4 Chapter 4: A Conversation with Fred Krueger
Conversation with Fred Krueger
Director of the Religious Campaign for Forest Conservation and the Opening the Book of Nature Program
August 6, 2003
My work now is with Opening the Book of Nature (OBN), which grew out of several other programs I was involved with. Right now the Religious Campaign for Forest Conservation (RCFC) houses OBN, but before the RCFC was Green Cross, which had previously been the North American Conference on Christianity and Ecology (NACCE) and the 11th Commandment Fellowship. I’ll share more about those organizations later, but my own interest in wilderness goes way back. I was a fishing guide in the High Sierras, and I always could catch fish, and I mostly took people out in nature, and we’d get lost in that vicinity… And then, I quit college after three semesters because a friend of mine was going to join the marines, and I said, “That’s just a terrible idea, the worst thing you could do.” He said, “I mean, at least you could help me celebrate going in.” And so for two weeks solid we chased around, and for the first time I started to get a couple of bad grades on tests. And I decided, “Oh, this is awful.” Well, he said, “I gotta go into the military anyway, so if you go into the Air Force, we’ll go on the buddy program.” He was a fellow who went to high school with me. And so we did, and I only lasted for eight weeks because on the basis of aptitudes, they decided I would go back to school and get a special degree in Serbo-Croatian. I had a choice between full time at Yale or full time at Syracuse with a military salary, but if I went to Yale, I would learn Korean, if I went to Syracuse, it’d be Serbo-Croatian. And I went to Syracuse, graduated only to find out that we don’t need Serbo-Croatian linguists any more, and so they would train me as an intelligence analyst with an emphasis on Soviet studies.
I went that direction and eventually was at the intelligence headquarters for Europe when they decided we need Serbo-Croatian again. And I became a voice intercept operator and analyst, responsible for an air order of battle for Yugoslavia. And so I saw international relations from the inside. I worked for the National Security Agency, larger and more secret than the advertising agency that they characterized the CIA as being. And everything is code word… But I could see that we were dishonest in our foreign policy even in the 60s. And I saw how we duped the congress at the end of the Johnson administration, staging an event and misrepresenting it to the congress, and then the congress voting to authorize bombing north of the Demilitarized Zone, over a fraud. Oh my gosh! Where is integrity in government?
And so, I went back and got a degree in international relations, Soviet Studies, and got involved with campus politics, so that I had an offer from the Republican National Committee to become a campaign manager, and in fact I was the youngest campaign manager for the first Nixon campaign running a state. And I worked to develop youth groups all on campus. But because there wasn’t a substantial campaign in the state that I was assigned to, which was Louisiana, I was able to run the whole campaign and get that sort of experience, which usually someone that recently out of school would not have. And on the basis of the success of building up the whole youth organization in Louisiana, I went back to Washington with the new administration to organize the national youth groups. And we had a formula where we could organize and manipulate and cheat, and it was dishonest. It was institutionalized into campaign management. I didn’t want to be a part of it, even though I was considered good at it. And I decided to bail back into fundraising, and we were raising independent funds through major contributors.
And I toured through some of the heads of industry in the Midwest, and I thought, “These are some of the most miserable people you’d ever want to meet” [chuckles], the head of Steel Company, or Milwaukee Tool, and so forth. I said, “I’m done.” And I looked for a graceful way to exit, and I entered a national essay contest to represent American young people on what American foreign policy should be towards China. And I won, and so— I just knew I would. And I studied for not that much time because I didn’t have much experience with the far east. And I got a free trip to study people and problems in Asia at Tsu Chao University in Taiwan, in Taipei. And Vietnam was still going, and I got culture shock. And I realized culture shock is when your personal assumptions are not validated by the outer mind. The inner mind does not find conformity in the outer mind. And the consumption of the individual was so different. Even assumptions about time and counting, and— and so I had to go through a re-sorting of values. And when I came back through the United States, the first thing then when I got back into California, I ran into a little religious group, and I became associated with it. It helped poor people in the poorer sections of San Francisco and gradually edited a magazine. That was the [group] that published the 11th Commandment, some eight or nine years later. And in between I ran a correspondence course and did a variety of things.
I mentioned that Opening the Book of Nature is now a part of the Religious Campaign for Forest Conservation, which is a 4th generation organization for me— the organization before the Religious Campaign for Forest Conservation (RCFC) was Green Cross. Before that it was the North American Conference on Christianity and Ecology, which I founded. And before that it was the 11th Commandment Fellowship, which was established in 1979, and its purpose was to develop an ethic of the environment— a religious ethic of the environment. We pioneered that, in the San Francisco area.
We had a newsletter at the time for the 11th Commandment Fellowship. And we were able to develop conferences, and it didn’t take long before we had chapters scattered all across the country. And that led to the realization that the churches were nowhere on this issue. And as you’ll find in every public organization, there’s a transition point. And so that marked the exit from the 11th Commandment Fellowship (which said there was an implied 11th commandment regarding care of the earth in the whole Judeo-Christian tradition, and it was there in scripture and was a recurring theme but nowhere succinctly articulated). And so, we established the North American Conference on Christianity and Ecology.
