The River Man

It was the beginning of February 2000, four months after Milosevic had been removed from office by massive peaceful national demonstrations. I was standing in front of my hotel in Belgrade watching an official motorcade go by. An old man with the groceries paused for a moment and joined my brother and me on the sidewalk. We asked the old man who was in the motorcade.

“Kostunica,” he answered, meaning the new President of what was left of Yugoslavia. “You are from America?” he asked.

“Colorado.” I replied.

“Ah, the Colorado, the Columbia, the Yang Tse, the Ganges, the Volga, the Danube, the Hudson, the Mississippi!” He went around the world naming rivers. Not geography, not countries, but a long series of the arteries of the world, those free-flowing entities that weave through our troubled geography. His own ancient city sat at the confluence of the Danube and the Sava rivers.

The political construct that had defined Yugoslavia as a nation had burst. The hatred, revenge and political greed that spilled into what was Yugoslavia, from Belgrade and other Serbian enclaves, is still difficult to imagine. He was now a citizen of one of the most vilified peoples in the world who were responsible for a host of war crimes not thought possible by educated Europeans. Standing next to him, I was a citizen of the country who had terrorized the people of that city with precision aerial bombing the year before. We were both downstream in time, the turbulence had abated.

Naming rivers had a universal element of connectedness. For our conversation now, we were connected by a fluid element, water that connects all things. We were not separated by a political boundary for the moment. It was the first time anyone had ever suggested a connection by something as common as flowing water. In one sense I guess the troubles between us were so bad it was about all we had in common, but the man seemed sincere in his suggestion of our watery bond. It was a thin connection but it got me thinking.

I was in Belgrade trying to figure out how a peaceful demonstration of hundreds of thousands had just removed Milosevic. How could this movement grow to such enormous proportions out of a country which had just crowned ten years of terrible violence on its neighbors with the expulsion of almost 800,000 people out of Kosovo? Where had all these free-thinking people been? It seemed more like an act of God than a political movement. I doubted I could figure it out but at least I could touch it in a way, look at the people on the street, on the trams and in the stores and wonder about it all.

My search for meaning through Christianity had left me exhausted. I had been force-fed information about God and how to think spiritually from a variety of slants like a Peking Duck. My head was crammed with information I couldn't use and had no context for. I couldn't take anymore. So I was on the hunt for context, trying to make sense of it all. Christianity was at the bedrock of my thinking. It formed the fundamental element of the way I saw the world. And yet after all this time I still didn't understand it. I was raised a Catholic. In my late 20s I became a Protestant. Using the information from both sides to guide my life spiritually was like sailing around in an enormous fog bank. I felt that in spite of my lack of success there was still something to Christianity; I just didn't know what.

And of course I asked those in the know, those who went through life with a religious title, men who had been trained in the ways of God and the American version of Christianity. Some had been to seminary; others got there through on-the-job-training, the preferred method with the groups I had been associated with. In the end of the matter they all seemed to have the same idea of how things worked. There would be one man in charge of the collective spiritual hopes of his pastorate, and beyond that, it was a mystical free-for-all...

So when the man on the street in Belgrade mentioned our river connection, I wondered later if the allegory of Christianity as a River of Life had any true durability. The lack of spiritual vitality I felt measured against all the information I received about it was truly depressing. I wondered if the structure of this River of Life had been altered somehow?

I wasn't alone in my feelings. In spite of all the good intentions of everyone involved, the ‘Life' of this River wasn't getting through. Jesus was always able to saw through difficult questions presented to him by leaders and followers alike with a parable. The parable became a lens that we could look through and in most cases get an instant understanding of our collective dilemma. I wondered if there was a parable, a story that would condense all this ambient religious activity into something simple, something contemporary, something a Serbian Orthodox and an American Protestant could look at and nod in agreement.

I knew a little something about a particular river, the Columbia River in the American Northwest, that forms the principal border between Oregon and Washington. I had studied the river for six months prepping for a consulting contract that never materialized. I studied the locks, dams, and river traffic, its political problems with the salmon, the Native Americans, fishermen and environmentalists. I also looked at its economic potentials, vested interests and its immediate political future. In hindsight I realize that I had studied the contemporary river of power, but I knew next to nothing about its life.

