You’re reading Tethered Letters, a monthly long-form letter on creative faith and faithful creativity. I also write a biweekly poetry letter called Five Lines, which you can subscribe to here. Oh, and I wrote a book. Everything you read here is AI-free. Thanks for being here.
Dear loved ones,
How are you these days? It has been a busy month, and I'm grateful for your patience with me in getting back to you with another long-form (long-winded?) letter.
If you're so inclined, I'd love to get to know you better. If you're new here as a reader, would you drop a comment in the thread below and let me know where you're from and something beautiful you've enjoyed lately?
It's a funny thing, this internet conversation we're all in. It feels like a gift or a curse to me, depending on the day. Today, I just want you to know how much I appreciate you puttering over to my little corner of Substack. I hope you're finding something here that gives you courage and joy, and I'd love to know a little more about you.
So where to begin?
August was blackberries (hence, jam!) and tomatoes (hence, salsa and soup!) Our canning process always seems to start around 9pm and end in the middle of the night, but I know we won't regret the time when we dip into those jars come winter. We also celebrated our Nadia's 11th circle around the sun with some cheesecake and her very own pop-up tent, which was promptly popped up and slept in overnight.
It's surreal to see my kids sleeping out in the same backyard I did at their age. Gosh, y'all, I feel old.
But anyway, here we are at the edge of fall, the garden shouldering gold while the meadow is already dressing up in ironweed, New England aster, and two types of goldenrod. And I'm writing you a letter once again.
We’ve been on a four-year quest to establish a native wildflower meadow in our backyard, and this year we’ve been seeing some of the fruits of our labor.
The first year was literally just killing off all of the established grasses and weeds within the top inch or so of ground; we accomplished this by smothering and cooking the soil under clear tarps. Then just before winter set in, we scattered a high-quality seed mix from a local prairie restoration company.
The second year we saw mostly the nurse crop, an annual native that grew tall but left a lot of air between plants to allow the perennials to form a solid seed bed. We did identify a few of the plants we hoped to see: wild bergamot (bee balm), partridge pea, sand coreopsis, and New England aster.
The third year was a wash of black-eyed Susan, a biennial that dies out by August, leaving plenty of space for other slower plants to get the nutrients they need for growth. We saw more of the forbs we had seen in the second year, plus wild lupines, smooth blue aster, and hints of goldenrod to come. But we also saw a huge amount of Queen Anne’s lace (wild carrot), which is a tenacious, invasive biennial that drops massive payloads of seeds if you look at it sideways. We have another back meadow close to our wildflowers, so we surmised that the seeds came from there. We spent much of our third year yanking up these plants by the roots to keep them from overgrowing the others.
Let’s pause here, because I discovered a related video recently on Youtube, made by a very nice, very eager environmentalist. Essentially, this person had purchased a large parcel of land (possibly by selling her possessions?) and was going to turn the whole thing into a sustainable, healthy ecosystem. I don’t know too much about sustainability, but I do know a bit about wildflower meadows, and the particular video was of her trying to turn a large area of her land into a native wildflower meadow. I was hoping for tips, you see.
She started with a bunch of beautifully-drawn plans for where specific flowers were going to be, and then literally just walked up and down through the existing fields scattering seeds. No solarization, no soil prep, just a bunch of seeds (which probably cost her a lot of money) tossed into a field already inhabited by grasses and weeds.
What really got me was the follow-up video, which featured her walking through the meadow pointing out swaths of flourishing non-natives that weren’t in her seed mix at all, as if she had accomplished her goal. The funniest thing was that she was calling them by their scientific names. The primary one of these, you guessed it, was Daucus carota – Queen Anne’s lace.
Only a few weeks earlier, we encountered an excitable botanist at our local state park who did the exact same thing. We were walking by, all seven of us, and he bawled: “What a great day for finding native wildflowers! This one is called blah-blah-blah, common name yadda yadda.” (I don’t remember what it was, just that it was another prolific invasive weed).
Not to put too fine a point to it, but this is akin to me walking up to my neighbor – who happens to be Amish – pointing at the horse attached to his buggy, and proclaiming: “What a beautiful day for local wildlife! That right there is an Equus caballus, common name: horse. People in the Anabaptist tradition of Christianity often use it as a mode of transportation.”
Now, I don’t mean to ridicule at all here, because Lord knows we’ve done some pretty silly and ineffective things around our place. We once broke a peach tree in half by leaving a sprinkler on it overnight when a frost was imminent; Linnea still has the picture on her phone and we often go back and laugh our heads off at the modern ice sculpture we created. So no, I don’t think these people are dumb.
I just found it fascinating (and very funny) that in both cases, these individuals used scientific names to obscure their lack of substantive knowledge on the subject at hand. They used the most formal words, the words that actually create the most distance between them and their beloved invasive weeds, to prove how intimately they knew these plants.