We had 11th Commandment chapters all across the country, and it took four or five years to reach that point. I started it, and Vincent Rossi was really the theologian behind it, and I was more the activist. There always were essential pieces by him in subsequent issues of the newsletter, like “A Christian Deep Ecology” in 1984. And so out of it the North American Conference on Christianity and Ecology (NACCE) emerges in 1987. We had newsletters and magazines and proceedings of the first event. We decided to move the whole of Christianity, and we convened a great congress: a North American conference on responsibility for the environment, which was the founding event for NACCE . We had over 100 speakers (everybody paid their own way). We had Wendell Berry, and Thomas Berry, and Jeremy Rifkin, Jane Blewett, Don Conroy, Ragnar Overby, Wes Jackson. And that marked the beginning for a number of denominations’ entry into ecological concern. There were seven art shows. We modeled the kind of changes that we had to develop. I think there were almost 20 people on the newspaper staff, because it was so big that we had to have a daily newspaper to chronicle all the things that were happening. There was a film festival, and you can see much more if you skim through the proceedings…
We picked the demographic center of the United States and held it in northwestern Indiana—it’s the land of lakes region, it’s a vacation center, and there are a lot of conference centers. So we got the largest conference center in the Midwest, and then we added several others around it and did a shuttle service so people could get to the main event. I think that just the shuttle service to the airport and back did almost 20,000 passenger miles [chuckling].
You can see from the list of names that we grabbed everybody that was a player. The goal was to grab the thought leaders of Christianity, and bring them together and develop a statement . Now, the event itself was a statement, but we had a declaration that came out of that. And that caused quite a controversy because at that time there were two strains of thought— this is in 1987, this event. There were the traditionals, who used scripture as a reference and a guide, and then a neo-Christian theological framework, which sought to use nature as its frame of reference, and this would be the creation-centered spirituality of the new story (Thomas Berry, etc). And it divided along that way— we had some heated evening discussions! And so, this was a watershed for Christianity.
And so, in an issue of the magazine, we did a survey of the state of ecological concern in the churches as of 1990— in the winter, in January of 1991. I was the editor, and this other fellow gave the money. This was a landmark study which the National Religious Partnership for the Environment (NRPE) used to substantiate that it was possible to do this. So we broke down where all the churches were at that time, and this is actually what provided the basis for the NRPE. And Paul Gorman bought a whole stack of copies of the magazine and cleaned out whatever was left of the proceedings , and that became the basis for the science initiative related to the environment (the precursor to the NRPE – the Joint Appeal by Religion and Science for the Environment).
But we saw a problem already developing at that time: concern for the environment was more an intellectual and theological assent to responsibility rather than rolling up the sleeves and getting to work. And so, there was a disconnect between faith and action. So for that reason we formed the Green Cross. Actually, it came out of a landmark conference that NACCE did in Russia. We did conferences all over the country. The following year after this we did regional events, and we were building up the base— California, Iowa, Georgia, Massachusetts, mid-Atlantic, Virginia, and something in the Pacific Northwest and in Colorado. So in ’88 we did a series of regional conferences that were great— they took on different character and orientation in each place.
The proceedings include the declaration that we finally came up with and all the people that were involved with putting that together. And again, there were all the different art shows. We used a unique organizing system to put this together. We had state and urban field representatives all around the country, based on the 11th Commandment Fellowship and the connections that we had everywhere already, and then we had all these sponsoring organizations. So we had a number of different departments and quite a lot of staff, though not everybody was listed in the proceedings. But this just shows what it took to put that together, with hardly any money.
And so from this, we formed Green Cross. And we were very activist. We were too activist. And we grew too rapidly. And it ran into conflicts with its parent, the funder, which was Evangelicals for Social Action. (Evangelicals for Social Action took financial responsibility, under a three-year temporary examination, after which we could either take it back, or they would own it.) And we had three levels of conflict.
First was denominational, and that’s because the membership was Lutheran, Methodist, Catholic, Episcopal, despite the evangelical orientation of its partner, which had hoped to conflate Green Cross into the Evangelical Environmental Network. In fact, it never could happen, because the membership did not overlap. They assumed that by announcing that there was a biblical responsibility, there was sufficient integrity amongst evangelicals that they would jump on and become champion environmentalists— no such thing. There was a huge underestimating of the cultural captivity of evangelicals in America.
Then there was a financial assumption. They wanted Green Cross to grow quickly, and they assumed it would. We got a medium-large grant from the Pew Foundation for $350,000 over two years to grow. And ESA wants to hit a home run. My proposal is to work through the membership, develop organically, and use our thought leaders as speakers. Develop kits so that they can go out and promote that if you’re a Christian, you’re going to be concerned with the land because we do God’s will on earth as it is in heaven. Instead, leadership said, “We’re going to hit the home run, and we’re going to go to the public relations agency in Seattle that made Focus on the Family big.”
So, they take a couple of steps. They go looking for a top-notch writer. I edited Green Cross magazine at the time, and members loved it. But they found Michael Crook, a Pulitzer Prize winning reporter down in Miami. He went from Miami to the National Wildlife Federation, to Green Cross. He was a disaster. He didn’t know the issue. He could write, and he was good at fluff, but he didn’t have issue substance. And so he ran off to seminary in Indiana, at a Quaker facility, which had no theological depth anyway, and so he took over. He lasted about a year and a half or two years. And then he jumped for a better position at Habitat for Humanity. He lasted at Habitat about 8 months until he was fired for misappropriating money, and that was the end of his tour through religion.
From my perspective, we squandered the grant. We spent about $100,000 on direct mail after doing the focus groups and the studies. And the studies showed at that time, in ’96, that about 8% of the people in ordinary churches— they did focus groups in Seattle, which was considered a little bit more ecological— about 8% on average would have an ecological concern. Now prior to that, the main study that had been done aside from ours was a Stephen Kellert study at Yale University, which showed an inverse relationship between ecological concern and religious concern. So, we were trying to change it, and we found that we really hadn’t made much of a dent.
So there were other conflicts too – but the third main one also involved money. At this time there’s a big controversy quietly going on among evangelicals, particularly in the big relief and development organizations. Corporations were saying, “Stop touting this environmental… stop, or you’ll lose funding from us.” So the debate is, do we have integrity and point out that as the land declines, its carrying capacity declines? Or, do we stay on message and say, “Well this is what’s happening, and if we’re going to feed the hungry, we’ve also got to deal with these kinds of ecological issues?”
