text:
The Land Beyond the Rim:
Early Years
Olson was born in Chicago on April 4, 1899 (three months before the birth of Ernest Hemingway just a few miles away). He was the second of three sons. At the age of seven he moved with his family to Wisconsin; he lived for three years on the Door County peninsula, three years in the north central logging town of Prentice, and spent his teen years in Ashland, on the shore of Lake Superior.
He moved so much because his father was a Swedish Baptist minister. Swedish Baptists were much like northern Baptists, except they conducted services in Swedish and continued other Old World customs, most notably a highly festive celebration of Christmas. They often opposed alcohol more stridently than other Baptists, because widespread alcoholism had plagued Sweden during the nineteenth century, when waves of emigrants left for the United States.
Lawrence Olson -- who referred to himself as L.J. -- was among those immigrants. He came from the mountainous province of Dalarne, where Baptists had been persecuted in large numbers by the Swedish government, which enforced the Lutheran faith.6 He was something of a liberal among Swedish Baptists in one regard: he began the divisive task of introducing English language services in his Wisconsin congregations, which marked the beginning of the end of the label Swedish Baptist. But theologically he was a fundamentalist who led anti-alcohol campaigns and told his three sons to turn their heads whenever they passed a Catholic Church. Sigurd once recalled how L.J. "could hold his audience of farmers and fisherfolk by telling them sonorously that if they didn't obey the 10 Commandments and love each other they would surely be flung into the depths of hell and spend the rest of their days in horrible torment."7
Sigurd's father also was a stern, grim man, very reserved and formal, always concerned about doing the right thing. He did not have much sympathy for amusements of any kind. One time, for example, Sigurd and his older brother, Kenneth, saved up their money to buy a chess set; when their father discovered them playing with it he grabbed it away from them and tossed it into the fire.8 After Sigurd was grown and married, he would recall for his wife how his whole family seemed to breath a collective sigh of relief when L.J. was called away to visit other congregations; everyone finally could drop the formality and be themselves.
The Olson family's move from Chicago to Sister Bay, Wis. in 1906 came at a perfect time for Sigurd, because he was just reaching an age where he had the desire and freedom to explore beyond the immediate neighborhood. His family's two-story, rectangular frame home, half a mile east of town, was surrounded by farmfields, woods and swampland. The dirt road passing in front of the house and the church next door cut straight across the peninsula to Appleport, three miles to the east. Sigurd got to know both sides of the peninsula: the deep harbor of Sister Bay, protected from west winds by wooded bluffs, the Sister Islands protruding thinly on the horizon; and the shallow waters and windswept shore of wide-open Appleport, where constant pounding of waves left a beach composed of smooth stones, clumps of grasses and hardy wildflowers. Just south of Sister Bay was Ephraim, where the harbor view centered on spectacular limestone cliffs that were bathed in a luminous gold by the early morning sun. Sigurd often visited Ephraim after his father began holding regular services in a log building there in 1907, and he occasionally accompanied L.J. on ministerial rounds to Bailey's Harbor, Gills Rock and Washington Island. On the way to Washington Island, the road they traveled with their horse and buggy took them steadily uphill to a high view of Ellison Bay and the broad expanses of Lake Michigan.
Simple pleasures abounded. He learned to fish, and built a small fort of branches in his yard. Each week he joined friends downtown to watch the stagecoach come in; its driver, knowing the children were watching (and waiting for the candy he handed out), always galloped the horses down the steep hill to the Sister Bay Post Office and Tavern. Fishermen brought the Olsons cold, shining catches in exchange for L.J.'s services, and orchard owners brought bushels of fruit. Sigurd would never forget the sweet autumn scent of apples in the cellar.9
At night, lying in his bed, he could hear the moaning of fog horns, a sound that called to him as enticingly as would the howl of wolves or the wail of loons later in life. Eventually he got the chance to follow that call, exploring nearby wooded paths by himself in an ever-larger radius from home until one day he made it all the way to the lake. Half a century later, he described what he experienced at the end of an abandoned stone pier:
Sigurd's childhood explorations of the woods, fields and shorelines of Door County, and his later excursions at Prentice and Ashland, were partly an expression of his innate passion for natural beauty. However, they also served as an escape from the stifling atmosphere of school and home, and as an outlet to find and express his true self. Decades later, in a draft of his memoirs, he would write:
In many ways, Sigurd's background is reminiscent of two other well-known naturalists, John Burroughs and John Muir. Like Olson, Burroughs and Muir had intensely religious fathers whose God resembled the angry and vengeful Lord of Jonathan Edwards. Chauncy Burroughs was, like L.J. Olson, both a grim man and a fundamentalist Baptist; when John defied his edict against Santa Claus and hung a stocking one Christmas Eve, Chauncy filled it with horse manure. And Daniel Muir, who became a preaching elder in the Disciples of Christ, was physically abusive, beating John whenever he failed to memorize the day's Bible verses.12
The "two Johns" turned away from the faith of their fathers. For John Burroughs, it was gut-wrenching. His break came at the age of 19, when he attended a revival meeting and, seeking God, allowed himself to be immersed in the Delaware River. He came out shouting hallelujahs in order to fit in with the other believers, but that night he wrote in his journal that despite his fervent desire, he had felt nothing. The rest of his life was full of what biographer Edward Renehan, Jr. calls a "consuming" nostalgia. He longed for the simple life of his childhood on the family farm, and he "mourned his personal loss of the simple, straight-forward, Testament-based faith by which his parents and grandparents had gladly governed their lives."13
For John Muir there was no defining moment, no hard break from his fundamentalist background. Instead, without any evident inner torture, he gradually discarded the dogmas enforced by his father's beatings. For years scholars have considered him to be essentially a pantheist, but more recent students have set him within the boundaries of liberal Christianity. Similar arguments are likely in store for those who study Sigurd Olson, because, like Muir, he wrote vaguely about his beliefs and, as with Muir, Olson's religious beliefs are central to his vision about the role of wilderness in the modern world.14
Olson experienced a religious crisis at the end of 1918, while he was attending the University of Wisconsin in Madison. He was 19 years old, and had just moved into the university's YMCA at 740 Langdon St. This was a prime recruiting location for student religious groups, and Olson soon discovered and joined the Student Volunteers, American Protestantism's most important missionary organization. Formed in the late 1880s, the Student Volunteer Movement had vowed to evangelize the entire world within a generation. The Madison chapter's meetings sometimes featured missionaries who had just returned from the wilds of India, Africa and the Amazon; their stories so excited Olson that he seriously began to consider becoming a missionary himself, and he became so enthusiastically active a member of the Student Volunteers that the chapter soon elected him to serve as its president. But at the very moment when it seemed as though he had found himself and his goal in life, he was assailed by doubts.15
The details are sketchy, but eleven years later, when he began keeping a journal, he recalled this period and wrote that "when new ideas of religion became mine" his faith and hope were "shattered."16 What these ideas were, and from where they came, he didn't say. They don't seem to have come from his classes -- he was taking an animal husbandry course called "Beef and Dairy Cattle," a course in modern European political history, a physics course called "Mechanics and Heat, Electricity and Magnetism," a basic soils science course about soil physics and fertility, and public speaking.17 In such courses there would not have been any discussion of the theory of evolution to clash with his Baptist background, no modern psychological debates about the existence of the human soul or free will, no anthropological treatises on the cultural creation of God. Of course, just by attending the University of Wisconsin Sigurd may have come into contact with these ideas, even if they weren't part of his classes. But it's impossible to be sure.
Perhaps when he wrote about "new ideas of religion" he simply meant he was exposed to versions of Christianity that made him question his fundamentalist upbringing. Certainly the YMCA and the Student Volunteers were not only for Baptists. But his journal recollection makes the problem seem much deeper than that. He wrote that he would climb to the roof of the YMCA and look down upon Lake Mendota and the city lights or up at the stars, and "pray and battle with my God." He continued:
As his doubts increased, Sigurd began to think that his excitement about the missionary life had more to do with his love of wild places than with a desire to save souls. The issue came to a head the night before he was to publicly declare his intent to become a missionary. Once again he climbed to the top of the YMCA to fight his inner battle. The pressure must have been tremendous: to change his mind now not only would upset his friends and advisors in the Student Volunteers, but would make him L.J. Olson's second son to reject the ministry. His older brother, Kenneth, had decided he would go into journalism, despite L.J.'s strongly stated desire that he become a minister. [Late in life, Kenneth would write to Sigurd, "Dad and I never got along."19] And Sigurd knew -- although he could not have told this to his father -- that at stake this time was not just a career choice, but a whole way of looking at the world.
Before the night was over, Sigurd made his decision. The next morning he quit the Student Volunteers. As he recalled in his journal eleven years later, "At last in despair I gave up my dream as a missionary and life's castles crashed around me. Doomed as it seemed to a commonplace existence I gave myself halfheartedly to my work and hung doggedly on....I had not yet developed the philosophy that would have made it possible to override my despair."20
For years afterward, Olson was obsessed with what he called his search for meaning. To lose belief in the dogma of his father's church was one thing, but to lose faith in the idea of a mission in life, of an individual calling to some noble purpose -- this cut deeply into the psyche of the Rev. L.J. Olson's second son. "For years I went on getting more bitter and disillusioned all of the time," he recalled in his journal on Jan. 14, 1930. His only hope for happiness was to recover a sense of mission. Before that could happen, however, he needed to regain his faith in a greater power.