Unfortunately, the same happens to church-folk sometimes. I'm pretty sure many of us have known eager theologians who got a little penal substitution and predestination running through their veins and began to layer theological terms over everything to distance themselves from the truth: that they didn’t really know Jesus very well, or spend much time with their Father.
Intimacy bends down to simple words. It does not pin the object of its affection to a board, spread their wings, and fill out a classification and “date caught” label.
The initial draft of this Tethered Letter was essentially a movie-by-movie analysis of James Gunn’s Guardians of the Galaxy trilogy and how it exemplifies the vision for Christian community laid out in Bonhoeffer’s Life Together. You know, the normal bread and butter of this Substack.
Given the monumental nature of that worthy undertaking, I realized there was no way to do it full justice in a single Tethered Letter. Obviously I’m still going to do it. It will just be a three-part miniseries released later this year… so stay tuned. I have a mighty need to talk about this trilogy, and I will not be stopped.
In the meantime, there’s an interesting theme running through the third film that relates to terminology.
In this movie, the Guardians face off against the High Evolutionary, the mad scientist who experimented on Rocket when he was a wee raccoon. The reason the High Evolutionary is trying to get at Rocket is because Rocket, of all of his experiments, somehow had a spark of true creativity — something human within this little trash panda, beyond the beastly nature of his other experiments. Rocket proves this by solving a problem the High Evolutionary could not solve, and the High Evolutionary hates him for it. He doesn’t want to understand Rocket. He just wants to study his brain to figure out how this was possible.
Rocket, to him, is a numbered object to be used, an "imperfect clump of biological matter," not a creature with personhood and a name. He constantly calls him by his assigned experiment number, 89P13. He mockingly asks him at one point, "How could you be part of a perfect species?" We could dismiss this as normal villain talk, but his words cut deeper than just an "I'm above you" villain schtick, because at the core, he's attacking Rocket's personhood (or in this instance, his raccoonhood).
What's so striking about the High Evolutionary is that his use of language is a villainy we are accustomed too. We hear it every day: you are something less than human, whether because you have been subsumed by a tribe, or you are not yet holy or healthy enough, or you are a statistic, etc. Usually, this means that your worth is defined almost exclusively by your usefulness to whoever happens to be trying to use you at the moment.
In his essay "Agricultural Solutions for Agricultural Problems" (from Bringing It to the Table), Wendell Berry outlines this particular problem, focusing on our societal penchant for machine language:
It may turn out that the most powerful and the most destructive change of modern times has been a change in language: the rise of the image, or metaphor, of the machine. Until the industrial revolution occurred in the minds of most of the people of the so-called developed countries, the dominant images were organic: They had to do with living things; they were biological, pastoral, agricultural, or familial. ...
Now we do not flinch to hear men and women referred to as "units" as if they were as uniform and interchangeable as machine parts. It is common, and considered acceptable, to refer to the mind as a computer: one's thoughts are "inputs"; other people's responses are "feedback." And the body is thought of as a machine; it is said, for instance, to use food as "fuel"; and the best workers and athletes are praised by being compared to machines. Work is judged almost exclusively now by its "efficiency," which, as used, is a mechanical standard, or by its profitability, which is our only trusted index of mechanical efficiency. One's country is no longer loved familially and intimately as a "motherland," but rather priced according to its "productivity" of "raw materials" and "natural resources" — valued, that is, strictly according to its ability to keep the machines running. And recently R. Buckminster Fuller asserted that "the universe physically is itself the most incredible technology" — the necessary implication being that God is not father, shepherd, or bridegroom, but a mechanic, operating by principles which, according to Fuller, "can only be expressed mathematically.
Instead of the messy and time-consuming nature of human growth, we talk about efficiency as an eternal good. Instead of bearing fruit in season (not to mention death and resurrection), we "produce." Instead of human beings, in church parlance we are "family units" or even "giving units."
It's no coincidence that the most-hyped technology of our age is one that touts its ability to replace human creativity (and creative humans) with little effort, nor is it a surprise that "forward-thinkers" across disciplines are falling in line to try to prove its value. If we are machines, why couldn’t we be replaced with more effective ones?
This machine language reduces us. And the shift in philosophy that it represents takes a very dark turn very quickly. For instance, if efficient human-machines are what we value, what do we do with the inefficient ones (the young, the elderly, the disabled, etc.)? Perhaps we should stick them somewhere so they can grow into model human resources, or house them out of sight until it’s time to pull the plug.
Instead of committing to the hard work of discipleship, we celebrate numbers and grieve statistics. Instead of doing the hard work of relationship, we connect through layers of social media. Instead of setting ourselves to the hard work of creativity, we automate imitation and, despite every evidence that it is not so, we call it good. Instead of celebrating art made by humans, we celebrate “content” that pleases the algorithm.