So it was money over integrity, and money won out. One of our Green Cross executive committee members resigned from a senior position at one of these development agencies at that time, and joined our steering committee. But by and large it began a trend in many evangelical groups to distance themselves from the environment .
So. I was told at the end of December, Merry Christmas 1997, “You’re going to be gone, sorry.” And, so I thought, “Well, what am I going to do?” And I quickly put together a plan for a new organization: we would tackle the hardest of all the issues to address, which is forests. And I commissioned research— I still have all the articles at that time dealing with religion and forests. It was done through the new spin-off of the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund, which was Earth Justice Legal Defense.
And so we began to outline a plan to address the issue of forests. And there was a program proposal, and we didn’t quite know where this was going to go. But we developed a proposal for a Religious Campaign for Forest Conservation, as a coalition. This was still in ’97, as part of Evangelicals for Social Action.
We did some quick historical research on forests. And called for a conference, which would take place that weekend up in Redwood National Park. And so I stayed on and worked for nothing for three months while trying to move and determine where to go. And in the process this office here said well why don’t you come here, and we’ll give you an office, and you can help work on our programs. So I moved from Philadelphia to here. And I had offers to go to the Native Forest Council in Oregon, with a salary and everything, or come here and no salary. I decided we’ll just go forward and do this and take the Opening the Book of Nature Program, which nobody else could understand anyway.
Opening the Book of Nature (OBN) had already been created much earlier – the original precursor in 1979, in fact. I had been running similar events with each organization. But through Green Cross it began to evolve, and we started to announce special wilderness training for clergy. Owen Owens and Oren Gelderloos (Oren was the president of AuSable Institute) were involved. And we asked, “What are the lessons of Christianity from Nature?” So OBN began to take more concrete form.
But also, we’d already made some substantial marks politically because the Endangered Species issue of Green Cross tipped the balance in the congress. Between that issue being delivered to every member of Congress, and the press conference, and a particularly nasty letter from the Chair of the House Resource Committee, Don Young (saying the churches should stick to religion, and leave ecology to the experts), which we handed out to the clergy associations around the country, in ten days poor old Newt Gingrich was on TV apologizing to the American people…
So, the Contract with America was broken, through the churches getting involved. And actually, they overestimated how much opposition there was amongst the religious community because they felt that integral to the Contract with America was the embracing of religious values. And here religion seemed to be going entirely in the other direction. And so, Gingrich apologized for his party being out of position on the environment. And that broke the Contract with America, showing that little raga-muffin organizations could still make an impact, even though the bulk of the impact came from environmental groups and Jews, Catholics, and mainline Protestants who were already on record. When the evangelicals came in, the assumption was we’re more Republican; that’s what broke it. That caused the re-authorization.
So, this showed that something substantial could be done in the Congress, which laid a foundation eventually for what we did in forests. Just as in the past with Green Cross and even earlier, the process of Opening the Book of Nature, through various retreat events, often supplied guidance for political action and organizational vision. So as our forest campaign took shape, here too we developed a statement, and how we came to the statement is an incredible story.
There were actually two events. There were several groups that got together. We had the best science, and biological briefings on forests. And then we began to look to understand the spiritual side of it. We spent some reflective time outdoors, following the OBN tradition, and drew upon insights that emerged in that time. And each group came up with a very different perspective. They didn’t seem to integrate. But one of the crucial events was a fight, between a Baptist minister and a Presbyterian— wouldn’t seem to be too different, but they were.
The Baptist minister’s packing up (he had been a missionary in Africa for 30 years), and we said, “No, you can’t go home. You mean, you’ve spent all your life so that you can retreat and run off? If you had any integrity, you would stay here and find out how to address that situation and not just put your tail between your legs and drive off!” So he stayed. And he prayed all night to see “what is the key thing I need to say.” And he kept getting what seemed to be an irrelevant passage from scripture— the story of Paul and Silas and the soothsayer . But in the morning, we’re ready to start, and we’re going off for each group to declare their insights. And with a certain southern drawl he said, “The lawd has put it on my haht.” He stopped everything and told the story. And everyone else understood its meaning: economic considerations were no consideration before God, which had been a stumbling block, which was a cultural assumption about the forests. And that ‘right information’ alone was not adequate, there had to be a right spirit behind it. In other words, this lady had been coming behind and saying, “These are the servants of the most high God, hear them.” And finally Paul casts the demon out, scares it out.
And so we saw a series of lessons that related to the forest that enabled us to go forward. And it was an epiphany, a break-through of insight, that this person was praying and kept getting the same insight over and over. And so the first group fell into a difficult spot where they couldn’t make much headway, and so they developed a prayer that admitted what we did wrong. In the second group (we had three Opening the Book of Nature facilitators in each section) we had the CEO of Loran International— an import company— Jim Davidson, who happened to be the same person who sent the check that empowered our ability to go forward, and he had a couple of people with him. They developed a theological statement about forests.
And the third group, without planning— we went one, two, three, one two, three, and divided everybody up— but the third group came up with an activist statement. So what it looks like is a prayer of thanksgiving and confession, then a theological statement, “God, Creation and the Forests,” and an activist statement that called for an end to commercial logging on the National Forests. And each group was so different, composed of the same pool of people. So this then is the statement that the theologians who came in September and met in Muir Woods finally developed . And they cleaned out the redundancies, and the overlaps, and the things that didn’t stand the test of scrutiny. And that’s how we developed the statement.
And at this time, no religious group had a statement on forests. Now we’ve got many that do: Christian Environmental Council evangelicals do, the National Council of Churches does, the Methodists, the Episcopalians, the United Church of Christ do as of a month and a half ago in Wisconsin, the Catholic Franciscans, the Central Conference of American Rabbis, and so forth. There’s a coalition on religion and Appalachia.
