colonizing joy

I was reminded this week of a poignant experience I had two years ago while hiking in Rocky Mountain National Park. While staying in Estes Park the boys were at an all day camp so I took the opportunity to take off on a solo 20 mile hike.

It was the first week of June in the high country which means the hills were alive with the sound of music – birds chirping, wildflowers bursting with color, the smell of pine purified air. It was the beginning of the pandemic so everything was crisper and cleaner due to a lack of car and foot traffic.

About a mile or two into the hike I paused and allowed myself to be embraced by all the granduer and gratitude that surrounded me. It was one of those moments where the bliss and justice of the natural world sneaks up and gives you the hug you didn’t know you needed.

And then…

An inner crisis. Something inside me began contriving and uncomfortably forcing theology and bible verses into the scene and just like that the sacred presence got sucked out of the moment. All those June mountain scents and scenes with a distinct divine power all their own became rudely hijacked and replaced by the musty stench of a seminary library or an old church basement.

Something inside of me felt held against my will by an evangelical culture I thought I had left far behind. A culture where a Bible verse or worship hymn had to be shoehorned into every occasion without consent in order for it to have any perceived value.

Before I took my next step on the trail I determined right then and there to a) be kind to myself regarding what just happened and b) return to all those bliss filled scents that my body found so genuinely pleasurable.

The moment was already enough. Joy was already doing what genuine joy does, pulsing its way from my beating heart throughout the rest of the cells in my body.

In that moment those old fundamentalist tapes felt like an assault like a terrorist attack on pure human joy which throughout my life has felt so terribly elusive.

Like Instagramming all meaning out of the moment and assigning value to it based on a level of certain satisfactory feedback, this is the impact of a constricting religion made in the image of the empire.

And it’s the very essence of colonization.

“Everything is possessed of personality, only different from us in form. Knowledge is inherent in all things. The world is a library, and it’s books are the stones, leaves, grass, brooks, and the birds and animals that share, alike with us, the storms and blessings of earth."

--Luther Standing Bear, Lakota