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Interview by Deshna Ubeda
March 14, 2019
I recently had the opportunity to speak with Rev. Matt Syrdal about his theological journey and his quest to re-wild Christianity. Matt is an ordained pastor in the Presbyterian church (USA), founder and lead guide of WilderSoul and Church of Lost Walls, and co-founder of Seminary of the Wild. Matt speaks at conferences and guides immersive nature-based experiences around the country. In his years of studying ancient Christian Rites of Initiation, world religions, anthropology, rites-of-passage and eco- psychology Matt seeks to re-wild what it means to be human. His work weaves in myth and ceremony in nature as a way for people to enter into conversation with the storied world of which they are a part.
I am excited about this movement bringing Christianity home to Mother Earth and Her mysterious ways. Long before Industry and Empire, mystics found God in nature and Her creatures. Teachers walked the roads and used the elements to demonstrate the sacred Life we have been blessed to be born into. It is time for Christianity to heal its ancient wounds, to seek forgiveness from the Land and from the people who are indigenous to the Land. It is time to rebirth a mythology and story that is aligned with the mystical and brave theology of Christ Consciousness that Jesus experienced and taught. Jesus didn’t teach the Way in buildings and institutions. He taught on the Land. Indeed, his teachings were deeply interconnected to the Earth and Her creatures.
We are made of this Earth. We will return to Earth. Indigenous peoples and the Mystics have been worshipping God in the Wild since the beginning of time. Christianity was greatly wounded and nearly destroyed when it was used as a tool to separate people from the Land and from the Sacred Feminine. Healing must take place where the wounds are. The Holy Wild is the liminal space where the Divine can be felt, heard, seen, and spoken to. I am delighted to share this interview with you. May we all step into the Holy Wild to find the sacred around us and within.
Deshna: I think I am most interested in your theological journey, your story. What has shifted, when, and why?
Matt: Throughout my life I have been most influenced by the Christ tradition. While it has been an ambivalent relationship at times, it continues to hold a peculiar awe and wonder—like a strange gravitational pull. I am not talking about the church, but the paradox and mystery of Christ. Growing up I spent my childhood Sundays at a small mainline Presbyterian church in Lake Forest Park, not far from downtown Seattle. When I was twenty-three years old I had a mystical experience—an awakening—and I told almost no one for about fifteen years. Looking back, this was a kind of “molting,” a shedding of a skin that was no longer mine. This new way of being in the world created a seismic shift from my largely egocentric and anthropocentric faith to really a sort of cosmo-centric worldview. An enlarging of consciousness occurred, disrupting the very foundations of my life and identity, what I would call an “eco-awakening.” Traditionally, in various cultures, this kind of awakening would be viewed and witnessed by the elders as a confirmation of the completion of the tasks of one’s first adulthood – entering into the second half of life. Yet I didn’t have the tools, the framework, the community or the wholeness, to really understand or fully live into what was happening in my life. The next several years were very disorienting and dismantling, and I turned to mystical Christianity in search of understanding, grounding and wisdom.
This marked the beginning of a new stage in my life, a period of wandering deeply into the world. Like Abram who left his father’s house and gods, who left all he knew, I spiritually wandered for over fifteen years. Looking back, I was searching to initiate myself into a new life path that made sense of my experiences, searching to find a new people to which I belonged, elders to confer some new identity upon me that I did not understand. I worked overseas for seven months in West Africa and northern Europe, and upon my return, enrolled in seminary in Southern California to explore and respond to a deep and mysterious longing. I visited hermitages and monastic communities, practiced contemplative prayer and meditation and studied the mystics.
About a year into ordained ministry I realized that something was missing. There was a profound longing and grief that I was experiencing that I could find no way to explore within the framework even of the mystical tradition. While the gifts of the contemplative practices were a resource, I felt like I was closed off from some unknown terrain.