And we’ve got a list of all the Christian creation care groups around the country— we identified about 60. Maybe a few more. And then we developed a magazine, and we’ve done a newsletter, and we show, starting in ’99, everyone who’s been added to our honor roll, which we have on the website. And ever since then we’ve kept it going. They tell what the individuals did, and it’s actually modeled on the military’s congressional medal of honor. So and so did this and did that, and then this happened, and they responded in this way. And so, we developed a national steering committee, and the chairs were Rabbi Warren Stone, who chairs environmental affairs for the Central Conference of American Rabbis, and Reverend Owen Owens, who at the time was the director of National Ministries for the American Baptist Churches, and he had co-chaired the eco-justice working group for the NCC. He’s our chair, he still is, and so is Rabbi Warren.
And then we would regularly develop papers for people, such as an introduction to forest issues, religious visions for saving forests, and then challenge everybody when we went to Washington our first year: “Here are the objections to what we are doing; how do you address each one?” So that we knew where the opposition’s arguments were, and everybody knew how to address those when they went to Washington. And then we developed a supplement to the basic statement, which was an ethics of consumption.
And the first year we waltzed right into the White House, and secretary Babbit welcomed us into his office, and we immediately got into a discussion over what was proper policy for the Forest Service. He capitulated in the discussion, which we very seldom would see, but then he deflected it, saying, “Well, you gotta deal with the congress, not me.” But we convinced him on the spot that an end to commercial logging on the National Forests was the policy that would be in the interests of America in the long term. And that was an interesting thing.
We also helped Mexico to develop the Interreligious Counsel of Mexico, and do a great Congresso, and we had as a model for them the NACCE. And we’re working together still.
Now in the White House, it was very interesting to see the difference between the Clinton and the Bush administrations. The Bush administration seems to put up a veneer of supporting religion, and the Clinton administration didn’t engage the issue, but each behaved in an opposite way to its public persona. So that the Clinton White House was always open to us at the level of department heads, and the Bush Administration, while they will take religious leaders to Texas and wine and dine them and speak to them, they divide where they disagree. So it’s just the Catholic bishops that go down, it’s the black leaders, or it’s the rabbis, but they don’t want them to come together. But we pushed and pushed and pushed, and so we’ve gone into the [Bush] White House several times— they treat us miserably. There is no genuine religious sensitivity in this White House .
We did a background investigation of all the people that met with us the first time— it was a rogues gallery! One of them was from the CIA, another had been a deal-maker with industry, when Bush was governor in Austin, giving industry preferential treatment for campaign contributions [laughs]. We felt, my God, look at these people that they sent to meet with us! None of them have a genuine background. Another was a campaign manager for Century Strategies, which was the senior campaign management firm for the Elect Bush 2000 under Ralph Reed. And they didn’t just smile and nod, they tried to pull a dirty trick and have us look at the budget for the Department of the Interior and the White House. Well, this is absurd! Well, we waited for Thomasen, who was the director of the Council on Environmental Quality, and— look at the budget, financial figures, as if that would be a great joke afterwards to report. “Yeah we used their hour looking at financial figures.” And so there’s stories…
We do kids planting trees… a conference on forests… we went back to the cradle of forestry in America… Webster, North Carolina.. northwest of Hendersonville, and we read our declaration for the correcting of forestry. We went back to the source, and this whole conference focused on a new ethic of forestry. So that’s the place, that was the first place of forestry, the cradle of forestry in America…
But we’re a small office. Here we have Larry who left today for Ohio, we have Vincent Rossi here in the evening sometimes, and Patricia will be in in a little bit to do database, and our taxes and such. We don’t hardly have any grants— we pay mostly our own way, although that does put a lid on some of what we can do. We get by on membership dues, donations, services, conferences, and materials.
We did a leadership training seminar for Book of Nature. This was our first wilderness event down in Texas. Then we went back to Redwood Park, then Colorado, then North Carolina. And we had different groups at these events. And then to finish up, we had seven conferences on wilderness. And then we had a coordinating consulate— this was two summers ago, 2001, which was the year for pioneering wilderness. We did a press conference on Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR); Lieberman chaired it for us. The Wilderness Society felt that was a crucial event turning around several key senators when religion came in. And it was mostly the Religious Campaign for Forest Conservation calling itself the Religious Campaign for Wilderness. Lieberman introduced the religious speakers… and the rest of our motley crew. And that made a difference. That was as significant for ANWR as the EEN conference was for the endangered species act.
So by now it’s starting to cook.
So you can see that there are many pieces to our work that the OBN process feeds and complements. The organization doesn’t simply focus on OBN and wilderness, but they are a crucial source.
And the very first program after I decided “let’s form a chapter around this,” not knowing what else to do, I said, “well let’s go out and see if we can discern religious lessons in wilderness.” 1979. And we hit so many, it was just amazing! And used it occasionally as an effort to raise funds— I’ll show you an experience like you won’t believe. And it would always work, but it was only in— it took on another name, when I was with the North American Conference on Christianity and Ecology. I only did it two or three times and called it “The Numinous in Nature,” but nobody understood the word Numinous. You’d have to have had some theology (or read Rudolf Otto) and gone in that kind of a direction to grasp the term “spirit and nature.” I began to run across in Clarence Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore, nature as a book. And so we used “Opening the Book of Nature.” And as we began to systematize the process, we picked up a term from George Washington Carver: “keys” on learning from the land. And he proposed several initial keys, based on his own experience, that were crucial. We embraced those but went beyond it— far beyond it now. And so, it has given us a natural literacy, a religious literacy of nature, that has helped to develop these other programs.
And then we applied a formula that would decentralize the leadership. So we probably have 30 some facilitators. We don’t teach in the Opening the Book of Nature process, except we do present the historic legacy, which is substantial. And clearly we can show that this is something that is part of the Christian tradition that has been left in the past, mostly since the rise of science and technology during the Enlightenment, but the wearing away began even before that. It probably began toward the end of the 14th century. And so we document this.
