God, nature and Nannie Rawley's philosophy

by Annette Mendola and John Nolt

We have been reading Barbara Kingsolver’s “Prodigal Summer,” a marvelous, complicated book about the web of life, culture of southern Appalachia, changing gender roles, interconnectedness of communities, moths, coyotes and the American chestnut. It is great. Read it.
We especially like the ecotheology—the sense it makes of relations of humans, nature and the divine. One of the heroes of the novel, Nannie Rawley, champions the notion that the world is filled with glory, wonder and joy, but not for humans alone. Nannie, a 75-year-old, freethinking, organic-apple farmer, and her neighbor, retired voc-ag teacher Garnett Walker, have a running disagreement about nearly everything, most especially nature and the divine. Garnett’s somewhat traditional view puts humankind above and thus apart from the rest of creation. “If the Holy Bible is to be believed, we must view God’s creatures as gifts to His favored children and use them for our own purposes,” he lectures. But his beliefs put him at odds with the world around him, from weeds to insects to his neighbors and his own son. Everything around him must be managed, be it with Sevin dust and Malathion or with reprimands and scorn. His sense of superiority provides him neither solace nor delight.
Nannie, by contrast, has a modest understanding of who and what we are in relation to life as a whole. We are not the crowns of creation, not the favored children of God. To think we are, she believes, is the root of much destructive foolishness, and paradoxically, a sense of despair. She articulates her thoughts in a letter she writes to the openly hostile Garnett and deposits on his porch, along with a homemade blackberry pie. Nothing, she insists, is as simple as it appears from our finite perspective:
Everything alive is connected to every other by fine, invisible threads. Things you don’t see can help you plenty, and things you try to control will often rear back and bite you, and that’s the moral of the story … it’s an aggravation and a marvel. The world is a grand sight more complicated than we like to let on.
Failure to understand that, together with aggressive use of our power over creation “for our own purposes” inevitably leads to unintended consequences. Nannie catalogues some of these with a theological twist: “To our dominion over the earth, Mr. Walker, we owe our thanks for the chestnut blight. Our thanks for kudzu, honeysuckle and the Japanese beetle also.”
She is not sentimental about nature; she pulls weeds from around her trees and kills the flea beetles on her eggplant. But there is humility in her methods. She is mindful of what she does and takes care not to disturb the balance of the ecosystem. She understands nature’s cruel side, having borne a child with Down’s syndrome who survived only to fifteen, but the miracle of the world before her is a comfort to Nannie. The notion that all of God’s creatures are sacred does not weaken her appreciation for life. It only deepens it.
Garnett’s belief that God created the world because He loves us and wants us to be happy actually seems at odds with the idea that God wants us to consume all we can, without regard for the delicate intricacy of His world. What kind of father would want to sire children who are indifferent to his work, to his provision for them? As Nannie says:
You’re a religious man, Mr. Walker. Seems to me you’d think twice about spraying Roundup all over God’s hard work.