Through some readings of Richard Rohr I stumbled across Bill Plotkin’s book Soulcraft. It was a view of nature and the soul I had never encountered before. The practices and stories I read were troubling and strangely alluring, and I felt as if I had found strange treasure, hidden right where it had never occurred to me to look for it. I attended the “Nature and the Human Soul” Conference in Albuquerque, New Mexico that very fall. Over a thousand gathered from all walks of life: ex-Catholics, disillusioned Christians, and spiritual seekers. In this auspicious gathering of seekers, I carried with me two particular dreams that had been recurring since childhood. I met one of the Soulcraft apprentices who offered to do dreamwork with me during the conference. Later during the conference I enacted one particular childhood dream out on the land. My connection with a mysterious and sacred power of the place, of the land itself, cracked me open like a deep well of wild grief, that eventually gave way to an ecstatic joy. It was my first entrée into the realm of soul, a realm of psychospiritual reality that up to that point I had no experience of or framework for, and it wasn’t until years later, through Biblical study and theological and anthropological exploration, that I realized it was a common experience for many traditional and animistic peoples throughout history, including the Hebrew prophets and Jesus himself. I realized that something in my life and psyche had shifted, had in fact completed in my life. I was entering into a new alluring and dangerous terrain for which I had no map. This was the missing half of my spiritual life, a call of the depths of the world itself, something radically different than I had experienced through the Christian contemplative tradition. A year later, I embarked on a fourteen-day wilderness fast near Lone Cone peak in the wilds of the San Juan mountains which was a four-day ceremony of psychospiritual death and seeking vision. In the wooded backcountry on my solo-fast, I discovered an image that began an ongoing conversation with my deepest purpose in life. What I will share is simply that I knew I must bridge—re-bind—the sacred wisdom of the natural world with the institutional church, and that I must become an agent of decomposition for old images and dying structures. A year later, I began training to become a nature-based human development guide through Animas Valley Institute’s Wild Mind program, and have been integrating my training into ministry ever since.
Deshna: Do you consider yourself a Christian? Progressive Christian? Emergent or Evangelical? Or something outside of the boxes?
Matt: Usually people don’t know what to make of me. I think we all stick labels on ourselves and others in an attempt to find what tribe we belong to. That said, the Church’s understanding of what Christianity, or a Christian, actually is, is not nearly large enough. Cultural and theological definitions of Christianity are still tribalistic—as are our political world-views in the West—and they are anthropocentric. I find this sadly true for the whole Evangelical and Progressive spectrum. I see the spiritual path as, in many ways, related to what Jung called the journey of individuation. We are here to really become an individual in the truest and deepest sense of the word. In our culture we talk a lot about having spiritual experience in our culture, but perhaps we could also say we are Spirit having a human experience. Ken Wilber talks about the difference between “waking up” which can be the powerfully enlightening experiences of the non-dual or the Spirit, and “growing up” which is the necessary pain and struggle of embodying an expanding worldview consciously in our ordinary lives. “Growing up” has to do with completing the necessary tasks of our development and individuation for the benefit of the community. Someone who knows precisely what is their gift they are invited to bring forth into the world and embody for the blessing of their people and the evolution of human culture in a living world.
For me, this is the meaning of Jesus’ parabolic teaching to “take up your cross.” This growing consciousness—or awakening—to God, Self and world is a great struggle and a kind of necessary suffering to birth what Jesus called the kingdom of god. I see Jesus as an embodiment of this process of incarnating god throughout the Created order, an exemplar of discipleship in its most radical essence. That being said, I think we see the Jesus we want to see. We box up Jesus into neat compartments that fit our preconceived worldview. We project our fantasies of who we need Jesus to be in our lives based on the stage of development we are currently in. All this is really prologue to my answer, which would be really “none of the above.” I care deeply for the Christ tradition, but I cannot personally identify any longer with what in my view Western Christianity or religion has become in this age. My personal framework for Jesus is not just the Cosmic Christ, but the Indigenous One—the Wild Christ of the Earth.
Deshna: I love the image of Jesus as Indigenous and Cosmic Christ. Because really, he was also a bridge between the sacred wisdom of the Land and the intellectualized theology of his time. Have you read Bishop Spong and do you resonate with his theology? Any other authors or leaders that you greatly resonate with?
Matt: I have read some of Bishop Spong’s work and enjoy his perspective. The authors and spiritual leaders that have most influenced and shaped me over the last seven years or so are: Ilia Delio, Teilhard De Chardin, Meister Eckhart, Black Elk, Cynthia Bourgealt, Thomas Keating, Ken Wilber, Richard Rohr, Thomas Berry, Brian Swimme, David Abram, and Bill Plotkin, who is my primary mentor in the SAIP program at Animas Valley Institute.
Deshna: What has been the motivation for creating a new kind of sacred community- if you would call it that – and can you tell me more about re-wilding in a theological and faith community container?
Matt: My primary motivation has been a sense of call, that came through my own psycho-spiritual descent, to rewild the church and our dying cultural narratives that are contributing to the violent exploitation of the planet. Through deep spiritual practices in authentic community, individuals can relearn to listen to the sacred conversation in nature, reconnect deeply with the natural world, cultivate wholeness and Self-healing, and begin to discover their deepest purpose in unique service both to the human world and, to what David Abram calls the “more-than-human” world. We have lost this more earthy and ‘wild’ vision of Christ, a sage and sacred healer who retreated to the wild edges to receive wisdom and guidance, who quested and fasted in preparation for his work, who spoke truth to power, who restored balance between the wild and the domesticated human world overrun by empire.
