while Kathy and I were dating at BYU. On one particular day we had been together for much of the afternoon (doing something that I no longer remember). I do remember, however, saying goodbye to her at the outer door of her apartment complex.

I said goodbye to Kathy and proceeded to the parking lot. I no sooner had opened the door of my car when I realized that Kathy was inside the complex standing by her front door locked-out of her apartment. How, exactly, I knew this is beyond me. I could neither see her nor hear her. But somehow I knew anyway.

I decided to act on this unusual insight and proceeded back into the complex. And, just as I expected, Kathy was standing outside her door – locked-out – wondering what to do next. She was surprised to see me. I decided not to go into details right then. I was still trying to figure out what my little mystical experience meant.

I have since come to understand what was unclear to me then: my connection to Kathy goes far beyond the visible and audible. It is a deeper thread that is forever unbreakable.

You may find this admission a bit over-stated.  After all, no one can be sure that love will last forever? Please notice, however, what I actually said. I said that the connection between us would never break. I do believe with all my heart that I will always value this connection greatly – in other words, that I will always love Kathy.

But even if the unthinkable happened and we were separated, for any number of reasons, the connection we have with each other would still exist. We have shared too much of our lives and our hearts. Dissolving this bond is no longer possible.

I do not think that every connection we have with others implies a loving relationship. But I do believe that everyone we love involves a connection. And we would do well to remember that the straining of these connections only ends up hurting everybody, ourselves included.

Which brings me to my final point; which is, that the loving connections of our lives are gifts from God. And as such, they are not ours to create or destroy on our own account.

“God is love,” declares the Apostle John (1 John 4:8). And as the Prophet Mormon indicated, this special kind of love – the love called charity that is defined as God’s love – is a gift that must be bestowed on us from above (Moroni 7:48).

We have not been entrusted with the disposition of loving connections. This is a privilege retained by a greater power than our own. And this should be obvious to anyone paying much attention to the world we live in. We are not just animals that interact with others of our own species purely by instinct, and then proceed on our merry way. Neither are our interactions with others the mere unconscious calculations so favored by evolutionary psychologists.

We interact with others, and in so doing, we form lasting bonds. And if we follow the direction of Heaven and lose ourselves in the service of others, we cannot help but form a vast network of relationships that will bind us to others forever. And like a grove of giant redwoods that withstand the storms of centuries because of their interlocking roots, we can bind each other together in divine ligands that were made for the eternities.

Maybe you feel that you cannot love or be loved. Perhaps you have convinced yourself that you were born unattractive or are not the romantic type. If you have ever thought this way, you had best think again. Whether or not you love or are capable of being loved is not your decision.

The Hollywood and dime novel version of love is not the whole story – or even the most important one. Most love is very different. A good neighbor loves. So does a thoughtful employer, or neighbor, or friend. A parent loves and so does a teacher. You are loved in more ways than you know. And surprisingly, you love more people than you realize.

It no longer bothers me that Dad didn’t have deep romantic feelings for Mom. He spent most of his life devoted to her. For many years, when Mom was often sick and confined to her bed, he cared for her and never complained. Dad and Mom have been profoundly connected from the start. And they always will be. God has promised that they will. He has promised that Love Abides. 

References

For a good overview of how love has been understood in the great books, see Chapter 50: Love, in Mortimer J. Adler and William Gorman (eds.) The Great Ideas, A Syntopicon of Great Books of the Western World. My copy of Love Abides is in Jaroslav Pelikan’s (ed.) The World Treasury of Modern Religious Thought. Published by Little, Brown and Company, 1990. The paragraph written by Pope Francis is found on page 48 of The Light of Faith, Lumen Fidei, published this year (2013) by Ignatius Press.

Uncommon Encounters

When was the last time you stumbled upon something uncommon? I mean some thing or some event that is (or was) unlikely? It happened to me just recently. I was travelling along a winding back-country road just east of California’s Salinas Valley when a bald eagle flew over my truck. The sight of its strikingly white head and tail feathers is not an everyday occurrence in these parts, and I got a little excited.

It was obviously intent on where it was going. Its flight was direct and descending. I pulled off of the road to take a closer look just as it swooped down on a juvenile coyote that I just then noticed.