Introduction |
Early Years | "Flashes
of Insight" | Evolutionary Humanism and
the Emergent God
"Flashes of Insight"
His experiences outdoors provided the seeds of this new faith. The defining moment came on a canoe trip into the western portion of Ontario's Quetico Provincial Park sometime during the early 1920s. Olson by then was married, had one child, and lived in the northern Minnesota city of Ely, at the edge of what is now called the Boundary Waters Canoe Area, a wilderness adjacent to the Quetico. He taught biology at the local high school, and eventually would teach at, and become dean of, the junior college. During the summers, he made some extra money and satisfied his craving for the outdoors by working as a guide for a local outfitting company. One summer evening in the early 1920s, camped on an island in Robinson Lake, Olson got into his canoe after dinner and paddled to the nearby eastern shore of the lake, where there was a peak with a gorgeous view of the wilderness to the west. Sigurd climbed to the top in time to watch the sunset, but the experience proved more than an aesthetic appreciation of a glowing red sky. He recalled it in his journal in 1930:
Olson felt peace and contentment, and a sense of "union of myself with the plan of creation."22 And he began seeking these epiphanies, or "flashes of insight" as he came to call them, whenever he could find time alone outdoors. During canoe trips, after his clients had turned in for the night, Sigurd often would take the canoe out by himself, searching for another glimpse of the infinite. "Most of all would I find what I sought on brilliant starlit nights," he recalled in his journal on Jan. 20, 1930:
Olson's clients often were amused by his behavior, and teased him about his "poetic leanings" (just as they teased him for bringing a pillow). He took it good-naturedly and laughed along with them, but he thought that at least a few of his customers seemed to understand. He also began to notice how they, too, often were transformed during the course of a canoe trip. Gradually, during the first few days of paddling and portaging, they would drop the formalities and hard shell of their business personas and expose their true selves. They laughed more and played practical jokes. They sang. They watched the sun set and the moon rise, and listened to the roar of rapids and the soft sighs of wind in the pines. Olson was amazed one day to see a wealthy, work-o-holic executive spend more than an hour watching an ant hill.
These observations and personal epiphanies convinced Olson that nature in general, and wilderness in particular, could play a crucial spiritual role for modern civilization. The sense of oneness with creation that he had felt at Robinson Peak and many times afterward was similar to the Christian experience of being saved. And if sin consists not merely of individual moral transgressions, but in an underlying separation from God or Nature, then at- one-ment with the earth is an atonement, a reconcilation that makes healing possible. "Days when I have seen my vision," Olson wrote, "are glorious beads on the chain of my life; the others are drab unbrightened stones."23 And gradually he came to believe that his life's mission was to spread the good news of wilderness salvation.
This meant, in large measure, counteracting the modern tendency to dismiss as fantasy any claims to truth that weren't based on rational, scientific analysis. In an unpublished essay he wrote during the 1930s, he said, "Our enemies have debunked and analysed and have tried to strip our souls of the last thread of connection with the infinite." He wrote that those who do not "permit themselves to submit" can never understand the spiritual feelings that bring inner peace, and he added: "It is as difficult for them to understand as for a man who has never seen the wilderness, to know the joys of exploration and discovery. For them, never having probed the depths of their own sensibilities, there is no wilderness, nothing new, for they have never glimpsed the land beyond the rim."24
Olson saw himself as being in "the forefront of the battle to retain a few last entrenchments of the spirit."25 Science and technology were destroying the religous truths that had given mankind spiritual sustenance, the truths that had given meaning, and offering nothing in their place. Olson was driven, he wrote, to help "keep the faith alive, give people something to hold to, something to fight for that is bigger than politics, bigger than the problems the world is constantly facing, something in the way of a philosophical concept that lies at the root of any happiness the race can find."26
Introduction |
Early Years | "Flashes
of Insight" | Evolutionary Humanism and
the Emergent God
Evolutionary Humanism and the Emergent God
Olson did not completely reject Christianity. He and his wife joined the Presbyterian Church after they moved to Ely, Minn., and attended with some regularity throughout their lives.27 For a time Olson sang in the church choir. He vacillated in his faith, however: in 1933, for example, after reading the philosopher Benedict Spinoza, Olson wrote in agreement that "Our salvation now is [in] calm thought and contemplation rather than [in religious] authority." Yet he seems to have at least briefly considered returning to an evangelical Christianity three years later, for a letter from his mother says that "Dad was overjoyed to hear that you have surrendered your life to Christ."28
If Olson really was reconsidering his evangelical roots, his constant reading of John Burroughs throughout the 1930s must have been one of the factors that prevented it. Burroughs ridiculed what he called "theological pap," and praised scientific reason: "The atmosphere of our time is fast being cleared of the fumes and deadly gases that arose during the carboniferous age of theology."29 He argued that there is no evident purpose or design manifest in nature, only the laws of matter, force, and biology. To Burroughs, evolution's most important result was mankind's development of moral consciousness.
To a large extent, Olson came to agree with Burroughs, but Burroughs' universe was too cold for Olson: "He does not say anything about the fact that God may be good, that God is love, God is kindness and humility, tolerance, and seated primarily within the human spirit. That is where he failed."30
Olson exposed himself to a number of different religious faiths, through his clients whom he guided in the wilderness, through friends in the conservation movement, and through reading. Although he maintained ties to Christianity, he came to see all faiths as equivalent. In 1943, for example, he wrote to his sons about Buddhism: "There are so many things in Buddha that resemble Christianity, the working philosophy is the same -- the main idea being to align oneself with the great spiritual forces of the universe, to be in tune with the universe and God, that only by being cognizant of spiritual forces and in agreement with the best thought and idealism of the ages can a man ever achieve serenity and tolerance and peace, to practice humility and understanding."31
This was essentially the argument in a book he read two years later, The Perennial Philosophy, by Aldous Huxley. Huxley tried to show how the great thinkers and mystics of all of the world's major faiths agreed on certain principles, and he argued that religions tended to develop problems when they focused solely on one aspect of God: as personal and transcendant, for example, while downplaying or ignoring his immanent and supra-personal nature. The real God is all of these, he said, quoting from such disparate sources as St. John of the Cross, Meister Eckhart, Lao Tzu and Shankara.
Early in the book, Huxley, writing about the nature of God, quotes Eckhart, who said that God "becomes and disbecomes." To Huxley, this meant that God exists in time: "He might be an emergent God, starting unspiritually at Alpha and becoming gradually more divine as the aeons rolled on towards some hypothetical Omega."32 Huxley's speculation made intuitive sense to Olson, and he ultimately tied the idea of an emergent God into his wilderness philosophy, even using it as a chapter title in the 1976 book that summed up his philosophy, Reflections From the North Country.33
Aldous Huxley wasn't the only influence, however, or even the most important. Similar thoughts were expressed by Julian Huxley, Pierre Lecomte du Nouy, Lewis Mumford, and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, in books that Olson read between 1947 and 1960. Lecomte du Nouy wrote the first of these, Human Destiny, a book that fascinated Sigurd Olson. A pioneering French biophysicist and skeptic of religion who had converted to Roman Catholicism, Lecomte du Nouy wrote that "evolution continues in our time, no longer on the physiological or anatomical plane but on the spiritual and moral plane."34
Human Destiny was the first book of what Julian Huxley came to label "evolutionary humanism." The central belief of evolutionary humanists is that the development of the human species started a whole new phase of evolution. As Huxley put it in his 1957 book Religion Without Revelation, which Olson read with care and appreciation, "the present is the first period in the long history of the earth in which the evolutionary process, through the instrumentality of man, has taken the first step towards self-consciousness. In becoming aware of his own destiny, man has become aware of that of the entire evolutionary process on this planet: the two are interlocked."35
Lewis Mumford took a similar perspective in his 1951 book, The Conduct of Life, but tied this "evolutionary awareness" that Huxley would speak of to the idea of an emergent God: "The universe does not issue out of God, in conformity with his fiat: it is rather God who in the long processes of time emerges from the universe, as the far-off event of creation and the ultimate realization of the person toward which creation seems to move."36 When Olson quoted Lewis Mumford in his writings and speeches, this book invariably was the source.
But Olson was especially interested in the mystical theory of evolution described by a French paleontologist and Jesuit priest, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, in a book published in English in 1959 under the title The Phenomenon of Man.37 A central concept in the book is that of "convergence," which Teilhard describes as mankind's tendency throughout evolution to prevent differentiation among races from leading to the kind of biological separation seen among species of birds, for example, or insects. Another evolutionary process, "complexification," has led to increasingly complex patterns of organization; for example, from subatomic units to atoms to inorganic molecules to organic molecules, then to subcellular life, then to cells, and so on.
Teilhard wrote not just about evolution in the biosphere or the inorganic lithosphere; he coined the term "noosphere" to refer to the sphere of mind, a "thinking layer" superimposed on the other spheres, consisting of the total thought patterns of humans, and the patterns of their activities. It is a microcosm of incorporated knowledge. To Teilhard, the large increase in human population and the rapid advances in human communications is producing a complexification of the noosphere, and at the same time a convergence in mental activity, a global psychosocial unification. The end result will be an intensely unified, "hyperpersonal" noosphere, what he called "point Omega" -- by implication, union with God.
