Marooned

November 13, 2006 by djackson.

“The beyond is not what is infinitely remote, but what is nearest at hand.” - Dietrich Bonhoeffer

I’ve declared myself the Ben Gunn of Ward Island.  I think I’ve mentioned before that I live on an island.  My island, as I’ve taken to referring to it.  Yes, I share it with my wife and son, two coworkers, a brace of Baptist Student Ministries interns and a few thousand college students, but if you take the nature trail along the south edge at just the right time of day, you feel as alone as Ben Gunn.

You may remember Ben Gunn from Treasure Island, a hapless buccaneer so harmless that even his ghost can’t frighten his former colleagues.  They maroon him on an uncharted spit where he spends three years in absolute solitude yearning for cheese and Christian companionship.  But he knocks about the place until he knows it well, and discovers riches into the bargain.  Like the man in Jesus’ parable, Ben Gunn sells all he has to buy a treasure hid in a field, though he doesn’t consent to the bargain and makes the sacrifice before he discovers the pay-off.

So I’ve been spending as much time as possible rambling around the less-inhabited parts of my island, and the conclusion I’ve reached is that it could take me the rest of my life to master the small slice of sea and marsh that lies along its edge. When I set out most mornings the sea is grey and the grass deep green.  By the time I head back the sea has gone from gun-metal to bright blue and the grass has blossomed gold, and to ask which color they “really” are makes as much sense as asking if a T-bone steak is “really” a cow placidly crunching cud in the pasture or a sizzling brown slab soaking your baked potato with juice or the tender-tough texture against your tongue or the burst of flavor at the first bite. 

The other morning I spotted a vine whose heart-shaped leaves had draped themselves over a host stand of bushes and blossomed into tiny white flowers, the center stained purple.  Tennyson’s lines sprang to mind:

Flower in the crannied wall,
I pluck you out of the crannies,
I hold you here, root and all, in my hand,
Little flower -but if I could understand
What you are, root and all, and all in all,
I should know what God and man is.

1 Kings 4.33 says that King Solomon “spake of trees, from the cedar tree that is in Lebanon even unto the hyssop that springeth out of the wall,” and at that moment I was hard-pressed to decide which end of that spectrum paid greater tribute to his wisdom.  Henry David Thoreau boasted that he ahd “traveled a good deal in Concord.”  Harvard biologist Louis Agassiz once told his students that he’d spent the summer traveling, and had made it halfway across his backyard. 

With what unassailable inscrutability did that flower rebuff me!  I say it was a white flower with a purple center growing from a green leaf, but fifteen minutes previous it had been no color at all because the sun lay below the horizon.  Was the tint in the flower or in the light or in my retina awaiting an opportunity to exit?  I suddenly realized that I don’t know anything . . . except for what I’m told, and “what I’m told” is only another term for revelation.  The atheist says I’m a fool for believing in God only because the  Bible tells me about him.  I say the atheist is a fool for believing in San Diego for the same reason.  And if he counters that he’s seen San Diego for himself, I point to a tiny wild flower and laugh myself sick.

So I’ve reached two conclusions.  The first is that ecotourism is for suckers.  What do I need with jetlag and dysentery in order to ponder an Amazonian rainforest when I can occupy myself for years battling my bafflement at the battlements of a beefsteak vine?  The second is that Ben Gunn might have been a decent sailor, but he was a bad theologian.  Pirate’s treasure pales in comparison to the riches he failed to find on his island.

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