But without that, we could not have developed the forest campaign or the wilderness programs, or any of the other events that were associated with it. And it always gave a unique dimension to the original North American Conference on Christianity and Ecology, for instance. I think it helped it endure better than its competitors .
And with Green Cross, the beginning of the Opening the Book of Nature literature was with a 1989 event. At the same time, we would mass mail a listing of the different events across a section. One event would be eastern and we had a similar amount attend in the west. And the funds would come to the office. So we developed a larger brochure, and we would publish “historic voices” and then “participant comments.” And then we started to develop and run conferences, and we’ve also developed intermediate programs now where we go much deeper. The first intermediate program was in Yosemite, that was the first intermediate event. It didn’t take too long to develop an intermediate one. Originally, we did evaluations of every event, and the evaluations would look very good— the program was almost always very highly rated. Now they do something more simple, or they’ll get a different religious group that doesn’t like John Muir, so they’ll use a different set of quotes or such, like the Orthodox literature, or whatever is appropriate to that group.
What does the structure of the OBN program look like?
Participants arrive Friday evening and depart Sunday afternoon. The facilitators arrive early Friday afternoon. They’ll walk around the area, get to know it, and most importantly, bless the location which they will be using. This gets us started with a focus on Jesus Christ. Deliberately and intentionally, both facilitators consecrate or dedicate the entire weekend to Jesus Christ and to his primacy at this event. You ask God’s blessing to help you lead the weekend event so that you and each participant will have the inspiration and experiences that can enhance his or her appreciation of how creation is a “book” of spiritual lessons and a fountain of transforming experiences. And you pray for one another.
Facilitators then review the names of the participants and make a prayer for the safe travels of each. This also helps them remember each person’s name when they arrive. Then they resume scouting the area to decide the location of discussion groups and meeting places. They place directional signs to aid arrivals, set up their camp, and then greet the participants as they arrive.
The point on Friday is to provide a welcome and help participants get to know each other. The evening discussions are casual, free-wheeling, and wide ranging. This time gets participants thinking about the wider issues of Christian belief, creation, and a proper response to wild areas. Generally, this is a time to relax, chat, get the city out, and become settled in the location.
On Saturday, we have quite a full day. The first session starts after breakfast. We assemble in a circle, and after a welcome, we open with a prayer or invite many opening prayers. The goal of this first gathering is to emphasize that participants can learn from nature. We don’t tell them exactly “how,” we let them discover that for themselves, with reference to the fact that Christians have historically discerned many lessons from creation. Then they take 75 to 90 minutes for the first exploration.
Once the participants are off, the facilitators take five or ten minutes to pray for and bless each participant before joining the exploration themselves. The goal is to invoke or “bring down” the presence of Jesus Christ so that each participant is surrounded in a stronger way with the Lord’s presence. We may pray that God’s angels guide and help each person. This deepens the spiritual quality of this time of exploration.
When the group re-convenes for the second session, we share our experiences and learn from the experiences of others. The facilitators take notes on what each person has learned in this time and affirms their good insights. The notes become a “log” of the group’s process of recovering insight from the “Book of Nature.” At the end of the sharing, the facilitator summarizes the key insights and lessons. The next charge to the group is to take these insights or “keys” and to apply them.
We connect their insights with the key insights we’ve seen over time and insights that are historically evident in Christian writings and set the stage for the next exploration. I also usually give them the collected insights of a few poets and sages past, which can serve as an aid for reflection. Then the group goes out for a second round of exploration, usually 60-75 minutes. Again the facilitators pray for the participants, and sometimes we may ask one or a few of them to pray with us. (This practice comes from a tradition of the early church, where it was the responsibility of the clergy to pray for members of the flock so that they could access the experiences of Christ while inside the church confines.)
Lunch has to fit in here somewhere, but after lunch we convene again to share experiences and lessons from the second exploration. Facilitators ask questions and try to draw out further insights from participants. Keys which are often emphasized at this stage include love, joy, humility, prayer, and using all the powers of observation that a person possesses. And at this point, a facilitator will hand out a page listing the primary “keys” we’ve distilled from past events, condensed into seven key qualities. This gives the group even more to go on for their third exploration. (We wait until now to hand out the list of keys in order not to short-circuit the process of learning and experiencing them.)
The third exploration is processed more quickly, and typically a “collective experience” starts to become evident. Facilitators then introduce a spiritual nature walk exercise. The goal is to imitate Jesus Christ, and this deepens spiritual formation and exemplifies right dominion. It’s best to experience it in context, and a better description is in the facilitator’s handbook. But many participants will encounter potent and unexpected experiences through it. We usually don’t do it for more than 10 or 15 minutes— more is usually too much to handle. In any case, we don’t process this exercise because participants take a break until dinner at this point.
After dinner, we have an evening session. We start by discussing the need for a worship service in the morning and then either appoint a few people to coordinate it or agree on a fairly spontaneous format, potentially inviting each person to contribute something. It varies with each group. (It’s intended to be a pretty short service, 30 minutes or less.)
Then we open up for discussion. Usually, participants have plenty of questions and comments to share, or perhaps a facilitator will provide a starting point if none emerge. These discussions could go on all night, but we usually limit them to two or three hours.
Participants often pack up to go before breakfast on Sunday, so that the logistics of moving out don’t encroach on our final sessions. After the worship service, we move to a writing exercise called “In the footsteps of John Muir,” which asks participants to go out with a notebook (for 60-90 minutes) and describe what they would tell the world if they had been blinded and then had their eyesight restored. (This is based on Muir’s reported experience of blindness.) And facilitators as always pray for each participant.