Why? Is this because, as Rocket says, we want to make things better, or because we hate things as they are?
This language (and subsequent behavior) distances us from ourselves. We are living, breathing, God-imaging beings with personhood and names, not machines. To talk about ourselves as if we are full of gears and wires allows us to take a step back from the reality of the flesh and blood and bone inside of us, the emotions, the soul.
This distance gives us the illusion of control. We can use numbers to control outcomes. We can curate our image and block those who annoy us on social media (you'll find that blocking your next-door neighbor in Real Life is impossible, whether you appreciate his Q-Anon flags or not). We can write or paint without knowing how to do either well, because we now have AI. We can enslave an audience, by entering the content spiral.
I would suggest that we don't hate things as they are. Maybe, we hate ourselves as we are. We hate that we're not meeting the quotas our boss wants for us, or that we dread conversations with that one guy, or that writing something well takes so gosh darn long. We hate that we still sin, despite our best efforts to live holy lives. There must be a glitch somewhere in our system. If only we could fix ourselves, then maybe we could love ourselves.
The High Evolutionary is a simple person. He just wants one thing out of life: perfection. And he will maim and incinerate whoever he has to in order to fulfill that ideal. A life lived in slavery to such an impossible ideal will always breed hatred and violence. A life lived accepting our human imperfections and confessing our sins will bring forth love.
For a moment at the climax of Guardians Vol. 3, the High Evolutionary gets the drop on Rocket, spewing his tired poison:
You think you have some worth in and of yourself without me? You are an abomination, nothing more than a step on my path! You freakish little monster! How dare you think you are more, 89P13!
But Rocket is no longer enslaved to this language. He has not only come to terms with his brokenness, he has experienced love. He knows where he really comes from, what kind of cuddly, furry animal he was before the High Evolutionary mechanized him. He knows that he has a higher purpose than that of a discarded experiment on the way to ultimate perfection. And so he finally claims the name he has avoided all this time:
The name's Rocket. Rocket Raccoon.
And then he and the other Guardians give the High Evolutionary a well-deserved beatdown.
Every time we try to elevate ourselves above our human limitations – whether we’re trying to show off our knowledge, prove ourselves valuable, or push humanity to greater heights – we only end up making fools of ourselves, or worse, hurting ourselves and those around us. Because the most obvious truth of human existence is that we are incapable of adding up to the impossible standards we set for ourselves. The only way we begin to grow is through giving them up and asking for help.
Until we humble ourselves and drop our high-falutin’ terminology and our machine-driven mindsets, we’ll just be another idiot trying to explain to our Amish neighbor what a horse is.
And you know what? Setting aside perfection is how we discover just how much more amazing being truly human — living into our common, everyday humanness — actually is.
The eager scientific namers frolicking about in their weedy meadows (God bless ‘em), did remind me of something: the lost wonder of common names. The names we’ve learned for the plants in our meadow carry a wildness to them, a music, a mythology: white heath aster, partridge pea, rattlesnake master, goldenrod, hoary vervain. Who was this Susan, and who did she ensnare with her black eyes? Even the invasive pollinators we prune back are better suited to their common names: Queen Anne’s lace is an elegant plant with an elegant name. I just don’t want it to out-compete my ironweed.
In our fourth year, we’re finally beginning to see what our meadow might look like in years to come. We’ve checked off most of the native grasses and forbs on our plant-sighting list, and we’re beginning to understand the differences between them. Yet we still know so little and control so little. Most of the work has been done in waiting and watching, alongside selective weeding, strategic burns, and a little mowing. We've had to submit to the slow, unseen process of establishing a seedbed.
And in letting go, we’ve found ourselves encountering our meadow and its occupants with genuine surprise and delight.
This place is wild, y’all. Here’s to keeping it so, and calling it like it is.
Until next time,
Chris
August Favorites:
Just finished G. K. Chesterton's Heretics, which was a really entertaining philosophical takedown of a bunch of contemporary thinkers. Now to dive into Orthodoxy...
This video on the use of the word "content" by Patrick Willems offers some interesting perspective in the same vein as our machine language.
Linnea and I are enjoying all the sleuthing going on in the new season of Only Murders in the Building.
"Unfortunately, the same happens to church-folk sometimes. I'm pretty sure many of us have known eager theologians who got a little penal substitution and predestination running through their veins and began to layer theological terms over everything to distance themselves from the truth: that they didn’t really know Jesus very well, or spend much time with their Father." This is a whole word.
🥂 to Only Murders in the Building, low anthropology (have you read David Zahl's book??), and the grace of movies. You write about all of this so compassionately. Thank you