Covid Travels With Rob D ~ Part 1

2,600 Miles, Global Pandemic, and the Word of God

“Essential Travel”

A few days before the beginning of my 2,600 mile drive from Los Angeles to Spokane and back, my friend Scott Newhouse challenged me to write about my experiences along the way and somehow tie those experiences to Scripture.  I’m not really sure why, but I accepted his challenge.  

These blog posts will be my musings on traveling during a global pandemic.  I will not be thinking anything through; no outlines, no plan, no editing, but rather just riffing on whatever thought enters my pea-brain during the process.  So here we go.

I shut the door behind me in total darkness on April 13, the day after the resurrection of the Lord, Easter Sunday.  I waited till after-Easter Monday to make this journey because I’m a Pastor and Easter is kind of a big deal.  And because the following Wednesday is the day my daughters said that they would be ready to come home from college and isolate with their parents (and more importantly, dog).  

With a daunting 2,600 miles and at least 40 hours of driving ahead of me, I wasn’t sure how I was supposed to feel at that moment; excited to be taking an adventure during a stay at home mandate or bummed knowing that my knees, hips, and back would be killing me after just a few hours of driving?  The truth is that I was probably somewhere in between.

The first thought that occupied my time was the term ‘essential travel’, which is now something that all of us have heard plenty about over the last month.  I began to worry as I sipped my delicious McDonald’s black coffee at 6 am……is my travel really ‘essential’?  What if I get pulled over?  Will I get a ticket?  Will I be fined?  As you can see already, I sweat the small stuff, always have.  I am the guy who doesn’t worry at all about an airplane crashing, but gets anxious and sweats it out (literally) over the thought of not getting any overhead bin space.  Now that we got that out of the way……

Essential travel means that we are supposed to stay at home as much as possible, keeping 6 feet of distance between us and the other.  The law says that you should not leave the house unless you have a “reasonable excuse”.  As long as you present no symptoms, you may go grocery shopping, care for an elderly member of your family, You can leave your house to exercise once a day, but only in open spaces.  You may leave the house for medical needs or travel to work if you cannot work from home.  The law also says that you may leave the house to avoid injury or harm (thanks Captain Obvious).  How would we ever get by without that kind of wisdom from our government?  You may leave to access public services or take your pet to the vet, which we had to do, but that’s another story! 

I didn’t see “moving daughters home due to school closure because of a global pandemic” on the list of approved essential travel, but it didn’t seem illegal either as they are my daughters after all and they needed to move out of their homes in Spokane in order to shelter in place wither family.

There is a ton of essential travel in the Bible.  I could have chosen from hundreds of stories, but the trip that came immediately to mind was pregnant Mary and Joseph making the 3-5 day, 90 mile journey from Nazareth to Bethlehem.  Was their travel essential?  A few thoughts.  For starters, when Caesar says ‘jump’, you say…..(you get the drift).  Like Census 2020, they needed to be counted. But the more theological reason for their essential travel was to get Mary to the City of David before Jesus was born in order to fulfill the ancient prophecy of Micah 5:2 that places the birth of the Messiah in Bethlehem.  Personally, I would call that ‘essential travel’.  

They made it in time, but we learned that there would be no room in the inn and that baby Jesus would be born among the stable animals.  The question remained: would there be any room for me in the inn?  Would there even be an inn that was still open during a global pandemic?  Expedia promised me that there would be, but the weird notifications they were sending me weren’t all that convincing!   

Would I too need to sleep with the barnyard animals?  When I first struck out, I actually wasn’t sure of the answer.  Stay tuned to find out.

Peace

Rob D.  

Wood Wide Web

Robert Frost begins his poem Birches:

When I see birches bend to left and right

Across the lines of straighter darker trees,

I like to think some boy's been swinging them.

I loved to climb trees as a kid.  I’d climb as high as I could until the branch bent under weight, threatening to break and throw me back down to earth.  

Did you know that trees can actually move resources and share them with struggling, weaker or dying trees; even trees of different species thanks to a common fungi?  

When Birch tree saplings were “weeded out” of reseeded forests that had been clear cut, a curious thing happened.  The Douglas Fir saplings that were being replanted, deteriorated and then died prematurely.   

Canadian forest ecologist Suzanne Simard began to ask the question, why?  She came to believe that these Birch trees weren’t “competing” with the Douglas Firs for the soils precious nutrients, but quite the opposite; that somehow they were helping not hindering the firs, so she decided to investigate.

It turns out that that a common fungi that had previously been considered harmful to plants was actually existing in a subtle mutualism.  These so-called ‘mycorrhizal’ were weaving themselves into the plants roots and thereby creating this underground system which allowed the saplings to join together in an ‘underground social network’.  

The beautiful thing is that these fungi didn’t just connect Birches to Birches or Firs to Firs.  They formed a non-hierarchical network that connected plants of different species which allowed Birches to share their nutrients with Douglas Firs.  When the Birches were “weeded out” of the sapling forest, the Douglas Firs weren’t getting enough photosynthetic carbon and began to die off quickly.

Instead of seeing the forest as plants being in competition with each other, we now see it as producing a collaborative intelligence that Simard calls ‘forest wisdom’ and others refer to as the Wood Wide Web.

I learned all this today as I was reading, Underland: A Deep Time Journey by Robert MacFarlane.  When I read it, I wondered almost out loud; are our human communities destined to be only a competitive system that highlight the vast inequalities between the rich and the poor?  Or is it possible that a human community can be more like the forest; a subtle mutualism?

What is the Church which exists for God’s mission in the world?  A subtle mutualism that shares its resources across boundaries of every kind.  What is the ‘forest wisdom’ of the church?  How might we, who follow in the way of Jesus learn from the mutualism of the forest in order to share the resources we have with those have less, those who need more?

In a time of Corona crisis, the Church needs to lead in the way of Jesus. 

So….next time you climb a tree, remember what’s going on underground!

And before you reduce me to a label of one kind or another, hear the Word of God from Acts 2:44-45 and tell me that you don’t see the Wood Wide Web…..the underground social network…..forest wisdom……subtle mutualism……all for the sake of sustaining each other.

"All who believed were together and had all things in common; they would sell their                 possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need."

The Word of Lord.  Thanks be to God!