My background is more in the nature of the vested interest and power rather than the environmentalist slant. I, like the pioneers before me, saw nature as a resource. Nature was essentially wasted until we tamed it for our collective use. For 14 years my income was dependent on the outer rims of the fishing business in politics, labor unions, business and consulting. Much of my time was spent finessing policy to suit the demands of the particular user group I happened to be aligned with at the time. I drank deep from the cup of experience that was passed to me. If you asked me at that time what life was, it would be politically interpreted within the narrow confines of where my check was coming from. The battles were always about preserving the status quo within the current fishing policy regime. As I looked at the Columbia and those who managed and made a living from it, I saw shadows of myself trying to protect jobs, enlarge the political power base and build commercial constituencies while trying to keep the power flowing.

During my time studying the river, enthralled with the power aspects of the Columbia, I remember making a statement once in a church about it. I noted how the River System, with all of its dams, created all this electric power that helped so many, and that the dams reminded me of the churches and the people. I saw them as the great flow, and the combination of their energies was all this power. The concept was enthusiastically received. We were all familiar with the contemporary idea of Christianity in America and I marveled how it functioned in such elegant parallel to this great mechanical river system.

But I had not really seen a lively river. I saw man's managed version of it. I was looking at a system that was so well managed you had to really look to understand the problems. I knew the mechanical aspects of how the river functioned and how we had altered its structure to make power. But studying the politics of the river, I found there was a vociferous clamor on the edges of the system calling for great change. They said the river was dying. At the center of the conflict was the sense of order, man-made against the natural, or more plainly the order of power and the order of life and who was in charge of which.

On my return from Belgrade I began to look closer at the life issues in the Columbia River. What was all the fuss about? Were the frustrations expressed running parallel with my own disappointments with my River of Life, Christianity? I began reading about rivers in general, and the Columbia in particular, this time looking for what constituted life, and to see if this river had something to say about how we treat life in the quest for power. I pursued learning about rivers, treating the information I got more like theology than biology. I wondered how durable the parable would be, how deep the message would go. For most of my involvement with Christianity, the battle lines were clear; it was the epic fight of good vs. evil. Reading about rivers, it seemed that the battle lines were drawn in the battle of power versus life. Good and evil were fluid concepts that were used liberally on both sides of the epic political battles that raged over irrigation, salmon and electrical power on the Columbia. Good and evil were ambiguous terms, while the definitions of power and life were clear. It was the control of men against the control of nature. This was new territory in a spiritual context, power versus life.

It became quickly apparent that those in religious authority, rightly or wrongly, were going to be in the center of the issue. And because the Columbia River was completely harnessed within the last 60 years, we can see the results of the great managed tensions we created on a river of this size. As an allegory it helps distill our Christian history into manageable themes without getting into the fracas of who is doctrinally correct. Almost nothing happens naturally on the Columbia anymore. Everything is managed: the flow of water for power, managing the flow of irrigation water to users up and down the Columbia River basin, raising and transporting salmon smolt to assuage the fishermen, natives, and environmentalists, managing the locks for transportation, and politically satisfying, to whatever degree possible, the host of smaller vested interests who make a living from the managed river. Any effort to bring things back into a more natural regime is resisted fiercely and seen as illegitimate, wasteful and, most of all, expensive.

It seems that for a long time we paid little attention to the world of rivers in our country, other than they contained a commodity, water which could be transformed into power. But that has changed dramatically over the last 30 years. Beginning at the grass roots, river restoration has crept to a top priority on our national legislative agenda. Great damage has been done. We have divided the rivers with dams to create power, consciously and unconsciously polluted them, used them as sewers, over-fished them and most importantly we have turned our waters into a high-priced commodity. Rivers are no longer free. As much as they seem moving and free-flowing, weaving through our geography, for the most part, they are owned, measured and sold by the quart.

