Every wildfire is followed by new growth. And Christians are called to cultivate it.
Written by Braeden Holmstrom
The wildfires that have burned across Alberta in recent years have made common an event that was previously rare in the Prairies—a sky filled with smoke.
I have seen photos from my time attending university in Edmonton when the smoke made the city look more like a scene from Blade Runner than a sunny northern city. The smoke for me combined with the busyness of city life, air and light pollution, and broken-into cars so that I was eager to move back to my little hometown in rural Alberta. After the completion of my undergrad that is what I did.
Though I wouldn’t identify with the trend, I saw a similarity between my own decision to move home and homesteaders—folks seeking a simpler way of life away from the modern world with its complicated politics and technology. I don’t think most of us are cut out to sell a house in the city to buy a plot of land in the wilderness, but I do see the attraction and the broader disillusionment it’s based on. There’s a sense everything today is just too much. For some it’s about distrust in our institutions, rising costs of living, political polarization or something else. Whether we see the fire or not, it is easy to smell the smoke.
After my return home I was standing on my front porch petting my dog when I smelled smoke again. It was the burnt remains of Jasper National Park, a place that has a lot of memories for my family. I was deeply saddened by this damage, but I felt stuck to know what I could do about it. I’m no firefighter, and blaming politicians (the response of many on sites like Twitter) didn’t seem helpful.
Jasper has become illustrative of a larger cultural issue. As a Christian I feel as though I should be doing something about the world’s ills. But what should our response be when the fire is far away and far too large for us to handle?
Moving home offered no escape from the smoke. As an adult I realized my little childhood town is also facing its own fires. I saw a loss of community, a town haunted by the ghosts of alcoholism and economic decline. Wendell Berry writes about this in many of his novels. Jayber Crow follows the slow decline of the community of Port William, Kentucky. Increased industrialization depletes the population, and those who remain start driving farther for better deals in bigger towns that the local businesses can’t compete with. The local community withers. I saw the same thing in my own community and many others. When my grandmother was a teen there were dances at the town hall every weekend. Now? There are next to none. The flames of our world aren’t new.
I began reading the book The God of the Garden by Andrew Peterson around this time. As the tagline describes, the book is composed of Peterson’s “Thoughts on Creation, Culture, and the Kingdom.” Peterson’s relationship with plants, gardening, and faith is a large theme throughout, and he frequently brings up how he has taken to planting trees wherever he moves. There’s something about that which seems right to me. As he points out, humanity’s first given role was the gardener. Adam and Eve were to tend and keep the garden of Eden. In these chapters Peterson illustrates how gardening is fundamentally a hopeful activity. This rings true for me after a lifetime on the farm, but I hadn’t ever quite heard it put the way Peterson did. To plant is to hope.
Much like gardening and farming, hope can be hard work. At times it may even seem trite or cliché. When the world is cloaked in smoke everything takes on a gray tinge. It is difficult to escape from the immediacy of your concern when that concern surrounds and penetrates you. Every wheezing breath makes sure you know it’s still there. In such a circumstance hope can seem pathetic and small. One green seed cannot make the smoke go away; a planted garden is nothing compared to an ancient forest reduced to ash. But to hope is to believe the smoke will clear, the fires will die out, and that there will still be opportunities for life afterwards. This is not to say lament for what has burned is inappropriate, but we need to make sure our lament does not solidify into something permanent. Lament is for a time, sometimes a long time, but it mustn’t be forever.
But to hope is to believe the smoke will clear, the fires will die out, and that there will still be opportunities for life afterwards.
While the work of literal gardening is meaningful and important, frankly many of us don’t have a green thumb. Something we can all work at in the real world of daily life that is similar is community building. Both of these are acts of cultivation and hope—planting and tending even as the fires continue. While so much has been lost in our communities, so much is growing too, and still more being planted.
I’ve taken up a role at our county’s adult learning centre, and through my window looking out onto main street I’ve been watching the gardeners in our little town work. The things they are planting give me hope: children’s plays, community theatre productions, community suppers, festivals, new businesses, the list goes on. We’ve even hosted a Housemoot, an arts conference created by The Rabbit Room, a ministry Andrew Peterson helped start. Even my little community was growing, I just couldn’t see it through the haze.
I’ve been blinded by the smoke for a long time, it’s made me unable to see the things growing around my feet and the people tending those sprouts. My advice to others lost in the smoke is this, look to the soil at your feet, after every wildfire there is new growth there. And as Christians we are called to help it grow. What is the role of a Christian in a world filled with smoke? We must garden, because we worship the God of the Garden, the God of Hope.
Braeden Holmstrom is a writer working out of Killam, Alta. He is passionate about storytelling, faith, and learning. You can find more of his work on his blog.