Teilhard wrote that his goal was to show to a skeptical modern world a God who was "as vast and mysterious as the cosmos" and yet "as immediate and all-embracing as life."38 Sigurd Olson did not believe in all of the major tenets of Christianity -- in 1959, for example, he wrote to one of his fans that "physical immortality is a juvenile conception of frightened man."39 Yet his idea of God, while free from any specific doctrine or creed, was very much like that described by Teilhard.
Introduction |
Early Years | "Flashes
of Insight" | Evolutionary Humanism and
the Emergent God
A Wilderness Theology
Olson's wilderness epiphanies, or flashes of insight, provided the soil out of which his philosophy grew; they gave him a sense of purpose at a time when he did not know what to believe, and an intuitive grasp of the answers that he later found affirmed in the writings of such people as Lecomte du Nouy and Teilhard de Chardin. A genuine mystical experience is difficult to describe, because such words as "oneness" often convey a sense of ethereal distance from the physical world. But while such experiences are accompanied by a feeling of detachment -- meaning a broadened perspective in which current problems, questions and issues recede in importance -- they also are accompanied by a feeling of complete participation. In his best-selling book The Singing Wilderness, Olson described once again his experience at Robinson Lake, this time with the style of a writer who has found his voice:
This was why he fought for wilderness, and this was his message in countless speeches across the United States and Canada, as well as in nine books and many magazine and newspaper articles: in wilderness people can find the silence and the solitude and the uncivilized surroundings that can connect them once again to their evolutionary heritage and, through an experience of the eternal mystery, can give them a sense of the sacrality of all creation. If, as Olson believed, evolution was proceeding toward an emergent God, and if, as he also believed, individual spiritual growth played an essential role in this evolutionary process, then a wilderness experience could even be considered a sacramental experience, of benefit not just to the individual but to all of creation. Olson's wilderness philosophy may well be considered a theology, because it was deeply connected with his beliefs about the nature of God.
It must be pointed out that Olson was not a systematic philosopher who built rigorous arguments out of empirical evidence; he wrote and spoke like an artist who uses watercolor, painting word pictures with a broad brush. Nor was he a scholar or a professional intellectual. He read very selectively, and his understanding of the great thinkers of modern civilization was as likely to come from the Saturday Evening Post or The Atlantic as it was from scholary books. Yet he was a profoundly philosophical person who lived for ideas and who was engaged in a lifelong search for meaning.
Olson wanted to bring his message of wilderness salvation to people who would never think of reading a book by a Lewis Mumford or a Teilhard de Chardin or even a Loren Eiseley.41 Because of this goal, and because he gave far more weight to intuitive experience itself than to building a coherent framework of logically consistent statements about the nature of such experience, he rarely was explicit about the details of his wilderness theology. His vagueness sometimes caused his readers to misinterpret him, and quite likely will lead to disagreements among scholars, as in the case of John Muir.
Some of Olson's readers, for example, wrote letters asking if he was a pantheist. Sometimes, in fact, they accused him of it. "I'm amazed at your lack of understanding -- forgive me -- of the Bible and God's true relation as Creator," wrote one reader in 1957.42 But he was no pantheist. "God is not in nature," he told his son Robert; "God is in the human spirit."43 This is a classic humanist affirmation, and Sigurd Olson did embrace the main concepts of a perspective that has been called evolutionary humanism. But was he really a humanist?
Max Oelschlaeger, in his book The Idea of Wilderness, says that "all humanists are at base modernists."44 He describes modernism, in turn, as "a complicated concatenation of ideological presuppositions, including ideas that progress is inevitable, that the power of science and technology is unlimited, that humankind represents the apex of creation, and that the natural and cultural worlds can be understood on the basis of a machine metaphor."45
A cursory reading of Olson's writings could lead one to conclude that he did accept one of these humanist notions at the heart of current environmental problems, the belief that mankind is the highest product of evolution. Olson, along with the evolutionary humanists, believed that the development of culture distinguished mankind from other animals. To Olson, the development of love, in particular, was most important. "Granted," he wrote, "that creatures other than man show love and feeling not only for their young but for each other, only in man has it progressed to where it is a major force in his development and culture." Or, to phrase it in another way: "Man has come from the same earth stuff as other creatures, but through the accident of evolutional development we are the fortunate ones."46
Love was the most important element in Olson's environmentalism. "There can be no real, lasting land ethic without love," he said.47 But Olson's idea of love went beyond the anthropocentrism common to both Christian and humanistic world views. While he often spoke of stewardship, a concept that is based in love yet implies human domination over the rest of nature, his essential philosophy went deeper: "What civilization needs today," he wrote, "is a culture of sensitivity and tolerance and an abiding love of all creatures including mankind."48
The heart of Sigurd Olson's environmental ethic and of his wilderness theology was what Loren Eiseley described as "the expression of love projected beyond the species boundary by a creature born of Darwinian struggle, in the silent war under the tangled bank."49 To Olson, this meant love of all of the individual manifestations of creation within the context of an awareness of the evolutionary process itself. Behind that process, moreover, was an absolute mystery that was impossible for science to analyze, but that he had felt many times in the wilderness.
Olson called for a "new humanism,"50 but his wilderness theology might better be described as postmodernist, for it was based on the interconnectedness of all things and rejected the modernist dogma that the scientific method of rational analysis is the only legitimate means to truth. Olson was open to science, but believed that any real "knowing" could come about only by incorporating ideas and values from other paths of knowledge, such as aesthetics, religion, and intuition.
Oelschlaeger tentatively asks his readers to consider "the possibility of a postmodern hierophany." His description fits Olson's wilderness theology: "Such a revelation of deity is, for the postmodern mind, rooted in our awareness, however tenuous, of the reality of creative evolution on a cosmic scale, and therefore is also a revelation necessarily devoid of finalism -- be this personalistic or theistic." He adds that "the reality of creative evolution is fully consistent with the possibility of reawakening a primordial sense of the fundamental mystery and gratuitousness of human existence, some sense of the infinite and transcendent beyond merely human pupose and life."51
Introduction |
Early Years | "Flashes
of Insight" | Evolutionary Humanism and
the Emergent God
Racial Memory
One central element of Olson's wilderness theology has yet to be addressed: his belief that our instincts demand that we seek contact with wild nature. It was the earliest tenet of his wilderness creed. "We all have a pronounced streak of the primitive set deep in us," he wrote in 1928, "an instinctive longing that compels us to leave the confines of civilization and bury ourselves periodically in the most inaccessible spots we can penetrate."52 This statement, published in Field and Stream, was his first description of what he came to call "racial memory." It was a key idea in his article "Why Wilderness?" that American Forests published ten years later, and it drew Bob Marshall's attention. In his letter praising the article, Marshall asked Olson to explain what he meant in greater detail.53 Olson's response made it clear he believed this primitive attachment to nature had a biological origin:
When Olson first wrote about racial memory in 1928, he had not yet, according to all available evidence, read in any depth the writings of Emerson or Thoreau, of Muir or Burroughs or W.H. Hudson. The journal that he began keeping two years later, in January 1930, indicates that he had just started paying serious attention to these writers. So it's unlikely that he got the idea from any of them, even though all but Burroughs describe the same basic idea at one time or another.
Perhaps Sigurd got the idea from his school days, when he first came across the romantics and primitivists, writers such as Wordsworth and Coleridge and Whitman and Ibsen who reacted against the excessive rationality, industrialization, and urbanization of the world around them. It's also possible that he was influenced during his travels in the mid-1920s with fellow guide Jack Linklater. Part Cree Indian and part Scot, Linklater sometimes would stop suddenly on the trail or at a campsite and listen to what he claimed was the sound of Indian music or voices, despite the fact that he and Olson were far from other people. Olson was convinced that Linklater really heard something, and that the Indian's cultural closeness to nature was behind any explanation.55
No matter what the source, Olson gave far more emphasis to the idea of racial memory than any other leading wilderness movement thinker or nature writer; he mentioned it time and again in his speeches and writings. To Olson, the theory provided a biological basis for his justification of wilderness preservation on spiritual grounds. "Because man's subconscious is steeped in the primitive," he said, "looking to the wilderness actually means a coming home to him," and the impact of traveling into it is so strong that "reactions are automatically set in motion that bring in their train an uplift of the spirit." Wilderness visitors may experience "burning instants of truth when everything stands clear," or may realize life's purpose "after long periods of waiting." In other words, by returning to our biological roots in the wilderness, we can more easily open ourselves to spiritual experience and come to know our true selves.56
Bob Marshall, too much a rationalist despite his strong romantic streak, could not quite accept this fundamental piece of Olson's emerging wilderness doctrine. Eventually, however, Sigurd would find support in the writings of a prominent figure in the field of psychology, Carl Jung. As early as 1911, Jung had described a theory similar to Olson's "racial memory." He wrote, "Just as our bodies still retain vestiges of obsolete functions in many of our organs, so our minds, which have apparently outgrown these archaic impulses, still bear the mark of the evoloutionary stage we have traversed, and re-echo the dim bygone in dreams and fantasies." Jung argued that these impulses were manifested in a "collective unconscious," a common, inherited psyche that predisposes people to produce similar, archetypal ideas. He wrote that when people separate themselves from this instinctual nature, "they then experience the full impact of unconscious forces." To put it in Sigurd Olson's words, denying our instinctual need for close ties to nature "results inevitably in frayed nerves, loss of enthusiasm and appetite for present modes of existence." The key difference between Jung and Olson was that Jung believed we come into contact with the collective unconscious in our dreams, while Olson thought we could find it in the wilderness.57
Like Robert Marshall, Sigurd Olson emphasized the human benefits of wilderness. Marshall's biographer, James Glover, has said that Marshall's focus on aesthetics and human benefits of wilderness made him "not nearly as biocentric" as an Aldo Leopold or an Olaus Murie.58 Superficially, the same could be said of Olson. But there's an important difference between the perspectives of Olson and Marshall. Bob Marshall believed that wilderness was important to mental health in the modern world, but he was skeptical about Olson's idea of racial memory, and he was a humanist who did not believe in an emergent God. Olson's wilderness theology was, in essence, a sacramental vision of life and of evolution itself. If the whole of earth and the universe beyond is an extension of God, then humans are obliged to love all life, human and nonhuman, because all life is intertwined in the cosmic adventure. Olson's argument for wilderness preservation focused primarily on the human psychological and spiritual benefits, but he believed that these individual benefits would, in turn, lead to a more biocentric perspective. In wilderness we could rediscover the timeless, creative force of the universe, regain a sense of being part of that force, and, in so doing, glimpse "the land beyond the rim." With such an experience, it would be impossible to maintain a purely anthropocentric world view. To Olson, this was reason enough for preserving wilderness. "No longer can [wilderness] be saved from the standpoint of physical enjoyment but only as a stepping stone to cosmic understanding," he wrote in 1966. "In a world confused and strident, a world where all the old verities are being questioned, this is the final answer."59


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The introduction and story are a good opening to the theme of prayer. It identifies common views and uses of prayer that guests will easily relate to before the speaker moves on to a more detailed biblical and practical exploration Christian prayer.