The basic premise of “re-wilding,” which has become a cultural meme, is to allow the land to return to its original, uncultivated state, before humans began to shape and develop the land. It refers also to the need to reintroduce apex predators back into ecosystems to revitalize the capacity for self-organization of a particular bioregion. This basic premise points to the undomesticated wisdom of wild nature and the fragility of the self-organizing intelligence of the web of life. We forget that God breathed life into the whole Creation, not just humans, and that the natural world is living and possesses a kind of intelligence and language of its own. Humans were endowed with and given unique stewardship of this mysterious ‘life-light’ in which the cosmos participates—self-reflexive consciousness. However, we modern humans have become severed— or exiled— from a relationship with the wild world rooted in participation, partnership, and kinship (Eden) in which ancient, indigenous peoples once enjoyed and thrived. If humans will have any role (or existence) in the future of the Earth, our religious institutions, our political and social structures must address and reflect this new reality. The hour is already late.
Church of Lost Walls is a living expression of church seeking to journey beyond our walls into wild, enchanting thresholds where nature, spirituality, and life meet in deep Conversation and sacred community for the cultivation of greater wholeness and service to the world. We are not normal church happening outside; our dream is to participate in and partner with creation through learning, worship, meditation and prayer. Through nature-based practices that draw upon the wisdom of sacred narratives and older traditions, we seek to cultivate nature connection and personal wholeness to inspire and guide one another into a culturally creative vision of life within our expanding circles of community, culture, the wild earth, and the great mystery we call God.
I am a part of various mycelial networks of emerging movements happening around the country and world right now. The Wild Church Network is a recent cultural response to this longing to rewild the vision of the Church and Western culture. It is in some ways a transplant from the Forest Church movement in the United Kingdom. But what seems to be missing is not just new forms of religious expression, or spiritual practices in nature, and changing our basic life ways regarding consumption of resources, but a rewilding of the mind and the Self. Living in alignment with the life-enhancing wisdom of the Creation, the big book of Nature requires a learning community and practices and processes for cultivating the treasures hidden in the field of our inner nature, the True Self.
Seminary of the Wild consists of nature-based experiential immersions and a wholistic training program for people in the Christ tradition who are drawn toward their own deeper relationship with Earth and Self, and also feel called to lead others into a deeper, transformative, and sacred relationship with Self, society, Church, Earth, and the divine. This training program is offered for those who long for a more soul-infused life and who yearn to find ways to re-connect to the natural world as a person of faith during a time of deep cultural and ecological unraveling. Our dream is to develop a community, a school of sorts, that will assist uniquely in the work of ecological awakening and reformation.
There are four primary ‘pillars’ or tasks that Seminary of the Wild addresses: A re-enchantment of the natural and wild world towards a radical re-visioning of our deep belonging to the Earth, reconnecting our senses, bodies, emotions, and imagination with the land and earth processes. The second is a re-wilding of the Christian story, exploring the nature-based function of myth in order to deconstruct the historical barriers and processes of domestication, including the theological distortions that have tamed and suppressed the earth-based vision of the Christ. Third is a re-claiming of one’s own prophetic voice as a social visionary during this age of ecological reformation. And finally, a guided and supported process of wild discipleship, expanding one’s capacity to connect directly with the Holy and follow the radical call of Christ as agents of cultural transformation.
Deshna: Well, I could seriously talk with you for hours about this!
Matt: Yes, likewise.
Deshna: Thank you for sharing your vision, your work, and your brave theology with me today and with our readership! If there is any hope for Christianity, in my opinion, it will involve offering deep repair of the damages the institution of Christianity has inflicted on culture, the land, the people, the feminine and certainly to the Wild. The sooner we can re-align this religion with its mystic and earth-centered roots the better, and I suspect that we will need to include a new sacred myth which teaches radical equality among all earth’s creatures and a reverent honoring of the land. Thank you for being someone who is lighting the way!
~ Deshna Ubeda
Read online here
Deshna Ubeda is Director of ProgressiveChristianity.org and Progressing Spirit, where she has worked since 2006. She is an author, international speaker, and a visionary. She is will be ordained as an Interfaith Minister by The Chaplaincy Institute in March 2019. She is a lead author and editor on the children’s curriculum: A Joyful Path, Spiritual Curriculum. She co-authored the novel, Missing Mothers. She is the Executive Producer of Embrace Festival.
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