We come back together and everyone reads a short paragraph to summarize the theme of their writing. And then we shift pace to a question of how we move “from relationship to respect to reverence.” For groups that have really progressed well, we also ask them to reflect on their sense of the value of this weekend experience. There are a whole host of additional reflection questions that we might ask, and on more advanced or longer events we do, but these are the basic ones that seem to work in the introductory experience. So the participants go out to reflect for 45 minutes on this last question.
The group returns to share their insights, and then various closing comments might be made by participants and facilitators. As a closing we form a circle and conclude with prayers for the process, for continuing growth of this process of learning from creation, and especially for the healing of the ways we degrade the earth.
So that’s basically how it goes.
Now this is just what’s described in the introductory handbook. We then have an intermediate handbook, which pushes much further, but you gotta come to an event and become a facilitator to get that. In other words, experience is essential, and we don’t allow academic learning to substitute for that— and in fact, you couldn’t— it just wouldn’t work. That’s why we’ll sell the introductory handbook for those who are interested. Several people, often academics, have attempted to develop handbooks— handbooks that don’t work. Usually, they just create a conflation of relevant information. Because they lack a deeper experiential base, they don’t have the kind of organizational coherence that allows it to come alive and work. I mean, it could all be true things, in the same way as every definition in the dictionary is true, but it’s not organized, so that you could never assume that that’s a novel of meaning.
In any case, there are many elements. We have lots of exercises. And we pick all the leaders. We’ve also developed a series of advisory statements— each of the statements had its own character. And we’ve learned, never anticipate where it’s going to go. It has a mind and a life of its own. One group created a great epic poem.
We developed a wilderness handbook, which was a systematic background, with the historic wilderness writings and a collection of all of the major statements and essays. And it concludes with an anthology. Some of these are outstanding. For instance, how many theologians know how the scriptures define dominion? They do. They define it always in the context of this repeating theme: what is man that thou are mindful? And in each time it’s defined in terms of wilderness. In terms of the greatness of nature, so it inculcates a humility— Rossi pulled that out of the scriptures, [snap] just on a question from someone who was at a leadership training seminar. Because the one for this year, 2001, focused on wilderness. And we even threw in a Native American view— I studied with a Lummi for a while. And they have a concept of skalal, or skalal-itude, which is when you get to that place of spiritual awareness and everything comes alive. And it has a very sacred quality. And so we sell the handbook. And then we use handbooks for our wilderness trips now. And there are themes every day.
Our wilderness trip last year was a backpack trip; we did about 60 miles. This year we did half that distance at a base camp. In some respects that was a lot better, although the level of experience was powerful in both years. We had clergy saying they were transformed last year, and we had people saying, well, we had half of them come back again this year. Next year’s trip is already full, 2004. And so, what we’re going to do is add in a second section that will go along, and we’ll be sort of together. I’m not sure how we’re going to do it yet, but— and it’s just through a couple of places, people heard about it, and a lot of them have signed up .
Now OBN is really starting to take off. We can’t keep up with demand. We can’t train facilitators fast enough to run programs for all the environmental groups that want us to help them explore the spiritual values of wilderness. We have so many variants in the program format that when at first you try to study it, it seems confusing. But there is a standard introductory program. We have a substantial handbook for the introductory program alone. And people have to go through leadership training because you can’t get it from the book. There has to be an actual transfer of a certain sense of how to do it. But this begins with a sense that the way we’ve been doing Christian environmentalism has not been adequate, in fact, because it has parroted the environmental movement. And so, we begin with a critique that the environmental movement hasn’t been able to address the roots of the problem because they are essentially spiritual.
The opening lines of our program brochure do a pretty good job of expressing the basis of our approach. It says:
“Since the creation of the world, God’s invisible qualities— his eternal power and divine nature— have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that all people are without excuse.” (Romans 1:20)
The scriptures, the saints, the reformers, and most Christians prior to the industrial era were unanimous about the ability of wild nature to provide potent spiritual instruction. In our day of science and technology this understanding has faded from the seminaries and pulpits and has largely been left in the past.
This OBN conference will help you recover a practical ability to discern spiritual lessons in nature. The challenge of discovery will blend with discussions and presentations in such a way that you can enter into a deeper appreciation of wild nature and the depth of Christianity’s ancient theology of creation. You are invited to join us.
This conference is not about philosophy or theory. It is a practical exploration and rediscovery of a traditional spiritual system of non-linear knowledge, based upon early and medieval Christian theology which leads to an experiential connection to the Holy Spirit in creation.
This process is at once traditional and contemporary; challenging and attainable; endlessly fascinating and yet right in front of us through wild nature. We combine prayerful time in nature with discussion and presentations to provide you with a method of learning that will challenge your capabilities, engage all of your talents and learning, and provide a spiritually uplifting experience, which for some can also be life-transforming.
This conference will not teach you or lead you to anything novel or new. This is an adaptation of the ancient process which the Greeks called “theoria physike” into a modern framework to fit our contemporary culture and mentality.
As a result of participation, a ‘doorway’ will emerge which can help you ‘walk’ into a more profound and rewarding appreciation of nature as God’s creation. Through this conference many report finding a leap in appreciation in the value of their own church and its way of bringing members to awareness and connection to Jesus Christ.
At a recent OBN Leadership Training Seminar, every single person who had been involved with the program for over a year responded that the OBN program had changed— and improved— his or her life. This can be true for you, too .
{note: the preceding text describing the program incorporates excerpts from the Facilitator’s Handbook.}
So obviously we believe it has a lot of potential. As the Introductory Facilitator’s Handbook describes (The Facilitator’s Handbook: Guidelines for Conducting the “Opening the Book of Nature” Introductory Weekend Program, by Fred Krueger, February 1998, reprinted March 2001), we have a relatively standard introductory experience.
What’s your own denominational background?