Try to maintain this if you use your own examples.
It's an interesting fact to me that in Britain, which is a predominantly secular society, and rather sceptical at that, surveys have shown that 75 percent of the people pray at least once a week. I don't know what sort of prayers those are, but I know the kind of prayers that I prayed before I was a Christian. There were basically two types of prayer. One was the kind of formula prayer.
My grandmother taught me a little prayer, although she wasn't a churchgoer, when I was a child. It went something like this: `God bless Mummy and Daddy and Granny' and one or two others, and it ended `Make me a good boy. Amen.' And I prayed that right into my teens—it's rather sad, actually! But it was really a superstition—it was `I don't think I might sleep if I don't pray this prayer tonight.'
The other type of prayer that I prayed was a kind of `emergency' prayer —prayer in a crisis. If everything else had failed, then I would cry out to God. I heard about an atheist, a total unbeliever, who fell over a cliff. And as he fell over a cliff he managed to grab hold of a tuft of grass.
And he was just literally dangling 250 foot above rocks. And although he was an unbeliever, an atheist, he cried out to God. He said, `Oh God—if you're up there—help me!' and to his amazement he heard this voice saying, `I am here. Let go of the tuft of grass and trust me.' And he thought about it for a moment, he looked down, and then he said, `Is there anybody else up there?'
Talk point 1
Now, those were the kinds of prayers that I prayed before I was a Christian.
And the question I want to ask tonight is: What is Christian prayer? Christian prayer is the most important activity of our lives. It's the very purpose for which you and I were created: that is, to be in a relationship with the God who made us.
Would you like to turn to Ephesians, chapter 2, verse 18. St. Paul writes this:
Ephesians 2:18
For through him—that is, Jesus Christ—we both—that's Jews and Gentiles, the whole known world—have access to the Father by one Spirit.
First of all, Christian prayer is to the Father. Jesus taught us to pray Our Father in heaven. And in that expression we have this extraordinary combination of what the theologians would call the `transcendence and the immanence of God'.
First of all, the transcendence. In heaven—the greatness of God. When we pray, we are speaking to the Creator of this entire universe. Do you know that our sun (S-U-N) is one of 100,000 million stars in our galaxy. And our galaxy is one of 100,000 million galaxies. I read somewhere that for every grain of sand on the beach there are a million stars. And in a throwaway line in the book of Genesis the writer says: he made the stars also—`just like that!'—billions and billions of stars. That's the transcendence of God in heaven.
But—this is the amazing thing—he's also Our father. He's immanent, he's right here now. And the extraordinary thing is that we can have a relationship with him which is like a parent with a child. And Jesus called God `Abba', which is an Aramaic word, which is left in its original because it's virtually untranslatable. It means something like `Daddy' or `dear Father'. And Jesus said we could have the same kind of relationship with him that Jesus had—that intimacy, that closeness. So Christian prayer is to the Father, who loves us intimately.
This is a key illustration of how Jesus gives us direct access to the Father.
If the example of President Lincoln does not work in your context / culture, try to think of a similar example that does work and that people will relate to.
Second thing is it's through the Son - Jesus.
I read of something that happened during the American Civil War. As a result of a family tragedy, a soldier had been given permission to have a hearing with the President, because he wanted to request exemption from military service. But when he arrived at the White House, he was refused entry and he was sent away, and he went to sit in a nearby park. And as he was sitting in this park, a young boy came across to him and just remarked about how unhappy he looked. And the soldier found himself pouring out his heart to this young guy.
And eventually the boy said, `Look, come with me,' and the dejected soldier went back to the White House, they went round the back. None of the guards seemed to stop them—even the generals and the high-ranking government officials stood to attention and let them pass through—and the soldier was amazed. Finally they came to the presidential office. Without knocking they went into the west wing, the young boy opened the door of the Oval Office, walked straight in, and there was Abraham Lincoln, standing there in conversation with the Secretary of State. And the moment they walked in, Abraham Lincoln turned to the boy and he said, `Todd, what can I do for you?' And Todd said, `Dad, this soldier needs to talk to you.' He had access, through the son.
And that's what Paul says, is we have access to God through the Son, through Jesus. Jesus takes us into the presence of Almighty God. And although we have no right of ourselves to go into God's presence, through Jesus, through what he's done for us on the Cross, through the blood of Jesus, we have access to the Father.
So Christian prayer is to the Father, through the Son, by one Spirit. Sometimes people say, `I really wouldn't know how to pray.' And that's what Paul says, St. Paul says. He says: We don't know how to pray… but the Holy Spirit helps us in our weakness.
Alpha Weekend or Alpha Day
And that's why the Weekend is always so exciting: because the Weekend is all about the Holy Spirit, who comes to live within us. And when the Holy Spirit is living within us, he helps us to pray.
So when we pray, the whole Trinity is involved: the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. That's why it's so exciting.
Talk point 2
So why should we pray? Would you like to turn to Matthew 6:6. Jesus says this:
Matthew 6:6
"But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you."
Why should we pray? First of all, because Jesus prayed. And he taught us to do the same. He doesn't start here by saying `If you pray' but he says When you pray—he assumes that we will pray. In a way it's very natural for human beings to pray. We were created for this relationship.
And then, because it's how we develop a relationship with God. All relationships are based on communication. Many marriages break down because of lack of communication; families sometimes break down through lack of communication. But with good communication, the relationship grows and flourishes.
And it's this relationship with God for which we are created. And in this relationship we find the very meaning and purpose of our lives.
And then Jesus says when we pray God will reward us. Sometimes people say, `Well, isn't that inappropriate, to be looking for a reward?' Well, of course there are inappropriate rewards: money for sex is an inappropriate reward. But there are also appropriate rewards. If somebody's working hard for their exams, passing them, getting a qualification, is an appropriate reward. If two people are in love, marriage is a kind of fulfilment and reward for love.
C.S. Lewis put it like this: `The proper rewards are not simply tacked onto the activity for which they're given; but are the activity itself in consummation.'
So what are the rewards of prayer? When we pray, we begin to experience God's love for us, his presence with us. We begin to experience joy. So many people are looking for joy in all kinds of areas, and often when they get there it doesn't satisfy, it leaves people feeling empty. But the psalmist says: In his presence, in the presence of God, there is fullness of joy.
So often we go around carrying guilt and anxiety and fear, and Paul says: Don't be anxious about anything, but in everything, by prayer and petition with thanksgiving, present your requests to God, and the peace of God, which passes all understanding, will keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. As we pray, this thirst that we all have, spiritual thirst, is satisfied. The spiritual hunger is met.
But prayer not only changes us; it also changes situations. I don't think it's possible to prove to a cynic or a sceptic that there is a God through giving lots and lots of illustrations of answered prayer. But I have found it amazing to see the way in which God answers prayer.
Try to think of your own personal examples of when you tried praying and how you learned that God listens.
I remember when I had first come to faith in Christ, I thought, `This prayer thing, maybe I'll give it a go.' So it just so happened that I needed—I was at university and I needed to get a lift to London. I had a party I was going to, and I think there was a train strike or something. And so I thought, `I'll try it.' So I just prayed a very quick prayer. I said, `Lord, please could I have a lift to London.' A few minutes later there was a knock at the door: someone said, `Oh, hello, Nicky. Do you want a lift to London?' I thought, `That's funny! Must be a coincidence.'