Wow! I thought, as I began fumbling for my camera. This is great. As it turned out, the eagle decided against grabbing the coyote. The young canine saw it coming and was ready to put up a fight. At the last minute, the eagle flew off in another direction and both of us – the dog and I – watched it fly away.

For several minutes after that, the coyote canted back and forth across the narrow valley. It was clearly agitated and, despite my proximity, it continued looking back in the direction of the eagle. It kept acting this way for several minutes, even after I could no longer see the eagle in the sky. I felt a little guilty being so happy when the poor coyote was so upset.

The truth is that I get excited over every coyote that I see. I might see half a dozen or more every year but it still gives me a thrill. And seeing a bald eagle is even more exciting. I am lucky if I see one or two a year. I knew that seeing them both together, in such an unlikely juxtaposition, was probably a once-in-a-lifetime experience.

I have also come to appreciate that such rarely experienced moments make life so much more enjoyable. Experiences of the uncommon and the rare remain in our minds and hearts. They are the stories we tell at parties and to our children and grandchildren. Sharing them with others very often creates a bond between those experiencing them together. Is it any wonder that sacred texts insist on the fact that holiness is uncommon – or that God Himself requires us never to refer to His handiwork as common?

The Apostle Peter, referring to the dietary restrictions in the Law of Moses declared that, “I have never eaten any thing that is common or unclean.” And then the author to the Epistle to the Hebrews states that (referring to Christ) He is “holy, harmless, undefiled, separate from sinners, and made higher than the heavens…”

What is there, exactly, between these apparently unrelated things – I mean between the uncommon, the clean and the holy? For starters, maybe it would be best to look at what it actually means to be rare or uncommon.

Scientists have come up with a fairly precise vocabulary for unlikely things.  Here is Kevin Gaston’s rather formal definition of rarity: “Rarity is merely the current status of an extant organism which, by any combination of biological or physical factors, is restricted either in numbers or area to a level that is demonstrably less than the majority of other organisms of comparable taxonomic entities.”

This is fairly complex way of saying that, for living things, something could be rare in a couple of different ways. A species could be rare because there are only a few individuals left in the wild. Or it might be rare even though there are still many individuals alive in the wild if they only occur in a restricted place.

An example of the former kind of rarity would be the ivory-billed woodpecker (Campephilus principalis) – assuming that it still survives. It probably disappeared from the United States several decades ago, although reports in the Deep South occasionally raise our hopes that some may still survive there. The more realistic possibility, though, is that if it survives at all, it does so only in small numbers in the remote forests of Cuba.

An example of the second kind of rarity might be the Monterey pine (Pinus radiata). This tree is restricted to a fairly small area in coastal California, although it has been bread for lumber and grows, in modified form, in a much larger area. There are still quite a few truly wild Monterey pines left in the tree’s native habitat, but they only occur in a fairly restricted area.

When should an animal or plant be considered rare, or just uncommon? The answer to this apparently simple question is not simple. There is a broad area of overlap. But it isn’t the academic definition of rarity that I wish to discuss. Of course the definitions and the philosophical clarity are important. But this understanding does little to explain the thrill of actually running into something unusual.

The thrill itself is not rational. It is visceral. It starts with a rational awareness, it is true. But then something beyond reason happens when one experiences a real encounter with the uncommon. Let me give an example.

Ever since I was a teenager, I have followed the plight of the California condor. For some reason it’s rarity and its unusual Latin name (Gymnogyps californianus) captured my imagination. I worried about it becoming extinct and followed with great interest the stories of the captive breeding efforts to save it.

In 2010, I was travelling with my friend Steve along Highway One in coastal California. Steve is an accomplished birder and we were hoping to finally spot a condor. At the time of our trip, the breeding program had been successful enough that several dozens of birds had been released into the wild. And some of them were known to be living along the coast.

At one point we had pulled off to the side of the road to look for seals when Steve spotted a couple flying high above us. We got a fairly good look before they disappeared behind a small mountain to the west.

