The Wild of God in Waterloo Township, Michigan

Compared to the Rockies or the heart of the Appalachians, the “mountain” behind our family farm in south central Pennsylvania is barely a ridge, but its upper third is steep and covered in scree (“the rocks,” we call them). Reaching the top is a serious scramble on uncertain footing. The boulders are wobbly and, at times, widely spaced with deep crevices between. It is close to a climb in places, with just enough risk and challenge to make it a real adventure for a boy of ten or eleven, which is what I was when I first climbed to the top alone. I remember reaching the perpetually windy summit in late October. (We never climbed the rocks in spring or summer because of rattlesnakes.) It seemed a strange, nearly surreal place of silences. My feeling was less one of accomplishment than of hushed reverence, a sense of deep glacial time and its underpinning divinity—a sense of wildness, of what Rudolf Otto would call the numinous. From the mountaintop, I looked down on our valley farm and the small Methodist church where we worshiped. I felt a disjunction between the staid divine of the Sunday morning church and the divine of the mountaintop. Were they the same? I was a pious child with a mystical streak. I was not Huck Finning it in the pews on Sunday (or at least most Sundays), desperate to escape a droning sermon so I could unbutton my collar and hit the woods. It’s more that the God of Sundays seemed warm and approachable to me, the God of the mountain inscrutable and, to use the word again, wild. I pondered this seeming dissonance on the mountaintop.

Of course, if I had been reading the Bible attentively enough, I would have seen both sides of the divine throughout. They’re both there in the two names God gives to Moses from the burning bush, one irreducibly transcendent (I AM THAT I AM), one personal (the God of your fathers). The wild of God is there in the perhaps overly familiar creation account in Genesis 1, in the pillar of fire, in the voice of the whirlwind in Job and in the whale in Jonah. It’s in the desert sojourn of John the Baptist and the desert fasts of Christ. The Bible is full of mountaintop meetings with the wild God. Yet it would be a long time before my sense of God stretched enough to encompass both church and mountaintop, let alone black holes, gaseous planets, and the vast voids of space. This was a personal trajectory, but it also reflects how the Christianity in our day, both Protestant and Catholic, tends to tame God.

There is nothing tame about the divine in Michael Martin’s new poetry collection Mythologies of the Wild of God, released in 2024 by Angelico Press. In “The Angel of Memory,” Martin writes,

The figure of the Baptist harries me,
His soul immersed in wildness and the earth,
Like Pan, Enkidu—strange, untamable,
A dark contrast to his fair and gentle
Cousin. Christianity may have killed
The wildness for a faith of the refined:
And this is why he had to die, his head
Taken, separated from the body.
This is a religion we can live with,
But through which we cease to live.
But now it is time for a retrieval:
Return the severed head to the body
And venerate the wild of God once more.

If this sounds somewhat pagan, Martin likely would not deny it, if properly defined. He is hardly calling for a rejection of Christianity, though. He is instead close to the Catholic philosopher William Desmond, who writes in God and the Between that “pagan love of the earth is always asked, love of the good of elemental being, astonishment before the river that runs, the surf that pounds, the clear blue of the ether, the blinding dazzle of new snow, the musk on the fields in spring.” Martin, like Desmond, warns against a Christianity that is neither incarnational nor sacramental.

In the context of the collection as a whole, it is clear that the Christ of these lines quoted from “The Angel of Memory” is a counterfeit. A few pages later, we get “Andrew’s Song,” sung by the fisherman apostle. He claims that even after the disciples left “boats,” “nets,” and “families,” accompanying Jesus as he performs miracle after miracle, they “still didn’t believe.” That changes, though, when these tough working men who know about boats and storms and drowning see Jesus coming across the sea to them:

Then we seen him walk on the water,
Then we seen him bright as day.
Then we seen him, me and my brothers,
Seen him walk on the waves.

Martin is a musician as well as a writer, and I suspect he has set this to music. I particularly like how the slant rhymes of this repeated chorus suggest the rough but vital speech of the fisherman Andrew as well as the roughness of the sea. (In general, the range of the collection, which includes ballads and songs, free verse and formal, short lyrics and long meditations, is impressive.) Regardless, Andrew here sees a Christ who is Lord of Creation. He sees the wild of God. And he believes.

While the two poems discussed so far are important to the collection, they are also somewhat unrepresentative. Martin is a farmer too, and most of the poems are anchored in the particulars of his farm and of the surrounding woods of Waterloo Township in Jackson County, Michigan. The numinous emerges in the interplay, the between or metaxu, of these particulars and Martin’s imagination and unconscious. Consider “Crows”:

(this is a dream)
Snow clings to the margins of the meadow across the road,
The dead, pale grass still damp.
A murder of crows plays in the swale nearby,
Argue over the corpse of a rabbit.
Four of them alight close by and my wife wants to shoo them off.
I tell her to wait and stretch my right arm towards them.
One of the birds flies to me and perches on my hand,
As my wife watches in amazement.
With my left hand I reach into the pocket of my barn coat
And pull from it a crust of bread as a gift for the black bird.
(this is not a dream)

How might one describe this? It’s a little Wendell Berry, a little Ted Hughes, a little Kathleen Raine. It is definitive Michael Martin.

But is it a dream? Martin would say this is the wrong question, or at least the question wrongly asked, if it presumes a “real” world of objective facts without spiritual meaning counterposed against a “dream” world of strictly subjective meaning. Martin suggests that both “worlds” are much richer than that reductive picture allows, and that the interplay between them is often hard to pin down. Another of my favorite poems in the collection, “Waterloo Pastoral,” ends with these lines: “The reality is symbol enough, brothers and sisters. / The symbol is reality enough.”

This might all sound to a skeptical reader like straining after re-enchantment, a kind of willful, even deluded, return to naivete. That is not my sense of the collection. I found it to be profound and moving, the work of an author who is not lost in flights of fancy but who is deeply receptive to the world and its God. I would offer as evidence those precisely rendered particulars of flora and fauna, of weather and landscape. I would also note that this is a collection that addresses serious family tragedies and old, lingering heartaches. This, too, undoubtedly contributes to Martin’s receptivity—the receptivity of the open wound. And here we get to another of the collection’s major themes. The consolations of the wild of God are sometimes direct and personal, sometimes elusive, but they are often those of the whirlwind’s voice in Job: the wonders and mysteries of Creation. In sorrow, one can do far worse than spending time in the woods or cultivating the soil. If we are fortunate, we can find a wild consolation there. Thus, despite the suffering that shows up throughout this collection, Martin ends it with a litany—“He Praises the Wild of God.” Here are its final lines:

I praise you in the mystery of pain.
I praise you in the pain of love.
I praise you in the love of All Things.

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