But I thought, `Well, I'll try something else.' These are all just trivial things, but the next thing I tried, I thought, `Well, I'll try something a little less trivial. I'll try praying for my mother.' I knew that she had a problem sleeping, and she'd suffered from insomnia for a very long time. And so I started to pray for her. I didn't tell her I was praying, but I started to pray. For a week I prayed for her to sleep well. And at the end of the week I said, `How are you sleeping?' She said, `Do you know, it's amazing—I've slept so well for the last week.' I thought, `That's funny!'
And as I've gone through now, I guess it's over three decades, of praying and writing down prayers in a kind of prayer diary, and going back over them and ticking them when they're answered, the cumulative effect of all those answered prayers leads me to believe that prayer does actually change situations.
Talk Point 3
So does God always answer prayer? I believe the answer is yes, but we don't always get what we want. For a start, God can't act in a way that's inconsistent with his nature. In other words, you can't pray that 2 + 2 will equal anything other than 4, because it can't—that's a mathematical system that is set up, and that's how it works.
We all have sympathy, I think, with the small boy's desperate and doomed prayer emerging from the geography exam, praying: `Oh dear God, please make Paris the capital of Turkey!' It can't work.
But also the New Testament tells us that there are some things that can stop our prayers being effective. For example, unconfessed sin—things that are wrong in our life can cause a barrier between us and God. Don't misunderstand me: of course, Jesus is the friend of sinners. All of us have things that are wrong in our life, and if that stopped us praying, none of us would be able to pray. But Jesus on the Cross died for us so that we could be totally forgiven. But if we choose to reject that and wander off, like the Prodigal Son, away from the Father's house, then we're no longer in that relationship.
Or if we plan to set out on a course of rebellion against God. The psalmist said: If I cherished sin in my heart, the Lord would not have heard me.
Or if we have totally wrong motives for what we're asking for. The apostle James says: You don't have, because you don't ask God. And when you ask you don't receive, because you ask with wrong motives—that you may spend what you get on your pleasures. So in other words, if we're praying, `Oh Lord, I want to win the Lottery!' there's no guarantee that that prayer will be answered!
Also there may be things that we just get wrong—we misunderstand what God's will is for us. When we pray, God promises to answer; but he says —and it's just over the page—how much more will your Father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask him!
So sometimes God will say—the answer to the prayer will be 'No', just like with a parent. If a couple of two-year-olds pick up carving knives because they want to have a sword-fight, the parent might say 'No!' In fact, you'd hope that the parent would say 'No!' Not because they don't love the child; it's just because they do love the child, that they know a little bit more than the two-year-old knows, and they know that's not a good idea.
And God sometimes says 'Wait', but sometimes he says 'No' if, as John Stott puts it, `the things are not good in themselves, or not good for us or for others, directly or indirectly, immediately or ultimately.'
Use personal examples here.
Sometimes, certainly in my own experience, we do understand later why he said 'No'. I can think of a couple of things in my life where I have prayed desperately, I've just prayed and prayed and prayed, mainly to do with a job, my work. You know, I can think of times when I've prayed and prayed and prayed for a particular job or a particular place at university to enable me to do something.
And both those times God shut the door. And now when I look back, I am so glad that he did shut those doors. Because if he hadn't shut those doors, I wouldn't be able to do what I'm doing now. Now, you may wish he hadn't shut those doors! But I personally love what I'm doing now, and I'm so thankful to him for shutting those doors.
I think sometimes in terms of relationships, as well, he shuts doors. I heard about Billy Graham's wife, Ruth Graham, who's been happily married to Billy Graham now for over fifty years—she told an audience in Minneapolis, she said: `God has not always answered my prayers. If he had, I would have married the wrong man, several times!'
So sometimes we look back and realise, understand, why God didn't answer that particular prayer in the way that we had hoped he would. But I think sometimes we're never going to know in this life why he didn't answer the prayer in the way that we'd hoped.
Try to use personal examples of an equally moving story where you had to cry out to God in prayer, even though you didn't understand the circumstances.
You may replace the word 'squash' with another sport, eg tennis, if squash is not well known in your culture.
I think of an occasion a few years ago when one of my very closest friends, Mick Hawkins, aged 42. We were playing squash together, he played a fantastic forehand shot, he turned to play the backhand and he just dropped dead of a heart attack. And he was one of my closest friends; he had six children—one of whom actually is helping on this course tonight. And at that moment, I have never cried out to God more than I cried out at that moment, that God would heal him, bring him back to life; that he would not die. But he did. And I don't know why.
I remember five o'clock the following morning. Obviously, I couldn't sleep. I went out on the beach and I was walking along the beach, and I was crying out to the Lord, saying, `Lord, you know, I just cannot understand why you allowed this to happen. But,' I said, `I'm not going to stop praying. I'm going to carry on trusting you for the rest of my life, even though I don't understand.'
And as I look back in my prayer diary over the years, there are some prayers that are still unticked, unanswered. But there are loads more that have been answered.
Talk point 4
So how do we pray? Prayer is a relationship. There's no set of rules in a relationship—all relationships are different. I suppose one key thing is honesty—God wants us to be honest with him, to say what really is on our heart. Not to come with kind of religious jargon and stuff, but he really wants to know what's on our hearts. He wants us to be real with him.
So there's no set pattern. But sometimes it's helped, just sometimes like in a meeting it's good to have an agenda. And in a meeting with God sometimes it's good to have a kind of agenda. Not that you always stick to that; but a kind of pattern.
This acronym to spell ACTS may not translate into other languages. If you are translating you may leave out the text in red.
When I started to pray I used to use the acronym ACTS: that stands for
A for Adoration—just worshipping God, expressing our love, our praise to God.
C is for Confession—asking forgiveness for the things that maybe we've done wrong and things that we need cleansing for.
T is for Thanksgiving—thanking God for all his blessings, all the good things that he's given us; maybe looking back through the day before and thanking him for answered prayer.
And then Supplication—which is asking for things for ourselves and for others. If you want to know more about that, there's a little bit about that in the little booklet Why Jesus?
But now, most commonly I use the pattern of the Lord's Prayer. If you'd like to turn just across the page to Matthew 6:9, this is what Jesus said. He gave us a model. He said:
"This, then, is how you should pray: `Our Father in heaven—that's, for me, normally just a question of basking in the presence of God, enjoying his love, thanking him. I look back the day before and all the blessings of life. His goodness, his grace, his forgiveness, his kindness, his love.
…hallowed be your name—that's praying that God's name will be honoured again in our society. As you look around at our society, so often the name of Jesus is a swear word. And it's a prayer that once again Jesus' name would be honoured in our lives, in our families, in our workplace, in our society.
…your kingdom come—God's kingdom is God's rule and reign. And that's a prayer that God's kingdom would come in our own lives, in the lives of our families.
Try to replace this with your own story about someone who was faithful and perseverant in prayer. If you don't have your own example you may use this story.
I read of one youngish mother called Monica who was a Christian woman, and she was having real problems with her rebellious teenage son. He was lazy, he was bad-tempered, a cheat, a liar, a thief. And later on, though outwardly he became very respectable as a lawyer, his life was dominated by worldly ambition and a desire to make money. His morals were loose; he lived with several different women and had a son by one of them. And at one stage he joined some weird religious sort of cult and adopted all kinds of strange practices.
And throughout this time this mother just continued to pray for him: your kingdom come in his life. And one day the Lord gave her a vision, and she just wept as she prayed, because she saw the light of Jesus Christ on him, and his face was just smiling at her with great joy. And that encouraged her to keep on praying. But it was nine years before her son finally gave his life to Christ, at the age of 28.
That man's name was Augustine, Saint Augustine, converted in 386 AD, ordained in 391, bishop in 396, perhaps the greatest theologian of the church. And St. Augustine always attributed his conversion to the prayers of his mother. His mother's prayers literally changed the course of history.
Matthew 6:9-13
…your kingdom come, your will be done—that's not resignation but a desire to see God's will in our lives, God's will which is good and pleasing and perfect.
…Give us this day our daily bread—I love to go through the day that's coming up and just ask God's help in all the different things that I'm involved in. Give us this day our daily bread. God is interested in all of our lives. God loves you. He's interested in the things that you're concerned about, just like any parent would be concerned about the things that their children were concerned about.
…Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors—forgive the things that we've done wrong, in other words, as we forgive others. There's this kind of virtuous circle in the teaching of Jesus that the more we understand that we are forgiven, the more that we want to forgive. When we know that Jesus has died for us, as we were looking at on the second week, that all our sins have been forgiven, we can't hold anything against anybody else any more. And so forgiving people is not a way to earn forgiveness, but it's a sign that we have been forgiven. Because if we really experience God's forgiveness, we will want to forgive everybody, however hard it may be—and sometimes it is hard.
Sometimes people say, `Well, why did Jesus teach us to pray Forgive us our sins, or debts or whatever word it is in the translation, when we're already forgiven through the Cross?' That's what we were looking at on Week 2, wasn't it, that God totally forgives us because of the Cross. Why do we need to carry on asking for forgiveness? Well, Jesus enacted a kind of parable, which I think is very relevant to this.
