Only Natural

Of late I have been struggling with my faith as a Christian. I don't feel all that much like a Christian these days. Today it hit me that one of the reasons why I don't has to to with the conflict between what is natural and what is Christian.

In general, it seems to me, Christianity is anti-nature. What I mean by the words "nature" and "natural" is hard to pin down. Let me try to sneak up on it.

Leading "the Christian life" amounts to, when you strip it down to outtward essentials, doing certain things and avoiding doing certain other things. What you do and what you eschew are done or conscientiously not done in the name of God. But the question is, why do you need to consciously embrace virtue and avoid sin?

The answer would seem to be that, by our very nature, we want the "wrong" things. Instead of doing righteous deeds, we veer in the direction of iniquity ... unless we consciously undertake a course correction, that is. That's what Christian living is: a permanent course correction that we build into our lives by intent, analogous to what a driver needs to do to steer a car that pulls to one side. The Christian commitment is one wherein we assiduously cock the steering wheel of our lives away from what would otherwise be the "straight ahead" position, under the assumption that the car's front end is out of alignment.

But where does that out-of-alignment assumption itself come from? For what it seems to imply is that our very nature is askew. Absent a course correction undertaken "in the name of God" — since what we generally do proceeds from our inner nature — unless that inner nature is somehow askew, no course correction would be necessary.


Indeed, the whole story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden seems to tell us nothing so much as that our very nature — and indeed, that of the world as a whole — is out of whack. This is what it means to say that we, and it, are "fallen."

Recently I have begun to seriously doubt that perhaps most fundamental premise of the Christian stance. It no longer makes much sense to me to believe in the fallenness of (human) nature: my own, that of other people, or that of the world as a whole.

Today I took a walk around a nearby man-made lake, something I do quite often for air and exercise. This time, as I huffed and puffed, I found myself spontaneously meditating on what it means to say, as we often do, that something is "only natural."

The water level in the artificial lake I was hoofing it around was unusually low. Only natural, I mused, given how little rainfall we've been getting these last few months. But what about the fact that I responded to noticing the alarmingly low waterline by worrying about whether "global warming" is having something to do with its cause? Was my complex mental reaction to seeing the low water level somehow "unnatural" because complex and mental?

It too, I realized, was really only natural, given how much we have all been hearing about the global warming controversy. I am a (supposedly) intelligent creature, and it was only natural that my mind would construct such a hypothetical story about how our species' ever-growing "carbon footprint" might indirectly account for how many mud flats were visible at Lake Centennial. No matter how complex the activities of the individual human mind, there is nothing about them that can be deemed intrinsically unnatural.


Did I say "species"? Another thing I was keenly aware of on my health walk was just how many living kinds there were in that one modest-sized park. Every plant, every tree, every animal species — I saw squirrels and chipmunks and swans and Canada geese, and I knew by the avidity of the anglers (another animal species) that there were fish under the albeit diminished lake surface — was testimony to nature's vast diversity. Yet I knew the fact of the biosphere's diversity was "only natural" — Darwin showed us why.

Surely, though, the existence of each individual species was some kind of accident of nature, no? No, I found myself thinking, it was "only natural" that each particular species should have come about. Even if the long, tangled skein of causality that has led in the present moment to (saay) a Canada goose incorporated junctures at which "random" genetic mutations occurred, who is to say that some such chance-riddled skein was not bound to yield Canada geese and trout and squirrels and chipmunks and humans to appreciate them all, in the fullness of time? Who is to say that it is not "only natural" that chipmunks and willow trees and trout and avid trout fishermen should be expected to arise out of the complex, multidimensional processes of nature on this planet?

Well, what about man-made lakes and other copycat geographical features? Surely they are anything but "only natural"? Well, actually, no, I'd say they are in fact only natural. It is in fact only natural that a species such as ourselves, having risen to a unique level of consciousness and associated power over the forces of nature, should learn how to put lakes where none had been before.

And it is in fact only natural that this (our) species' unique power to manipulate the environment would tend to get things out of whack on occasi0n. If our vaunted carbon footprint does in fact threaten our whole enterprise of human progress, it is not surprising that this eventuality might crop up at some point in our history. And it is only natural that we should engage in heated debate about whether the "evidence" for global warming (in this particular case) ought to be credited. For if it isn't lying to us, we need to change our ways. It's only natural that we would be in no hurry to do that.


I was also mindful of another way in which the ideas of "natural" and "unnatural" have been understood by Christians. To wit, sex. Certain types of sex are said to involve "unnatural acts." But it seemed to me, as I walked and cogitated, that homosexual sex, said to be the most "unnatural" type of all, is actually perfectly natural for some people.

That phrase, "for some people," is key, I pontificated. Just as the natural world is so diverse that its living species are uncountable, the human world (which is, when you think about, it just one branch of the larger natural world) contains vast diversity as well. If this person is gay and that one is straight, who is to say that one of the two is "unnatural"?

We know now that many animals engage in "unnatural" (i.e., homosexual) sex. If one assumes that animals are simply incapable of doing anything which is not "natural," then calling this particular kind of activity "unnatural" beggars reason.

Yet the Christian stance has long been that there is a true, "one-size-fits-all" morality, and such things as homosexual sex, or any sex without the benefit of heterosexual marriage, lie outside its perimeter.

Any act or urge outside that perimeter is perforce, in Christian eyes, "unnatural." By this is meant that, were we not living in a fallen, post-Edenic world, we would not have such urges and would never commit such acts.


And that is precisely what I no longer seem to believe. I simply don't believe that "nature" can be corrupted ... not at its core.

I'm not saying that certain acts, under certain circumstances, are not unethical or immoral. All we need to do is look around us and we see immoral acts being committed right and left. All I'm saying is that this odd idea that the way to forestall immoral behavior is to "correct" nature is bogus.

Look at the prevalence of priestly child abuse over the course of recent decades in my own, Roman Catholic Church, for example. Look at the recent scandal of the prominent evangelical leader Ted Haggard being outed as gay. Look at the intolerance spouted by the late Jerry Falwell and the still very much alive Pat Robertson. They all bespeak the fact that even the most devout Christians fail at their attempts to "correct" their inner nature, because in the end nature wins.

It's like building a dam. For a while, the dam holds, but come a ninety-nine year hurricane or flood or earthquake, and the dam is history. It's only natural that we should try to control nature with dams and levees, and perhaps it's only natural that we should imagine that we are in fact bound to work assiduously to correct nature, but in the end nature always wins.

Which makes me think that the Taoists are right. Water eventually overcomes stone. "The most submissive thing in the world can run roughshod over the hardest in the world — that which is without substance [water] entering that which has no crevices [rock]. That is why I know the benefit of resorting to no action ... ." So says the Tao Te Ching. The best stance is to align ourselves with nature, not try to correct it.