For Part One of the series, read here.
Does anyone know what these black birds are? The subject line of a neighborhood social media post caught my eye. Intrigued, I clicked to see what the mysterious black bird was. My sons are both birding enthusiasts, and I was excited to share a rare bird sighting with them. I opened to find that there was quite a neighborhood phenomenon of the baffling black bird. Picture after picture appeared in the comments sections: black birds on fence posts, on decks, on tree branches. I clicked on a picture to see if I could solve the riddle of the identity of the enigmatic bird. A picture filled my computer screen – a large bird, an iridescent sheen on his black feathers. It was a crow.
An unknowable world is a frightening and chaotic place, the very sort of place that existed before creation. Into the dark, formless void, the creator God spoke through his son, “Let there be.” And there was. And it was good. No longer chaotic, creation became ordered in the image of the Trinity. To Adam, the unique image-bearer, he gave dominion. Through Adam, creation was named and known. Genesis 2:19-20 describes man’s role:
Now out of the ground the LORD God had formed every beast of the field and every bird of the heavens and brought them to the man to see what he would call them. And whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name. The man gave names to all livestock and to the birds of the heavens and to every beast of the field.
After the fall, God spoke a curse upon the ground. However, the curse is one of thorns and thistles, sweat and toil. The curse did not return creation to the state of chaotic unknowing. Creation, in God’s image, remains ordered, united in wisdom. Over time, humans have become increasingly fragmented from creation, increasingly unable to view the beauty of God’s order within creation, and increasingly unable to approach the world with wonder.
In his book Chance or the Dance, Thomas Howard argues that with the Enlightenment came a shift of myth, or paradigm for making sense of the world. The old myth was that everything means everything: the new, nothing means anything. “The old myth saw the world as image; the new sees it as a chance concatenation of physical events.” Viewing the world as a chaotic place of chance underpins the idea that the world is unknowable and unnamable.
Rather than seeing a creature with wonder and curiosity, it is much more common to treat it as a specimen. In his collection of essays entitled Message in the Bottle, Walker Percy writes about approaching both sonnets and dogfish as “specimens” in a sterile classroom environment.
The phrase specimen of expresses in the most succinct way imaginable the radical character of the loss of being which has occurred under his very nose…The dogfish itself is seen as a rather shabby expression of an ideal reality, the species Squalus acanthias. The result is the radical devaluation of the individual dogfish.
He believes that the dogfish can be recovered by “restoring access to sonnet and dogfish as beings to be known, reasserting the sovereignty of knower over known.” The sovereignty of knower over known is the right relationship of man to creation. This is not a call to exploitation; it is a call to wonder, a call to wisdom.
The “science” I came to know as a student in the classroom revealed an increasing loss of being. It was mutilation of creation that bore no relationship to the natural world outside. All that remains in my memory from high school Honors Biology is the smell and the feel of a fetal pig as it disintegrated over the weeks in its formaldehyde bin. Unsurprisingly, I refused to teach science during my years in the classroom at our classical school. However, when I began to homeschool, I had no other teacher on whom to foist elementary school science. Fortunately, in discovering the lost art of natural philosophy, I began to recover a world lost.
Natural philosophy means “love of wisdom in the natural world.” Think of it as poetic knowledge of the natural world. It is knowledge that begins (and ends) with wonder and love. Victorian educational reformer Charlotte Mason provides a clear, practical paradigm for guiding young children in nature study. Steeped in the classical tradition, she advocates laying a foundation for future scientific learning through experiencing first-hand properties of substances and forces in the natural world. Young children learn through observation, nature hikes, nature journaling, and object lessons coupled with books about nature lore. Like Adam, they see, name, and know.
This is the way that children naturally approach the world before textbooks and specimens teach them otherwise. In this knowledge, my children have been my teacher, with superior memories and abundant enthusiasm. I once heard Sonya Shafer, co-founder of Simply Charlotte Mason, speak about her beginning experiences with introducing her children to nature study. She described it as taking a guest to a party where you know no one. Your guest may point to someone and ask, “Who is that?” Your response is to shrug dumbly, over and over. You do not know who any of them are.
Just like at a party of strangers, we began by naming one thing at a time, watching and sketching, building knowledge as the months turn into years. I guide them in questioning: What do you notice? What does it remind you of? What questions do you have? They teach me to see. When we see and love, the natural world is not filled with fear, but with beauty. Recently, when picking squash in my father-in-law’s garden, he remarked that it would soon be time to watch for rattlesnakes. The old-timers say to watch for rattlesnakes when the blackberries are ripe. Even in danger, there is a rhythm, an order. We wait in the already, not yet. Though creation is yet vitiated, it is still resplendent with the beauty of God.
Up next: Part 3: The Beauty of the Word