At the Last Supper what happened was that Jesus was washing the disciples' feet. And he came to wash Peter's feet. And Peter said, `No, no, no, Lord! You must never wash my feet!' And Jesus said, `Unless I wash your feet, you have no part of me.' So Peter said, in effect, `Well, in that case, why don't you wash my whole body!' And Jesus said, `A person who's had a bath needs only to wash his feet. His whole body is clean.'
When you come to Christ, your whole body is clean, you're totally forgiven. But as we go through the world, just as in the ancient world they picked up dirt on their feet, we, spiritually speaking, pick up dirt on our feet. And we need that sort of daily cleansing: `Lord, forgive the stuff, the bad stuff in my life. Cleanse me.'
Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one—God doesn't tempt us, but he is in control of how much we're exposed to temptation. And all of us have weak areas, whether it's fear, or selfish ambition, greed, pride, lust, gossiping, cynicism etc. And if we know our weakness, we can pray for protection against it, as well as taking practical steps to avoid unnecessary temptation. We'll look at that in much more detail when we look at the whole subject of resisting evil.
Talk point 5
So when should we pray? Well, the New Testament encourages us to pray always. Pray in the Spirit, Paul says, on all occasions with all kinds of prayers and requests. You don't have to be in a special building like this to pray. You can pray as you walk down the street, you can pray on your bike, you can pray on the tube. You don't have to pray out loud—in fact, if you're praying on the tube it might be a help not to pray out loud! But you can pray in your heart.
Give a similar personal example of how you pray.
But I think it's a help, certainly I've found it a help, to have set times also. I love to start the day. I always think that whatever you start the day with, whatever those thoughts are, the mind tends to grind on them all the way through the day! And to start the day with maybe reading the Bible, which we'll look at, and praying, is a wonderful way to start, I find.
And then with others. Jesus said, I tell you the truth, if two of you on earth agree about anything you ask for, it will be done for you by my Father in heaven. In other words, he says there's a special power when we get together and pray together. And that's one of the things, hopefully, which will happen gradually in the small groups during the course. As you get to know one another and trust one another—it may not happen tonight, but it may happen later on in the course that you start to pray together.
This story is a good way of breaking the ice with guests who may be scared to pray out loud in a group. Try to use a personal example.
If you're anything like me, the first time you do it can be a very daunting experience. I remember the very first time that I prayed with somebody else. I had been a Christian for about, I think, maybe, I don't know, two or three weeks. And we went on—I think we were on a skiing holiday, actually, with my two closest friends, Nicky and Sila Lee. There were just three of us in the room, and I think it was Sila who suggested praying together. And we'd never done it before, but we thought we'd have a go. And we prayed for about two minutes—probably quite long gaps also in that two minutes! And at the end of it I took off my shirt and it was wringing wet, I was so nervous just praying out loud for the first time! But it was a wonderful experience.
The heart of Christianity is this relationship with the God who made us.
Finish the talk with an uplifting, moving and encouraging testimony of answered prayer. You may adapt this story or replace with your own.
The text in red may be deleted.
And over the years, as I have said, I've kept this kind of prayer diary. And some of the prayers are ticked and they've been answered and I'm so thankful to God for doing it; others sometimes remain unticked.
I remember one occasion when I was speaking here on a Sunday night, and I got home and the telephone rang, and it was a man who said, `I was there at the evening service,' and he said, "I was up in the gallery listening to what you said.' And he said, `I'd love to meet.' So we arranged to meet at, I think, a bistro over here. His name is James Wynn. He was then an actor. For five years he was the English teacher in the TV series Grange Hill. At the time, he was quite well known, he'd made a lot of money.
And as we talked, I saw someone who in one sense had everything. In addition to all those, he was very good looking, he was very charming, and he had married a very beautiful woman. He told me over lunch that they'd been married for three years and then a year earlier she'd left him. And he said he was absolutely devastated. He said he was so hurt he simply could not forgive her.
And as I listened to his story, I was deeply moved by it. There were tears pouring down my face as I listened to him speaking. And at the end of the lunch I said, `Shall we go over to the church, and maybe we could pray.' He wasn't a Christian, he wasn't a churchgoer, but we sat in a room under here and he prayed a prayer of repentance for the things that he'd done wrong that had contributed to the breakdown of his marriage, and he gave his life to Christ.
And he received God's forgiveness. And when he experienced God's forgiveness, he found he was able to forgive Anna, his wife, who'd left him. And he wrote to her, telling her that he'd forgiven her. And he said he would love to try and work at getting the marriage back together. But she said no, she wasn't interested. And in fact he was only able to communicate with her through her lawyer.
And I said to him, `Would you mind if I wrote to her myself?' So I wrote her a letter inviting her to come and see Pippa and I. And to my amazement she said yes, and she came round. And she was the most lovely, lovely person, and we talked for about an hour. And I said to her, `Look, James has changed. He realised that he's been responsible for a lot of what's happened in your marriage, and he would love just to meet with you for half an hour, just so that you can see how much he's changed.' Two days later I got a letter from her, and she said: `No, I've made up my mind. I don't want to see him ever again.'
And we had prayed so much for her to change her mind. James was devastated, and we all carried on praying. Then there came a moment where the divorce papers came through to James to sign. And at that moment James was in a complete dilemma, because the last thing in the world that he wanted was a divorce. So he went away for a period of two or three days to pray, and I think he actually fasted as well, just to pray and ask God what he should do.
And at the end of that time he felt that, although it was the last thing in the world that he wanted was for them to be divorced, he felt that he shouldn't resist what she clearly wanted; and that, if she wanted a divorce, that he was not going to stand in the way of giving her her freedom. And so he consented to a divorce, and the Decree Nisi eventually went through.
But he carried on praying and praying, we carried on praying and praying and praying.
And then Billy Graham came to London to speak at Wembley Stadium. And James by this stage—this was maybe eighteen months later—he'd given up. And what he was really more concerned about was that she should come to know Christ, she should come to know all the wonderful things that he'd experienced in his relationship with Jesus Christ. And so he sent her two tickets for her and the man that she was living with to go and hear Billy Graham. But she sent them back.
Billy Graham decided to stay on for one more Saturday evening event at Wembley Stadium—the earlier events, I think, were at Earl's Court, but this one was at Wembley Stadium. And so James thought, `Well, I'll just send her two more tickets. What is there to lose?' On the Wednesday their Decree Nisi of divorce had come through. So I think when she got the invitation on Thursday, she thought, `Well, the marriage is over anyway, we've got the Decree Nisi of divorce. What's the harm?' So she rang up and she said her partner couldn't come but she would like to come. So they met for lunch and they went on Saturday night to hear Billy Graham speak in Wembley Arena.
The following morning, I was speaking at our sister church in St. Paul's Onslow Square, and just before I got up to speak I looked round—I was sitting at the front—I looked round, and I saw James and Anna walking into the church together. And I had never seen them together before in my life. And they came and they sat next to me in the front of the church.
And I was just dying to find out what had happened the night before! But I didn't like to sort of say to her, you know, `Did you go forward?' You know, Billy Graham always calls people forward to commit their lives to Christ. I didn't like to ask her that question. But I knew that it had been raining very hard the night before and that all the seats were in covered stands, but that when Billy Graham called people forward he called them out onto the pitch, where it was pouring with rain. So I just said to her, `Did you get wet last night?' And she said, `Yes, it was pouring with rain out on the pitch!'
And at the end of the service I invited them to come to lunch, and they told me what had happened—that when Billy Graham invited people to come forward, Anna ran forward! And there was a counsellor there, and apparently this is what they do at a Billy Graham mission, in terms of the kind of questions the counsellors ask, they say, you know, `Are you a Christian?' and she said no. They said, `Do you want to give your life to Christ?' and she said yes. And they said, `Well, did you come with a friend?' And she said yes. And then they said, `Well, is your friend a Christian?' and she said yes. They said, `Would you like to go and get your friend?' She said no! So she said, `Well, who is your friend?' She said, `It's my husband.' So she said, `Oh great, well, why don't you go and get him!' She said, `You don't understand. Until tonight I hadn't seen him for two and a half years.' And at that point the counsellor—whhh!—started crying as well! A lot of tears in this story!
And as they told me this story of what had happened, it was extraordinary, and Anna decided that at that moment she knew that she wanted to leave what was actually an adulterous relationship and to go back to her husband. And she did. Because they'd already had the Decree Nisi—they hadn't had the Decree Absolute, so the divorce was not complete—but at that stage you have to get the Decree Nisi un-Decree Nisi'd, so you have to go back to court. And they went to court and they told the judge the whole story. And the judge said, `This is amazing!' He said, `You know, I sit here all day listening to terrible things that have happened in people's lives, and this is wonderful!' The court usher was in floods of tears!
And, you know, that's several years ago now and they've been so happily married. They have two wonderful daughters. The oldest of their daughters, Abigail, is my goddaughter. And every time I see them I'm so deeply moved by the way in which God answered those prayers which we had prayed over and over and over again. And I remember the next day I wrote in my prayer diary, and I wrote this:
Praise you, Lord, so much for yesterday, the best day that I can remember. Praise you, Lord, for your greatness and power and love. Thank you so much for Anna Wynn going to Billy Graham. Thank you that she went forward. Thank you that she stayed the night with James. Thank you that she prayed the prayer. Thank you that she's decided to go back to James. Thank you for her and James coming to lunch afterwards. Thank you for the joy of seeing them together again. Thank you so much that you're a God who answers prayer. Lord, I love you so much. I commit myself back to you, to serve you with all of my heart, all of my life. Is anything too hard for the Lord?