We now knew that we were in the right area and so continued on the lookout as we managed the winding coastal highway. At one particularly steep curve we noticed a small group of cars suddenly stopping just as another condor flew overhead. Then we saw another one, and a third.

We stopped quickly, I grabbed the camera, and we both stumbled out of the truck onto the road, staring at the sky – thankfully there were no other cars passing just then. Something had attracted the rare birds and we found half a dozen of them perched on a rocky outcropping not far down the steep embankment between the road and the Pacific Ocean.

This was an unimaginable thrill for both of us. For me personally, having believed most of my life that I would probably never see this impressive bird, I was both thrilled and half dazed. Could this really be happening? And then, as if to make the moment even more unreal, Steve exclaimed incredulously, “Sam, look, there’s a peregrine falcon off to the right.”

This truly was incredible. The peregrine falcon (Falco peregrinus) is another uncommon bird. It had been devastated by the excessive use of DDT years ago and was considered rare throughout my youth. Thankfully, its numbers have been increasing in recent years. But still, I had only seen it one other time, many years before, when an unlikely pair decided to nest on a tall building in downtown Salt Lake City. To see it at that very moment only made me giddier than I already was. It was a sensational experience. 

I am convinced that it is the combination of awareness, and of personal immediate experience that can make uncommon moments sacred. This may seem a bit sacrilegious to those who would restrict sacred things to the purview of religion. My belief is that encounters with the Created world should often be religious experiences of a sort.

Consider the word sacred itself. It comes from the Latin sanctus meaning consecrated, holy, sacred, inviolable. It was used anciently to describe such things as deities, liberty, the dead, emperors, even the Roman senate. 

But our word sanctuary also comes from the same root. While it’s true that we often think of a sanctuary in a temple or a church, it can also be used to describe a place for animals and plants. A sanctuary is a place to protect these creatures from hunting and fishing, etc. It is perfectly proper, both from religious and historical contexts, to refer to created beings as sacred.

And what is maybe even more unusual, there is precedent for considering all of God’s creations in the same light. And the way that this is to be done is to gain a perspective that even common things – like human beings, for example – are really quite unusual after all.

In her book, The Rarest of the Rare, Diane Ackerman writes, “Sometimes it is difficult for us collectors of rare artifacts such as paperweights or buttons or paintings to understand that we ourselves are rare… We are among the rarest of the rare not because of our numbers, but because of the unlikeliness of our being here at all.”

Ackerman is not arguing from a religious context. Biologists that may not recognize any creator other than Mother Nature can still talk about the unlikeliness of mankind. Steven J. Gould (the late evolutionary biologist and essayist from Harvard University) was fond of pointing out that all of life’s many branches were caused by chance events, and that if our evolutionary past were to be replayed, nothing would turn out the same way again.

But of course this is only one perspective. The reality is that we have no first-hand knowledge of much of the Creation. Nor can we rely on scientific inference to provide us with unerring guidance about the past. Some things we will never know as sojourners here below.

But consider the further words of Peter as he recounts in greater detail his vision of why the gospel should be taken to the world: “but God hath shewed me that I should not call any man common or unclean.”

I know this seems odd. How can a relatively large mammal (ourselves) numbering in the billions be considered uncommon? Yet if Ackerman can imagine our human uniqueness and call it rare among living things, is there not something to Peter’s realization that all of God’s children are worthy of special notice?

Another way to look at this is to consider the words vulgar or profane. Most of us think that vulgar refers to something crude or boorish. And in fact, these are legitimate definitions of the word. But they aren’t the only ones. In fact vulgar originally had reference to masses of people, or to the language spoken by the common man. The Latin Vulgate – or the Biblia Sacra Vulgata – is an early translation of the Bible into the common language of ancient Rome.

The word profane – referring to irreverence or blasphemy – can also refer to common or vulgar things. In many ways, profanity is the improper relegation of sacred things to common use – speaking of deeply meaningful religious realities in an offhanded or disrespectful way.

Given this religious and biological perspective, it soon becomes clear that most of us are guilty of a chronic and of a crass profanity. I mean that we look upon sacred beings – I mean other people and even sadly upon ourselves – as if we were just so many warm bodies.