I’m eastern Orthodox— I joined ten years ago or so, because there is an opportunity to access spiritual experiences to a fuller extent. And so there’s also a more nuanced and comprehensive theology. Greek Orthodox worship is interesting. It was designed as a recreation of the life of Christ. And there are steps and stages so that there’s a similarity between the Catholic mass and the eastern liturgy. They’re both supposed to be journeys into an experience. But if you’re not familiar with how it’s put together, it’s hard to participate in a way that goes step by step by step into stages of awareness and consciousness opening up.
What’s missing today is the historic Christian cosmological world view, in which the liturgical year is a reflection of the natural year— I mean, that’s why Christ is born right after Christmas, soon after the darkest point, the light is born. And why Easter has to come right after the vernal equinox and the full moon and so forth— as soon as you begin to plot it out that way… eliminating the modern introductions that took place without that cosmological world view, then all of a sudden you say, “Oh my gosh, there’s a map here.” Similarly, the church is the cosmos in microcosm. And what’s from an ecological perspective most noteworthy in difference between, say, the Presbyterian and the Catholic, is the fence from Paul, that in him we live and move and have our being because in Calvin the presence of God is no longer in the world because it’s in heaven. And so this is the theater of God’s glory— but in Catholic theology, it’s right here. And so, Catholic theologians lead us to a sacramental world view in which everything ought to be lifted up in thanksgiving to a higher level. And it is a dimension of worship, it’s in a sense the lower octave of praise, which is thanksgiving, and being appreciative, and having that sense of connectedness to God in everything, so that it ought to come alive. So that’s what we do now as we begin to take on projects , we develop a more cosmological Christian view that draws from these precedents.
We’ve put together a number of publications . For example, one surveys historic Christian writings from the first century, like Clement of Rome, successor of Peter. Through the early church… into the medieval era… and then as it’s picked up by the poets… each one of these is a section. And there are 115 individuals. For instance, you look at Basil and his words, it’s all cited, it’s all printed on Kenaf, too. And lessons from bees, lessons from the birds, creation as a theophany of wisdom, and on and on we go, just on Basil. And at the same time, before the creation of the world, he comments on Genesis as a great parable, because the reality is too great to comprehend in a more precise way.
And then there is a short ecological biography: the contribution of each of these individuals and why they’re significant. And so we go way past Santmire’s survey, which is actually rather feeble, but it’s somehow considered one of the best that’s out there. His original one, Brother Earth, was one of the only things out there, but that was 1970, so he was pioneering. This is mostly original sources, but you’ll find that we pull out other sources. We use a lot of secondary sources because we have one of the largest libraries on religion and the environment anywhere, and it goes way back. So this is a foundation that substantiates our work.
We also have a publication on Orthodox Patriarchs’ positions on the environment. Patriarch Ignatius, for instance, he’s far deeper than Bartholomew. He’s a philosopher theologian. But all the churches are saying these things.
We’ve also got an ecological commentary on the Bible, and the way it’s done, it’ll pick 100 themes, right now it has 88. But then it lists 500 . So that in this form, I don’t know of something else that really duplicates it. We keep copies of a Green Cross guide to church management, which guaranteed savings of at least $1,000 per year if a church did an energy audit.
We’ve also got a hymnal of things in the public domain: “For the Beauty of the Earth,” “Fairest Lord Jesus,” and so forth, so that we have something to use at our events. “All Creatures of our God and King” and a wonderful one from the Catholic missionary sisters in east Africa: “Spirit of God.” We have one on the historic roots of our ecological crisis. It addresses Lynn White but from a Christian perspective, and then it takes 100 historians and weaves their insights together, always citing the sources, and the system was to take 20 key events through history and show that the roots have spread across western civilization rather than in any one person or event. And we’re working on some new material, too. Oh, and we’ve got a conference on Mormons and the environment that Brigham Young is going to sponsor, and it will happen February 15, 2004 .
We’ve done Opening the Book of Nature for the Apaches on the San Carlos reservation. And we have a lady who wants to take OBN to all the reservations around the country .
How does Book of Nature experience go from the participants’ view?
Well, here’s a story, in Tennessee. We had an event that had a professor of biology, an evolutionary biologist, and alongside him, here is a strictly scriptural six-day creationist. And as we have the introductions, they look at each other, and we have our protocol, which says there’s no theological controversies that are allowed. And they’re looking at each other, suspiciously… and at the end, guess who’s insight really won out? Neither one – both were just philosophy, and they came to some realizations about their Christianity and that neither approach was really adequate for engaging the land. And they were equally irrelevant from the standpoint of doing anything practical— we’re very Yankee, it has to be practical, it has to be applied, and work— if it doesn’t work, what good is it? That’s sort of the philosophy at OBN.
And so we’re finding that the limits are our own, and our captivity to cultural assumptions, and to a certain kind of insensitivity in ourselves about the land. Regularly, at the last OBN event, there was a full weekend that I did, oh, it took two hours before all the women were crying. A lot of times people cry. Why? Well, because there’s a therapy, a catharsis, that’s taking place. And well, let’s see, the last one I did was actually Massachusetts, last month, and at first people felt like they were in a shower of inspiration, but the next time out all the old hurts were beginning to surface and come up.
The wilderness can bring healing. This healing is usually more spiritual than physical. It deals with old hurts coming into focus and the release which results. It involves everything from hidden emotional pain and the stress of living which results from living in a high speed, technologically intense society to the subtle barriers that emerge in our culture to the innate sensitivity of the heart which then causes decline in feeling and spiritual awareness. In other words, this healing applies to every aspect of how modernity impacts upon the human psyche and spirit and how it stifles the innate spiritual striving which all people intuit.
A common experience during OBN weekend programs is that participants break down and cry. This is because old traumas are flushing out as part of the process of learning from nature. The reason this happens is pretty simple: people have to look to God in the process of learning from nature. As this happens, there is a movement of energy, of life, of the Holy Spirit.
