In Search of the Sacred Life

Book Review of Norman Wirzba’s This Sacred Life: Humanity’s Place in a Wounded World

By Catherine Grattan

The plant growing in your backyard is not a plant, according to author and theologian Norman Wirzba. Through their rootedness, these photosynthetic givers of life are constantly growing, reproducing, giving off and taking in nutrients, and mingling into the soil. They are not objects existing in a world, in fact, the world functions through their very essence and experiences [1].

Wirzba’s masterpiece “This Sacred Life'' does more than just skim the surface of the sacred life. While Wirzba has written books on narrower topics such as holy eating habits and Sabbath rest, This Sacred Life gives a holistic perspective on the beauty and plight of humanity and what it means to interact with God’s world. Delving into a realm of seemingly unrelated topics, Wirzba links the subjugation of the land with the oppression of human beings across history, dabbles in poetry and philosophy by bringing up the musings of 19th-century English writer John Ruskin (among many others), and hits on the hard sciences by appealing to the cellular intricacies of life. One may question how so many different disciplines can form a coherent argument and focus. Yet, this overarching truth- that humans can only embrace their telos by acknowledging the value of relationships with the rest of the created order, requires unpacking all God holds sovereignty over as Maker of the Universe.

Wirzba understands well that humans have the propensity to overlook embodiment in pursuit of heaven or vacillate towards the other extreme: engrossing oneself in this earthly life to the extent that death is not an option. He explains the pitfalls of the latter mentality in his critique of transhumanism (those who see no limits on human potential). We cannot escape our God-given finiteness. Yet, In stressing humanity’s rootedness in creaturely bodies, it is also a helpful read for those doubting anything in the physical world is redeemable or of virtue. Transcending the spiritual realm, God saw physical embodiment and creation as intrinsically good [2].

Likewise, for the moderate audience who does not fall on any one side of the pendulum, flecks of wisdom can also be gleaned. Wirzba provides a refreshing reinforcement of the truth that this earth, this land, and all organisms in it, matter. He weaves the idea of creation as a system of meshwork to reconstruct the notion of our human identity. We bear the image of a Creator who has endowed human beings with the gift of creating and working in a community of creation. Life is not simply about man existing in creation; it is creation itself that enables us to be truly human.

As Wirzba muses: “With meshwork one needs to relinquish the idea of the world as a collection of bounded, discrete entities that can be neatly classified and categorized. This is difficult to do, given the long influence of Aristotelian ways of understanding things: that humans are distinctly different entities from the rest of creation. In his substance ontology, for instance, he argued that the way to characterize something is to set it apart from others so that it can be understood as the particular thing that it is” [3].

Likewise, contrary to Aristotle’s conception, humans are much more connected to the land than they think. Wirzba points out how the bacteria in the soil bear a remarkable resemblance to the bacteria in our digestive system. Moreover, according to researchers, humanity’s cellular connection to the soil touches on something fundamentally intrinsic to our existence: a truly flourishing life.

Findings from the Journal of Happiness Studies demonstrate how being connected to nature yields positive psychological implications for the flourishing life. According to a study on eudaimonic and hedonic wellbeing [4], nature-connectedness was linked with boosted eudaimonic well-being levels, defined as “functioning well” [5]. More specifically, higher levels of “autonomy, self-acceptance, life purpose, environmental mastery, [and] positive relatedness” were associated with nature-connectedness [6]. Personal growth ranked highest out of all wellbeing markers. In differing from self-serving hedonic well-being, eudaimonic well-being gauges how well a person lives in sync with values. This is inextricably linked with the notion that humans have a concept of morality imbued in them, making it a marker of true flourishing [7].

As Wirzba understands, a life well-lived is not found in dedicating one’s life to their own self, as if it is man against the world. Our ultimate reason for existence has already been given in Christ, and we must humbly embrace our finiteness and role in relation to the rest of creation. Gleaning on the 20th-century localist, Wendell Berry, it is only by abstaining and yielding to nature that we find liberation through the One who gave us and the rest of creation the breath of life [8]. This, indeed, is sacred.

SOURCES

[1] This Sacred Life: Humanity’s Place in a Wounded World, Norman Wirzba, p. 84

[2] Genesis 1:31

[3] In Search of the Sacred Life, Norman Wirzba, p. 110

[4] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10902-019-00118-6

[5] Pritchard et al., 2019, p. 1146

[6] Pritchard et al., 2019, p. 1149

[7] Pritchard et al., 2019, p. 1147

[8] The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture, Wendell Berry