May we pray.
Father, thank you so much that you are a God who answers prayer. And Lord, I pray that you would help each one of us here to grow in our relationship with you. In Jesus' name, amen.

subset: commoncrawl


text: We've set the above video to start right before a fan accidentally smacks Usher in the face with her heel, but we recommend watching the previous two and a half minutes as well. While lots of women would probably love to be dry humped by Usher on a couch in the middle of Madison Square Garden, we doubt many would seem as comfortable as this lucky fan did, twisting, grinding and laughing as Usher sang "Trading Places" and worked his way through the Kama Sutra. The pair even played the mishap off like pros, with Usher cracking "we play rough in the bedroom! We kick each other in the face all the time" while she attended to his boo-boo. And yes, she still got a parting kiss.


text:
Carols were sung in Latin and in German by boys
Posted: December 27, 2012|
IN this season of carols, my mind goes back to the war years with Derby School at Amber Valley Camp and the last Sunday of term.
The whole school – headmaster, masters, mistresses, matron and the great mass of boys – would march from the camp to Brackenfield Church, a mile or so away, for our carol service.
Nothing particularly different in that, I hear you say, but it was the tradition of the school to sing "Oh come all ye faithful" in Latin and "Silent Night" in German.
I have no idea how far back this tradition started but it was second nature to us boys. It was many years before I realised they also had English words.
Even today, my automatic reaction on hearing the music is to start singing in Latin or German. I soon run out of memory though!
We occasionally had problems when some horrid little boy forgot to pump the organ.
Tony Jones


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Food Terms that should be banned from the media
"Artisan," like the paper-wrapped bread available at Walmart? I thought it was "artesian," like an aquifer. My bad.
I love food and I love feeding people and I love growing my own.
"Artisan," like the paper-wrapped bread available at Walmart? I thought it was "artesian," like an aquifer. My bad.
Home Run Inn.
Whatever you bring, make sure it's in sealed containers that can be refrigerated or frozen, and that the containers and food are microwaveable. He/she might not have much of an appetite right now, but whatever you bring will be available when their hunger returns.
A fruit platter of watermelon, cantaloupe, bananas, grapes, along with some crackers and cheeses and a box of assorted Popsicles would be very welcome, along with your pear sorbet. If you can find a recipe for sweetened ginger tea, bring a jug of that, too. (I use a thumb-sized piece of ginger, coarsely chopped, and let it steep for about three minutes (off the heat) in about three cups of water that's been brought to a boil. I add a tablespoon of sugar. It helps calm a churning stomach.)
Not too many people can stomach any dairy during treatments, except for maybe a taste of yogurt or a Fudgesicle. Most people complain that it coats their tongues and throats, but everyone's different. My best friend drink mug after mug of room temp Campbell's tomato soup made with cream, but mostly she was too tired to eat.
Tacoma Boys rocks! A thousand wines, incredible cowboy steaks, nice cheeses, un-ordinary pasta, and they practically force you to taste all the produce so that by the time you've finished shopping, you've eaten an entire fruit and/or vegetable salad.
Couverture chocolate is used for dipping, coating, molding and garnishing. It is not used for baking or pastries, which would be like mixing Beluga caviar with StarKist tuna.
There aren't too many companies that make couverture chocolate. Some of the brands readily available in the U.S. are Callebaut, Guittard, Lindt, Ghirardelli, Scharffen Berger and Valrhona. I've used all of them except Lindt because they don't sell in bulk.
I use Callebaut, Valrhona and Scharffen Berger ($11 to $14 a pound at my local market) most of the time for truffles, ganache and dipping--things where chocolate is the predominant texture/ingredient/flavor. These three brands taste different from each other, and they're all incredible good. Plus, I just sound so hoity-toity when I say their names.
For baking--when the chocolate flavor will be cut with butter, eggs, flour and sugar, I use whatever is handy, of good quality but a bit cheaper, which would be Guittard and Ghirardelli. . .and good old Hershey.
Here are some online sources:
2 lbs. for $12
Jacques Torres
I've only ordered once from Jacques Torres: I just had to use his chips to make his chocolate chip cookies, and yes, it was worth the splurge.
It's a lot easier to find good chocolate these days, even at run-of-the-mill grocery stores.
chiff, your linguini makes me want to dive right into the bowl. Just beautiful, better than some magazine photos.
I made nine loaves of raisin bread to give away. Wouldn't you know, two neighbors went away for the holiday, so I was "stuck" with those loaves. It wasn't so much the buttered raisin toast we had with breakfast for four days: it was more a problem of me eating my slices slathered with cream cheese.
The raisin bread's gone and my jeans still fit, albeit a little more snugly. Fresh fruit for dessert from now on!
I hope your stocking was the only thing that got stuffed.
cybercita, here's a bit of restaurant first aid:
Wash the cut well.
Dry it gently but well; try to keep it from dripping.
Dollop it with some Neosporin Plus (or the generic equivalent--make sure it contains an anesthetic).
Wait a couple of minutes, then gently dab away the excess.
Smother the cut with Super Glue.
Wait for it to dry.
Cover it with a large Band-Aid, positioning it in a way that prevents the cut from reopening.
Wear a finger condom AND a disposable glove.
No blood-borne pathogens in anyone's food, no nasty bits to infect your cut, and you're back to prepping and cooking in no time.
Kenji, you deserve the ovation I received from my kids after serving the rib roast cooked to your specs.
I used to do the high heat sear/low heat finishing. I would get the center rarest cut and the people who preferred well-done would get the end cuts. (How I gave birth to those people, I'll never know--they sure didn't get my DNA.)
This year, after the rest period, I sliced off the two ends and pan-fried them for the two well-done sons. The rest of us thoroughly enjoyed the most (and moist) red meat ever on a slab of rib.
Thank you for giving my kids (and grandkids) another reason to idolize me.
I vote for dbcurrie's multi-ethnic anything except Italian, Mexican and Chinese. How about something Anthony Bourdain has eaten on one of his shows? A Cajun/Creole theme would be fun, too.
A green party: I have a nephew who spent a year of his early childhood not eating anything unless it was green. He's normal now.
A Democrat party: All the food has to include fruits, nuts or flakes, or has been made in a crock pot. Ba-dum-dum. Hey, it's okay for me to say that--I am one.
When I was 14, my dad made me a strawberry shortcake with a leftover dinner biscuit. It was heaven.
Christmas Eve dinner for me and son #5: arroz caldo (gingery Filipino chicken rice soup, one of our tradition), pork tacos and fresh-baked cookies. Son #4 returned from his wife's grandmother's house with a giant platter of very hard and stale green and pink Rice Krispies treats with sprinkles on top, burnt PB sandwich cookies filled with green powdered sugar icing, some decent peanut butter fudge and a bowl of watery fruit salad (red and green apples, halved grapes, papaya chunks, canned pineapple and walnuts in instant vanilla pudding). Before the grandkids had taken off their coats and put away their shoes, DIL had already tossed everything except the fudge.
Snacks while waiting to see Rudolph's nose (there's always a plane flying somewhere on Christmas Eve, so we look out the front window and scan the skies for a jet's red light--Rudolph's nose--so the kids know Santa's near and they have to hurry up and go to sleep because everyone knows he doesn't bring presents if you're awake; we've spotted Rudolph's nose for 30 years now, through fog and cloud cover in IL and WA): hot cocoa with candy cane stirrers, big soft ginger cookies, those hard candy rainbow ribbons and chocolate-filled candy straws.
Christmas Day brunch for two grandkids, two sons and a DIL: I made a giant frittata using American fries, ham, red pepper, swiss, mushrooms and green onion. Raisin toast, apple turnovers and fruit on the side.
Dinner for 12: The perfect prime rib (THANK YOU, KENJI!!), cheesy twice-baked potato casserole (lumpy mashed baked potatoes, cream cheese, shredded sharp cheddar, butter, cream, green onion tops, bacon, S&P), crisp-tender broccoli (salpico, Na-na-Na, Na-na-Naaa), fresh green beans with bacon and red pepper flakes and sliced almonds, popovers, a run-of-the-mill tossed salad with lemon and olive oil dressing, key lime cheesecake (made with bottled juice) and Perfect Party Cake (Dorie Greenspan's recipe using seedless raspberry jam between the layers). There's a couple of slices of cake left, a small portion of cheesecake, and a couple of plates of cookies and candies leftover.
We're full of merry and bright! On to the New Year!
Home Run Inn, Chicago and suburbs. Best crust in the world--it actually has flavor. Haven't been back to Chicago in three years. I think I'm due for a field trip soon.
Winter ham: Seedless toasted rye, butter on one side, cream cheese on the other.
Summer ham: A sturdy while roll with cole slaw.
Bone-in ribeye, medium.
Isn't it wonderful that we're all able to make the people around us feel comfortable enough to express their appreciation by "talking" with their rear ends?
And I'm guilty of criticizing the food on other people's plates. Not outsiders, just my sons', as in "I don't see anything green on your plate." Jeez, the youngest is 25, the oldest 39--you'd think I'd get over it already.
