A Role for Nature in Addition to Golf

A morning hymn sings, “Not here for high and holy things we render thanks to thee, but for the common things of earth…” It goes on to express the same sentiment as Sister Maria when she sings, “The hills are alive with the sound of music” -- namely, that nature can heal and inspire the human heart.

I hope this is not news to you, but just a reminder. Perhaps you, as I, have neglected the balm of nature for a while. Maybe it has been too long since you stood eyes skyward toward “the silver glistering of all the million million stars” and heard “the silent song they sing.” Geoffrey Studdert-Kennedy heard music in the stars as Maria von Trapp heard it in the Austrian Alps.

Geoffrey Studdert-Kennedy seems the kind of chap I would dearly love to meet in heaven. Not as popularized in latter days as anyone in the von Trapp family, he nonetheless deserves a hearing as the author of “Not here for high and holy things.” A British chaplain in the trenches of the Great War, Kennedy found solace and strength not only in the stars, but also in “the velvet of soft summer nights” and the “purple pageantry of dawning and of dying days.”

A remarkable thing about Geoffrey Studdert-Kennedy is that he never sought in nature a lasting escape from the demands of human society, but only the solace and strength. He was nicknamed 'Woodbine Willie' for giving Woodbine cigarettes along with spiritual aid to injured and dying soldiers. (“Their name! Let me hear it – the symbol of unpaid – unpayable debt. For the men to whom I owed God's Peace, I put off with a cigarette.”) Kennedy continued afterwards to engage the needy. Though appointed a royal chaplain when he left the army in 1919, he joined the Industrial Christian Fellowship to aid people on factory floors and in the streets.

But nature was Kennedy’s recourse – his inspiration to carry on serving in a sin-broken world. An Anglican monk records of him, “Once he was to tell a pious congregation with a beautiful and ancient parish church that sometimes he felt he would like to take a great sledgehammer and smash every stained glass window in the church, and then go out and celebrate the Eucharist in a field with a tea-cup and plate.” In a field (italicized for emphasis)! I suspect his tantrum had to do with his hymn’s fourth verse, which begins, “Awake, awake to love and work! The lark is in the sky, the fields are wet with diamond dew…” A lovely church building can easily wall us off not only from the need of the world, but also from the inspiration to meet that need.

“Aha!” my golfing friends perhaps will say, feeling justified to be on fairways on Sunday mornings. But a golf course, despite being a field, can also wall us off from love and work. These engineered fields challenge and frustrate us more than they inspire. From a dewy first tee at the crack of dawn, we might heed Studdert-Kennedy’s exhortation to “see how the giant sun roars up, great lord of years and days!” But its purpose for this poet is to “so let the love of Jesus come and set the soul ablaze.” I have golfed enough to know that the only time Jesus comes on a golf course is as an expletive or in a joke about walking across water traps.

Studdert-Kennedy’s appreciation of the sun and the fields sustained him for whacking away in trenches, not sand traps. One of the things nature inspires when it is beheld rather than merely used is selflessness. The “million million stars” dispel any notion that we are the center of the universe, and at the same time bestow a gift of joy and wonder in all God’s works – even in the very human beings who so often mar the other works. Surely, Jesus beheld these same stars on all his mountain retreats. We can, too.