Human existence is entangled existence. Our very being is constituted by the relationships of nurture we bear with the earth, our neighborhoods, families, and churches.
Independence, personal autonomy, self-sufficiency. These were among the primary virtues I learned as a child. Now, that is not to say my family wasn’t connected. Rather, we (the kids) were encouraged, from an early age, to discover, learn, and venture out on our own. Such qualities continue to characterize my existence and living in “do-it-yourself” New England certainly plays a part.
My existence, therefore, has been uniformly perceived as an independent existence. Whether to do right or to do wrong was my choice. Where to attend college or graduate school? My choice. What habits, hobbies, or hijinks should I pursue? Again, my choice.
From an early age, I was left home alone, entrusted with the keys to my own car, allowed (and might I say enabled) to carve out a life for myself in the world. Such virtues have proven immensely helpful in my development: they helped get me through college and graduate school; they helped me find and marry my best friend; they helped me purchase our first home, move halfway across the country, and welcome and (begin to) raise three children.
Is it actually true, however, that all of this development owes itself to in-dependence, self-sufficiency, personal autonomy? Well here enters my old friend and professor from Duke Divinity School, the now-acclaimed theologian and ethicist Norman Wirzba.
Wirzba recently published two new books, both of which stand as material, bounded expressions of his fluid and invigorating teaching at Duke. In his book, Agrarian Spirit: Cultivating Faith, Community, and the Land (Notre Dame, 2022), Professor Wirzba writes of a reality I had known but had forgotten, a reality he calls: the meshwork.
Drawing from the work of social anthropologist Tim Ingold, Wirzba describes human beings not as “bounded, discrete entities, single, separable, self-standing things, or sovereign, self-enclosed, object-like subjects,” no. Human beings, and all creatures for that matter, exist, rather, in the way of a meshwork.
“Each organism and each thing,” he writes, “is what it is only as a result of its entanglement within and co-development with a bewildering array of fellow creatures.” “A life,” therefore, “is not a single, separable, self-standing thing. It is,” rather, “a knotting of lines that are constantly interlacing with multiple other lives and lines... together making a tapestry or meshwork.”
To explain this further, he writes, “each body depends on the nurture and support of countless seen and unseen others... Things, therefore, are their relations.”
Now, I had heard such talk three years ago in Professor Wirzba’s Creation and Theological Anthropology course (Spring 2019). However, such notions had receded into the background of my mind, leaving me shamefully reminded as I read his words today.
In his book Agrarian Spirit, Wirzba presents an incredible (in the truest sense of the term) illustration of such existence as it is manifested in the non-human creation. He writes:
Scientists have learned that a single rye plant will in the course of just four months grow fifteen million roots that have a combined length of roughly 380 miles. If one adds the many more millions of hairs that are attached to these roots, then the overall length of the plant’s engagement with its soil home extends to 7,000 miles. It is astonishing to think that the vitality of one rye plant requires such a bewildering array of paths of nurture.
The existence of a singular rye plant, therefore, depends upon and is constituted by, its interlacing, tactical, enmeshed association with its “soil home.” Soil, as scientists are discovering, “is not a simple container of organisms but a complex and hospitable home in which roots, fungi, worms, water, and untold numbers of microorganisms grow together to create conditions for fertility” and, thus, life.
Human beings are not rye plants, of course. We are, however, creatures, and every creature relates to creation, our world, in a similarly enmeshed sort of way. Just as there is no life for the rye plant apart from its “bewildering array of such paths of nurture,” so is there no life for human beings “apart from the countless threads that join human flesh to the flesh of the world.”
“Every human life,” Wirzba writes, “is necessarily a rooted life that through our flesh binds us to the earth and entangles us with other creatures.” “To be human,” he goes on, “is to be open to others like a seed that opens to its soil environment.”
Now, I grew up thinking of myself as a free-standing, self-contained subject, living “in” a world which exists apart from me, which I can observe and turn away from at my leisure. However, for a creature to even look at a world, Wirzba writes, “it must always already be eating, drinking, touching, and breathing” that world itself. While we may think of human skin as a protective shell, shielding us from pathogens and environmental organisms, our skin is really a medium, “a permeable and highly sensitive membrane that opens” people up to the nourishing world in (and from) which they live.
Such meshwork existence became clear to me as I sat on the floor of my living room with my three small children and dog. Lowering myself to their eye-line, my ten-month-old, constantly moving twins are climbing on me as though I were their own personal jungle gym. Meanwhile, our five-year-old Golden Retriever is persistently ensuring that I see his new blue nylon bone (closely!). At the same time, my almost-three-year-old son is blowing spit-garnished air in my direction while he performs a musical concert within inches of my face. So much for a free-standing, self-contained, independent human existence!
What I have begun to learn, then, from raising a family, from reading theologians like Wirzba, from planting roots in a place, and from congregational life as a church, is that creaturely life, human life, can never be described as independent. To live independently is to die. To exist apart from others is a contradiction.
Perhaps this is why we read so early in the Biblical narrative that “it is not good for human beings to be alone” (Gen. 2:18). The original “man” in Genesis is of course soon met with a “woman,” but the countless creatures who inhabit this earth, who were formed from the same humus as us, and the countless ecological “wombs” of our world, tell us: “Man is not alone. So stop fooling yourselves.”
“Bathed as we are in an overwhelming number of influences and interchanges, sometimes the most honest thing to do is to speak with restraint and as a witness to the unfathomable depths and intricacies of this life.” The key to all of this, writes Wirzba, is to understand ourselves not as “sovereign, self-enclosed, self-standing subjects... but as enmeshed, needy, dynamic vessels through which God’s life-creating love can freely move.”
“Each life,” each dependent, enmeshed, interlaced-with-others human life, is at its utter best, not when it self-reliantly trudges forth with ambition, determination, and singularity, but rather when it opens itself up, allowing the love of God the Creator to “flow in an unimpeded manner through the breadth and depth of relationships that constitute it.”
Human existence is entangled existence. Our very being is constituted by the relationships of nurture we bear with the earth, our neighborhoods, families, and churches. Let us humbly acknowledge such entanglement, opening our (already opened) lives to become conduits of God’s grace and love for all.
Jonah Bissell
Associate Pastor