I don't mind listening to puke stories--most of them are really funny or so gross that I can't help but laugh--but just don't tell those stories at the dinner table. Likewise, poop stories.
That wasn't cheesy, winternutt. It's pretty funny, in a Ben & Jerry sorta way.
Psst. . .Pass it on.
I'm with gastronomeg. It would be awfully hard to choose one, but if I absolutely had to, I would choose from the Irish or the English (I don't think Jamie Oliver can single-handedly rescue the entire nation from boiled-to-smithereens vegetables) or whatever the Scandinavian country is that invented lutefisk.
I feel so bad for all of you! Like Laura J, my experiences have been with lousy service rather than bad food. Or the quality or quantity of the food wasn't worth the price. I've had "meh" but not "ewwwwww."
Two of my sons love those Jack in the Box tacos. Gaack. Where did I go wrong?
Po-Boy's in Puyallup, WA and Branks in Sumner, WA--both smokers are in the parking lots, so you can watch. And sniff!
Disaster--Christmas in my first house and I was making goodie plates for my new neighbors. I made a double batch of pecan sandies and it's a good thing I sampled one. I forgot the sugar! I can still remember the awful taste of baked flour and butter. Disaster averted--I was able save the rest of the dough by blending powdered sugar in the remainder of the dough.
Triumph--Making cucidata from Uncle Rome's family recipe and hearing him tell my cousins, "These are like I remember, only better."
Not cookies, but we love yogurt pie when it's hot out. It's just half yogurt and half whipped cream sweetened with a little powdered sugar, in a graham cracker crust. Freeze it, let it sit at room temp for 10 or 15 minutes, cut and serve. You can turn the filling into frozen yogurt bars, too.
The first time my mom made me a peanut butter and bacon sandwich ranks right up there with the first time I smoked a pork shoulder for pulled pork.
Thanks to finewinendine for starting the Christmas cookie topic. I was going to add the candies I make for gifts, but thought it should be another topic.
So. . .I make Peanut Butter Balls (I think they're also called "Buckeyes" and "Globbies"). I think it's my #1 most-requested recipe. (A stick of butter, two cups peanut butter, 2 1/2 cups powdered sugar all mixed together with two cups of Rice Krispies. Roll into balls and dip in melted chocolate coating (sold as Almond Bark for about $2.50). Makes 50-75, depending on size, for about $6. For Christmas, make a double batch, one chocolate and one pastel pink and green by melting white chocolate and coloring it with Wilton pastes.
If there's any melted chocolate left, I dip pretzel rods and sprinkle with Christmas sprinkles.
Homemade Mounds--a stick of melted butter, a can of sweetened condensed milk, a bag of coconut and four cups of powdered sugar mixed together and rolled into 2" logs, then dipped into melted chocolate coating. About $8.50 for 100 candies.
Truffles, using any recipe, and dipping them into tempered Scharffen Berger. No one gets these or the chocolate cherries unless they're related.
Chocolate Covered Cherries--they're not hard to make, but it takes a lot of time.
Male Fudge (with nuts)--the recipe for No-Fail Fudge from the jar of Marshmallow Fluff. Female Fudge (without nuts)--the Better Homes and Gardens recipe from the red-plaid book. Peanut Butter Fudge, also from the fine folks at Marshmallow Fluff.
Divinity. I have six recipes. Sometimes I get it right. I keep trying. Almond Bark and peanut, almond, cashew or sunflower seed brittle.
I start the candy-making two weeks before Christmas because they stay fresh-tasting a lot longer than cookies do. I don't start the cookies until the week of Christmas, when I'll make two or three batches a night or as needed.
Any other sweet gift ideas?
My mom was from the Philippines and didn't move to the states until 1955, when I was three. One of the first recipes she wrote down was for Kolacky, which she pronounced "Ko-Lots-Key." I have her hand-written recipe, which I would never pass along because the cookies were so tough and hard that they couldn't be eaten unless they were dunked in hot tea. It calls for a half-cup of cornstarch to be added with the flour, and the dough is rolled into logs, wrapped in wax paper and chilled, then sliced, topped with fruit filling and baked. Bad, bad recipe, but she made them every year for Christmas until I started baking.
When I was in my mid-teens, I got confused when I found recipes titled "Kolacky" that resulted in fat puffy yeasty buns topped with fruit, or recipes for flat brioche-type pastries that look like Danishes and recipes for rich buttery cookies with cream cheese or cottage cheese in the dough, which is cut into squares, topped with fruit filling, has two corners pinched together before baking and is dusted with powdered sugar after baking. There are recipes for European, Moravian, Bohemian, Polish, New York, Texas and Oklahoma kolacky.
No one I've asked agrees what a kolacky is, much less how to spell or pronounce it. Is it Koh-lotch, koh-lotch-ee, ko-lackey, ko-lots-key? The only thing anyone agrees on is that they are topped with fruit or poppyseed filling.
For the past 40 or so Christmases, I've made two kinds: I follow the cream cheese recipe on the back of the can of Solo filling, adding a half cup of pulverized walnuts and topping half with apricot, half with one of the red flavors to look festive; and I use Julia Child's recipe for brioche to make the puffy yeasty kind with prune (stop yer snickering!) or poppyseed topping.
Does anyone have fond memories of making these with their mother or grandmother? Which version--cookie or bun or Danish? And please tell me how you spell and pronounce it.
I stole this technique from Alton Brown. I didn't try it at home first, just plunged in and used it as a side dish for a catering job. I cooked and delivered it, and a daughter-in-law's mother was one of the servers. She reported back that the church ladies loved it so much, they came back for seconds; for the first time in recorded history, the carrots ran out before the meats (ham and turkey). I tried it with yellow sweet potatoes next, then orange ones, and the same thing happened--vegetables POOF! disappeared. I dunno--they're good, but I'd rather fill my plate with the expensive stuff on the buffet table.
Here's Alton's recipe:
In my version, I add a teaspoon of grated fresh ginger and omit the chili powder and most of the parsley. Sometimes I omit the parsley entirely and sprinkle on some thyme.
For sweet potatoes, I peel and slice them about half an inch thick, then pour over enough ginger ale to cover and sprinkle in a teaspoon or two of grated ginger. If the sweet potatoes are done before the ginger ale is reduced, I put them into a casserole and boil down the soda until it's syrupy, and then I enrich it with a goodly dollop of butter.
Have fun with this--I've tried 7-Up, Sprite and Mt. Dew, too, but I like ginger ale the best. I think I'll try sweet potatoes with Dr. Pepper sometime before Christmas. It sounds good to me.
When I registered on SE, I used my plain old boring given name. Most of y'all have creative, punny, descriptive, regional, food-ish names: gastronomeg, pavlov, 1stmakearoux, climbhighinAK, yayfood, finewinedine. Even dbcurrie has a food name.
I wish I had been as clever as you. So, everyone, not just those listed above, tell me the story of your SE name.
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Please, make it stop.
When the weather gets chilly, I love one-pot meals, a little because of the easy clean-up, a lot because the whole house smells so wonderful.
One of my favorites is corned beef and cabbage, and another is similar--chicken, stock, potatoes, cabbage, carrots and green beans with salt, pepper, a knob of ginger and and a couple cloves of garlic.
And you?
So sad. From her I learned about Serrano ham got ideas for beautiful flavor combinations I would have never thought up myself, like combining apricots and mustard.
Frank Bruni, formerly of the NY Times--but you already knew that, right?--will be on the NPR show On Point this morning at 11 am.
There's always been an ex-con or two in the three kitchens I've worked in since the 60s, so I think the only thing new about this concept is the fact that they're advertising it. It sounds like a worthwhile program. I'd eat there if I lived in Chicago.
An article I read said it was causing a "red-hot controversy."
Supposedly, what's between the bread can foretell how long you and a partner will stay between the sheets. For the record, bologna isn't one of the options; neither is grilled cheese.
For the article, go here:
For the personality traits that go with the sandwiches, go here:
I'm a Libra/club; he's a Saggitarius/BLT; 21 years.
This is what I get for hardly ever watching the Food Network anymore! I had to find out about this--probably the only chance I'll ever have to throw my unworthy cooking self at Alton Brown's feet--from a neighbor.
Last week a woman I work with who is my age (AARP eligible) showed me a label from a cake container and asked me to pronounce a word and tell her what it was. It was "ganache."
I explained ganache and went on to tell her about chocolate truffles.
The poor dear has been avoiding ganache her entire adult life because she thought it was the shiny fruit in fruitcake. Her daughter shared some of a ganache cake bought at WalMart, of all places, and Betsy didn't want to touch it until her daughter swore to God that there was no shiny fruit in it.
Just thought I'd pass along this little quiz that is in today's Chicago Tribune. The first question is about ganache.
This article from the Chicago Trib is sad, and it happened to me last week. We sat at the bar in our favorite tavern, ordered dinner, stared at the Mariners game, and after we had eaten and the plates were cleared, the bartender asked, "Are you two feuding, or did someone die?" I realized we hadn't said one word to each other about the kids, work, friends, chores around the house, what we were going to do over the weekend, what new noise my car is making, nothing, for pretty close to an hour.
We usually laugh about lot of things and complain a little about something. I mean, even after 24 years, there's always stuff to talk about, right? Maybe we were just tired I just hope this doesn't become routine.
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