To illustrate this, if we can conceptualize God as an ocean and the touch of Spirit as the flow of water, then when people connect to God, they also connect to a flow, which flushes out old events that were out of harmony with both the nature of God and their own inner natures (to which there is an intimate connection). Pain was involved with those old events. When these hurts flush out, there is a release, a purging, even a purification. This is why afterwards there is elation and joy. We find this in virtually all of our events.
We’re also finishing up an Opening the Book of Nature book, which covers the basic process, then includes activities. And from this we developed the intermediate program, and now we’re beginning to see where the advanced program is going to go. It involves spiritual formation; it involves light and silence, and the further side of Christian experience that leads to awareness of the so-called mystical holy being, that part which is not physical.
In other words, it’s all ready. The chapters are in shape, there’s a formula, but this will be a book. It will be much more interpretive of the data, and it’ll explicate the experience that we’ve had over now, well, it will be for 25 years of doing it, so it’ll be a 2004 publication, I think . Although the first years, they were glorious at times, but they were few and far between just because we didn’t understand what we had, and so we are not developing something new so much as recovering something that was there. And that’s why we can be informed by the tradition.
But that makes this even stronger. Understanding the creator from the creation, learning to know the maker from things which are made. That’s quoting Wollmans, but then his own experience is added to it, and then contemplation. And this is something that Catholics have preserved, where others have lost: how to contemplate. And contemplation requires some spiritual. You’ve got to hear the still, small voice within. If you don’t, there’s no contemplation, there’s just reflection. And to go further into nature, you have to go further into what’s Christianity.
And so, when we do the Christian nature walk, we identify these seven steps in doing the Christian nature walk. And that also requires an experience. You have to go into it. But these seven qualities are crucial. And it begins in being quiet, and then in prayer, and then a conscious invoking of the presence of Christ, be relaxed, there’s no negativity, and you’re thankful. And with those seven, something happens. And one participant who’s now a facilitator trainee, and her life was changed as a result, and she went to seminary (Andover Newton). And it didn’t work— it didn’t help her ability to facilitate— she spent a whole year of her life. It was more academic than experiential, and the consequence is that it didn’t quite apply.
But many people have gone to seminary as a result of OBN. That’s what we find that we’re doing— we’re bringing a lot of people back to churches. And they come from everywhere, they can come from other religious groups. Whoops, I’m really a Christian underneath. Or, they realize that they’ve got to go deeper, and they’ve already hit a wall. One of the other things that we find with OBN is that those who do not have a liturgical tradition become restless in their Christianity because it’s not quite adequate. And those who do have a liturgical tradition, when they can go up through it, into a connection— they have more long-term stability in the church where they are. Otherwise they begin to pogo stick from one church to another.
We pay no attention to denominations. We ask a person though to reflect the fullness of their understanding but respect the responsibility of the other person to do the same, and not to get into discussions over theology but to stay with the experiences of the day. And then we share those, and in that, because there’s something real that they came to, we begin to develop a milieu— a mental framework in which everybody becomes like family, regardless of their religious background. We form community in the wilderness. One of the problems that we often have with OBN is that when the event is over at 1-2 p.m. on a Sunday, it comes to be 4:30-5 p.m., and nobody’s gone home because they’ve been so touched, and they want to prolong that. And that’s a problem for the facilitators because they travel some distance to get there, and they’ve got a fair distance to go. And so the big discussion often, more so with the ten-day wilderness programs than with the weekend, is how do you re-integrate into society given its glitzy and manipulative character. And that hasn’t been easy for some people— it tends to be harder for the women .
And the only solution is to go deeper into your Christianity, so that it becomes, that it informs your lifestyle and your way of being – the lessons you take from the wilderness, then you bring back. Because those [experiences] were characterized by a form of integrity that the city doesn’t convey. And it doesn’t convey it because in the wilderness, you’re immersed in the mind of what created the wilderness. And when you’re in the city, you’re immersed in the mind of what created the city and, therefore, the subtle expression of contractors and architects and everyone else – and you LIVE in that mind. And so it shrinks down possibilities. And as it shrinks it down, it enculturates a material world view.
Churches are supposed to have that cosmic world view, remember the church is the cosmos in miniature, and the liturgical cycle is a reflection of the cosmic cycle, at least on earth in the northern hemisphere. That’s where it ran up against the dilemma of north and south, and the need to synchronize calendars, north and south. It would make more sense to reverse it for the southern hemisphere. Then the darkest night of the year, which is June 21, Christ would be born on June 25. We first notice the change very minutely on the 24th, and so that’s why he’s born that night. All those things have meaning.
And you see it in Irenaeus of Leon. And after that it fades. So it’s real early, in the formation of Christianity. Much of that cosmological awareness is so overgrown with everything else, acculturated, so that instead of the church being a place where we could perhaps maintain a sense of cosmic order and our place in it, instead we get more entrenched in the world. It can happen. It does indeed .
And so they put financial concerns and the building fund, before ecological principle, which we’ve toured through. That’s a problem. And it’s because, partly the culture is too much with us, but the other side of it is Christ is too little with us. And the more one grows in Christ, the more there’s a vision that goes with it. And it cannot help but be an ecological vision, and therefore underneath all this, I think if there were to be a saying, it’s to be Christian is to be concerned for God’s creation, it’s to be an ecologist. Ipso Facto— I’m Christian and an ecologist. And that ought to be on the horizon for every church.
Now, the question is will we get there sooner or too late? Because it’s clearly the right thing.
Postscript
“Wilderness experience can be transforming, but only when a proper protocol and methodology are present.”
To see more about the impact of Krueger’s work, check out Christ in the Wilderness programs.
Watch the Face of God film about Krueger’s work and impact.