Faith: Feel the healing effects of a nature walk, even with someone who doesn't share your views

“How could we believe that an august presence of such awful power could become an ordinary human being on a designated summer day?”

— Kenzaburo Oë

The Baltimore Catechism I grew up with explained, in its usual non-inclusive language, that Good Friday was called such because on that day Christ “showed his great love for man and purchased for him every blessing.”

“Good”, in fact, derives from an Old English expression meaning "holy," and the vagueness of “every blessing” just muddies the waters.

As a result, my playmates and I remained as confused about the day as the writer, Kenzaburo Oë when hearing over the radio Emperor Hirohito, considered divine in Japanese culture, as he announced the country’s World War II surrender. One of Oë’s friends could even imitate the ruler’s voice, causing his gang of pals to laugh at first but then feel suddenly afraid.

This voice, like theirs, challenged their sense of awe for this key figure in their world. Such cognitive dissonance, no doubt, radiated across the country. After all, the nation’s ancient samurai dealt with such failure to deliver with seppuku, the ritual stabbing of oneself in the belly before turning the blade upward to render the fatal wound.

Such an act matches the grisliness of crucifixion. I’m forced to admit, as a male growing up in America during the 1950s and '60s, I had no difficulty connecting such violence with heroism, yet it still troubled me.

At the seminary where I trained, the Jewish rabbi teaching New Testament made a pretty good case for interpreting Jesus’ surrender to the Roman authorities who torture and kill him as a kind of suicide. After all, Jesus knew that the acts he performed and the words he spoke challenged the reigning Jewish leaders’ authority. His words in the Garden of Gethsemane, in fact, reflect a foreknowledge that these men would seek his execution.

Some feel the final speech of The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. on the night before his assassination reflects a similar foreknowledge when he declares that he, like Moses, “may not get there with you, but… I have seen the Promised Land.”

Whether we believe these leaders exhibited suicidal tendencies or not, we must admit, like Oë and his friends, that their brutal deaths, like an emperor’s small voice carried on scratchy radio waves, register their fallibility and that this strikes a chord of fear in us. If such greatness can be so easily eliminated, what does it say about the power these heroes represent?

Haru Matsuri is the spring festival equivalent of Easter in the indigenous nature-based religion of Japan — Shintoism. I once wrote a term paper about one practice of this holiday: the Thousand Flowers pilgrimage up mountainsides to visit a series of ancient shrines.

The most interesting aspect of this ritual was the timing of its re-emergence. Residents resumed this practice, long-neglected, at the end of World War II. It became a way of restoring meaning for the Japanese after the national hegemony that they’d psychologically invested in had shattered. The nationwide return to Shinto and to this practice proved a response to the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as well. Seeing humans engage in such genocide led many in Japan to look past the limitations of the species to nature to make sense of the world.

The issue at hand is how we as a community approach failure. We witnessed what can happen in our own democracy when one’s party candidate, in whom many personally invested, fails to win an election. The ensuing violence is not alien to our history, but still, we believed on some level that we’d abandoned such extremes for more measured options. We in the U.S. now, therefore, struggle with cognitive dissonance, too. Perhaps we need our own Thousand Flower pilgrimage to restore our sense of national unity, stretching past our political differences and our human limitations in coping with perceived failure.

Even those who do not strictly practice Shinto, still journey regularly in the spring during Haru Matsuri to the more remote parts of the country to see the Sakura, cherry blossoms in bloom.

We in the U.S. share this tradition by virtue of a gift — one offered as a gesture of friendship by the Japanese in planting thousands of cherry trees at our nation’s capital in 1912. Many Americans still make the journey to see this abundance of natural beauty in Washington, D.C. Perhaps for the Christians among them witnessing this explosion of life provides a concrete expression of the Resurrection in real-time.

Whether we visit our national Sakura or not, we can still appreciate the value of such a ritual. The power of religious pilgrimage derives from two things. First, the transporting of one’s body to a different space alters one’s mental state. Second, when we do it in tandem with others, we experience a sense of unity.

Anyone who’s attended a sporting event can attest to this effect. We here in Texas emulate this pilgrimage without ever leaving our cars when we observe the bluebonnets and other wildflowers along our roadways with thousands of others. If we open our minds to spring’s renewal, might we appreciate that we really do have more in common than not?

Both the beauty and the complexity of the US rest in the fact that we cannot claim a single ethnic identity. Our sense of unity requires a transcendence beyond race and culture. Will our capacity to simply smell the roses suffice? While it might appear too facile a solution at first blush, I believe Lady Bird Johnson was on to something in beautifying our Texas highways.

Make your own pilgrimage through the blooms this spring and see if you don’t experience a mental shift. If you can share this walk with someone with whom you disagree or with someone of a different race or culture, all the better. While not a panacea, it may provide a tempered introduction to dialog.

I engaged in one of my most intense but productive conversations with a colleague of a different political and theological persuasion while hiking up the flanks of Denali in Alaska. True, the possibility that we might round a woody bend any moment to startle a grizzly, heightened our sense of shared vulnerability. Yet, it was the natural beauty surrounding two guys treading the tundra for the first time that literally grounded our heated discussion.

The journey from the Cross to a Thousand Flowers might prove shorter than you ever guessed. Happy Haru Matsuri and Holy (Good) Friday, y’all.

Terry Dawson is an ordained Presbyterian minister and former adjunct faculty member of San Francisco Theological Seminary.

This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: Faith: Use nature as a connector between people with differences