This happens because of our failing to grasp the first part of the two-fold path to the sacred (I mean that we fail to be aware of what we see). When I pulled off to the side of the road to watch a bald eagle, I did so because I knew that I was seeing something unusual. While the remarkable natural scene was being played out, a few other cars drove by without noticing anything at all. It is this lack of awareness that makes us miss the sacred – that makes our world so profane.

Years ago, while driving along Highway 40 in western Colorado, Kathy and I happened upon a crackle of Mormon crickets. Many of them were engorged from feeding and their bodies were full of nutritious morsels that would be allocated to their offspring.

The adult females, in particular, were fat and each carried a long egg-laying blade (called an ovipositor) at the end of its abdomen. As a group they hopped and scuttled over the ground and into the tender vegetation that covers the high Colorado Desert in the spring.

Some of the crickets had started to cross the road only to be run-over by passing vehicles. Other crickets, eager to benefit from these flattened storehouses of food, were then moving into the road to eat them. Many of these crickets would also get run over, and soon the highway became slick with dead cannibalistic crickets.

Kathy and I stopped to see what was going on. When I discovered the crickets, I quickly grabbed a few and plopped them into a bottle of alcohol. They were fairly easy to catch because they don’t have wings. I was thrilled (I guess you can sort of see the pattern here). Mormon crickets are not very commonly seen.

They have become part of the history of the Inter-Mountain West because of the damage they caused to the crops of the Mormon settlers. There are a handful of accounts from the mid-19^th Century telling of millions of these crickets devouring the sorely needed crops of pioneer families. 

In desperation, these inexperienced farmers prayed for relief whereupon hundreds (perhaps thousands) of gulls descended on the crickets en-masse. Accounts tell of the birds engorging themselves to the point of regurgitation, only to return to the arthropod feast and eat some more. There is a monument to these avian miracles on Temple Square in downtown Salt Lake City.

And, for whatever reason, the efficiency of the gulls seems to gain even more traction because nobody sees the crickets anymore. Most members of the Mormon Church know the story of the Mormon crickets, but very few could ever recognize one of the insects even if they saw it. The reason seems clear enough. Almost nobody ever does see one.

They are primarily restricted to the tops of high mountains – above tree-line. I have seen them on a few occasions as I have climbed some of the peaks in Colorado and Utah. But it seems that they only come down into cultivated areas rarely or in a few isolated places.

I have come to look upon the time of our lucky encounter with these insects with soberness. It combined the discovery of an uncommon creature with a sacred tradition. And the result somehow made the whole experience much more poignant.

I don’t believe that we have to be in the presence of something rare to experience this thrill. If this were true, very few of us would ever experience it. Some people may never experience it with living things. Perhaps they know the thrill from seeing an original Rembrandt painting or a rare golden coin. These can all be very exciting.

Finding an uncommon being, however, should be an extra meaningful experience among followers of the Judeo/Christian tradition. The Creation, after all, is part of our theology. A rare painting is not. Seeking them out can be one of life’s great pleasures.

It can also be addicting, although finding them can hardly be predicted. The hope, however, that I might find something unusual often compels me to start looking through maps and planning my next trip only days after I return from my last junket into the wild. I can never get enough. And I think we are made this way for a reason. We are supposed to be inspired by sacred things.

References.

The New Testament references to Peter are in Acts 10:14 and 28. The reference in Hebrews is in Chapter 7, verse 26. On Gaston’s definition of rarity see, What is Rarity?; in, Kunin and Gaston’s The Biology of Rarity, Chapman and Hall, 1997. Ackerman’s quote on rarity from The Rarest of the Rare is in the introduction (on page xviii). You’ll have to excuse me for the phrase “a crackle of Mormon crickets” but I couldn’t resist the urge to use James Lipton’s interesting phrase (and a very appropriate phrase in our case of treaded insects). His book, An Exaltation of Larks, is a wonderful collection of nouns of multitude – or terms of venery as Lipton prefers. For a detailed account of the “Miracle of the gulls” see William Hartley’s “Mormons, Crickets, and Gulls: A New Look at an Old Story,” Utah Historical Quarterly 38 (summer 1970): 224-239.