The Usefulness of Uselessness
We returned last week from a vacation to southern Oregon, with little dips into northern California. The first part of this trip was spent in a very special place, one that I’m sure you might be growing tired of hearing me talk about! It is a little college campus in Lincoln, Oregon, about 20 miles from Ashland. In the 70’s a few professors scouted the now defunct lumber mill situated in the Cascade-Siskiyou mountains, and decided to convert it into their idealistic vision of academia. (Find out more here: https://www.oregonextension.org/)
Dave Willis
The campus is located in the Cascade-Siskiyou National monument, established in the year 2000. Dave Willis, who lives on the campus, has devoted his entire life to protecting that land. Before President Clinton gave the monument its designation, Dave had been working for 17 years.
Like the three rivers that converge in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the monument is the meeting point of the Cascade, Klamath, and Siskiyou mountain ranges. This meeting point of these three unique mountain ranges creates the conditions for remarkable biodiversity.
It also happens to be the land of my spiritual awakening. By the time my dirty feet touched the ground of the monument, I was a full-blown ex-Evangelical mess. I hadn’t cut my hair in years, and my grandfather made his displeasure about that fact quite clear. I remember his mumbles of “god-damned hippie” when I walked by. I was sewing upside-down American flags on thrifted black hoodies. If there is a life-span of a Christian, I was at the door slamming, I hate my parent’s stage.
But the Cascade-Siskiyou mountains, and her juniper, and frigid waters, they held me so tenderly. She let me rage, and flail, and swear, and shake my firsts. When I return, once or twice a year, that sour-sweet smell of juniper and sage reminds me of the sacredness of that place and what it meant to me. How it held me through my coming into myself. It reminds me of how I emerged put somewhat back together.
On August 24, 2017, I woke up to a notification that interior secretary Ryan Zinke had handed President Trump recommendations for 27 National Monuments to have their protected status removed, and thus opened up to timber production once again. The Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument was on the list.
I guess it is a good thing that I can count the number of times I have felt rage on one hand. The news of August 24, 2017 accounts for one of the fingers on that hand. I wasn’t sad. I was red-hot angry. At that moment, I imagined the drive to the campus, which includes a remarkable twisting and turning up a mountain. Half of that drive is like driving through a tight hallway, whose walls are Douglas Fir and Ponderosa Pine. I could see the shaved land, with tree-stump stubble. Clear cuts. I felt sick.
Thankfully, no actions were taken, and the monument remains intact. But I thought about that rage and realized that it was because that land held my personal transformation that I felt so protective of it. I felt selfish. I had not cared nearly as much about all of the other lands slated to be sold and spoiled. I felt sadness, but that sadness felt mostly like resignation and apathy. The rage made me want to fight for it.
The transition from the monument to our next destination on our trip happened during the two and half hour drive from Ashland to Brookings. As we got closer to the coast, we started to see the first Redwoods. The road flowed around their trunks like a river.
My son in the Redwoods
One of our vacation days was dedicated to visiting the Redwood groves. During a hike through a grove, we stopped and let the kids climb on a downed tree. I sat on the ground and went to church. Spirit came strong and clear to me after a few minutes of silence with this word of gratitude, “thank you, God, for the people who saw this place beyond its financial potential.”
That gratitude comes from knowing that not everyone had the foresight to protect those groves.
The hills surrounding Oakland used to be old-growth Redwood forests. Following the gold rush, the hills of Oakland were entirely stripped of their old-growth Redwoods. Well, except for one.
In 1969 a naturalist discovered a 500-year-old old-growth Redwood growing amongst the young second-growth trees. After its discovery, it was named “Old Survivor.”
Why did it survive?
First, it’s location. Its roots anchor it into a particularly steep bank on the hill. Getting to it, and positioning oneself to bring it down would have been ineffective and dangerous. Secondly, well…it is useless. Useless because as it soars 93 feet into the air, it does so like a tornado. Its twisted character and precarious location made it not worth the effort.
Old Survivor is a symbol and perhaps a role model for us in our call to resistance. Jenny Odell, a writer, and artist who teaches at Stanford had this to say about Old Survivor,
“…we could say that Old Survivor was too weird or too difficult to proceed easily toward the sawmill. In that way, the tree provides me with an image of ‘resistance-in-place.’ To resist in place is to make oneself into a shape that cannot so easily be appropriated by a capitalist value system. To do this means refusing the frame of reference: in this case, a frame of reference in which value is determined by productivity, the strength of one’s career, and individual entrepreneurship.”
The usefulness of Old Survivor is its uselessness. And the whole time I was reading and thinking about this I couldn’t help but think of Jesus.
You’d have to take an Exacto knife to your New Testament to miss a major theme of Jesus’ life. He was pulled like a magnet to those that society deemed useless. Why? I think Jesus knows how difficult it is for those of us who strive for and seek out validation of our usefulness by worldly standards to accept what he has to offer.
By uplifting and coming alongside those whose status in life has been deemed useless, and saying “these people are blessed” he is saying, “these people know humility” these people are free from the illusion. The Gospel is leading all of us towards liberation.
Howard Thurman cuts right to the chase when he says,
“The basic fact is that Christianity, as it was born in the mind of this Jewish teacher and thinker, appears as a technique of survival for the oppressed.” Like Old Survivor, the Gospel is good news for those who have been deemed useless.
It is at the heart of Matthew 19:24, “Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone rich to enter the kingdom of God.” and Matthew 19:21 “Jesus said to him, ‘If you wish to be perfect, go, sell your possessions, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.”
What if we made our money, time, attention, and energy useless to those who use it to isolate us, destroy our planet, and keep us dependent on them for our happiness and well-being? How might we be intentionally too weird or too difficult to proceed easily toward the sawmill?
Perhaps this is the goal of a Jesus follower. It is awfully hard to grasp all of this “Kingdom of God” stuff, let alone to work to build it if we have been enlisted to build another kingdom.
If you know me, you know this message lines up perfectly with one of my top five poems, which I have read to all of you probably a dozen times now. But I’ll just read a section from The Mad Farmer’s Liberation Front by Wendell Berry:
Praise ignorance, for what man
has not encountered he has not destroyed.
Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.
Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.
Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years…
As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn’t go. Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.
We find ourselves in an age where our impulses are manipulated by algorithms. Our value is measured by the data we create online. Our Facebook feeds are curated to respond to our emotions. In the words of Wendell Berry “As soon as the general and the politicos can predict the motions of your mind, lose it.” Perhaps we can now say, “As soon as Mark Zuckerberg can predict the motions of your mind, lost it.”
As we enter into open worship I offer these queries for you to carry with you into the silence, only as an invitation
What has it looked like for you to make yourself useless to systems of oppression or manipulation? What did it take for you to get yourself there?
When we consider how our attention, our money, and time are claimed, what stands out? How might we be creating an alternative?