There is also a river flowing through our lives. It has been called the “River of Life.” It is the great and invisible river of faith, Christianity, in all its colorful variations. For millions of us it is the river that we meditate by each week. And like many rivers in this country it has been divided, polluted and generally abused. One of the great virtues of a river is its ability to absorb change and foster life. Put a dam in a river and that process stops. Life in the river declines, flow is all but stopped and its ability to cleanse itself and absorb change halts. The natural mechanisms that keep a river clean and vital are suspended. Denominations that start with some lively minds and earnest hearts, if they are successful, soon find themselves top-heavy, well managed earthbound institutions incapable of necessary change. Rigidity sets in and another great religious dam is created.

As of now there are about 900 formal Christian denominations and who knows how many others not counted. The Columbia River including all of its tributaries has over 400 dams in its system. Maybe, over time, we have gotten our ideas of what constitutes spiritual legitimacy, what I call life, inverted. If it is inverted and change is required to get life back, how is it accomplished? Denominations, like user groups on the river, get nervous when folks start talking restoration. Contrasting the rivers this way has shifted my thinking. Trying to see the physical river as a dynamic whole instead of a bunch of mechanical parts has made looking at my faith river easier. We know what physical rivers are. They exist on the earth, and can be looked at, studied, dissected and, ultimately, understood. And it is this precise visualization that I want to use as the basis to look at the whole of Christianity. Not the parts, but the whole, for this is a book about wholeness, the lack of it, and the desire to see it restored.

You might say that this is an evaluation of the “river of life” by an environmentalist. It would seem to be an illegitimate, unauthorized intrusion into the affairs of those who manage the great river of contemporary American Christian faith. Just as the Old Testament prophets used analogies from their everyday world, so I am going to use the environmentalist's perspective of a natural river, to show the similarities of the spiritual river. I spent many years in and around the Columbia River; it is a river I am familiar with. Outside of that, it can stand on its own with almost any river in the country. It is truly a great river. It has all the problems of a contemporary American river but in one respect it has them all beat. The Columbia River has scale. It has the greatest volume and velocity of any river in the country. It produces more hydroelectric power and consequently has more political problems than any river in the country.

The tale of the Columbia River, its discovery, hope for a new way west, the trapping of the beaver, the harvesting of salmon, and the eventual damming of the river, mirrors the themes of contemporary Christianity. The year 2003 was the 200th anniversary of Lewis and Clark, and though they didn't discover the river per se, they swung open the door for people to move west. In their extensive travels, the Columbia River was the only river they called “great.” It is a river that has been harnessed by man's ingenuity, and transformed into a workhorse for mankind's good. It mirrors the condition of our “river of life.”

At its peak, on the point of discovery, it is estimated that the Columbia River received an estimated 16,000,000 salmon returning to spawn every season to the tributaries of the Columbia's 250,000 square mile watershed. This is no longer the case. Today the river is one of the preeminent rivers in the world for producing power. It has made decisive contributions in war and fueled the economic engines in peace. The trade-off has been the life of the river itself.

Today the battle on the river is not a battle of good against evil, but good against life. There is a great struggle to restore the life of the river. It is meeting fierce resistance from the vested interests, those who derive a livelihood from the river outside of its natural function. The structure of the river has been radically altered and consequently the function of the river has also drastically changed. Its great natural generosity has been cut off and in its place is a vast machinery that measures and sells every quart of flowing water throughout its system.

In the center of this dynamic political drama are the salmon. They are the great, strong, beautiful fish, the pilgrims of the river, who travel to the ocean as fingerlings, mature, and begin the long trek back to their breeding grounds. They used to bring life to the farthest tributaries, thousands of miles from the ocean, up the swiftest river with the most volume of water in North America. The wild stocks of salmon that still survive now navigate up a river vastly changed. It is a confusing place. The great intimacy of the river is gone. In its place are a series of dams and great reservoirs, fish ladders, weirs and hatcheries. The fish are losing the battle in the new structure. And because the river is less they are less.

The Columbia is now a river on clock time, the continuum of the river having been cut off. Now managers say what and when things come and go. But because we have altered its structure and have chosen to collect the water and consequently the silt, the natural river is dying. The river system will live on, but the eternal feature of life is disappearing.

So it is with the “river of life.” Christianity has been divided up. We have traded relationships for memberships. Our spiritual passage is confused by great walls of doctrine, and because our river is less, we are less. We too operate on clock time with managers to regulate the flow. Thus the environmentalist's perspective of the natural river, is a fitting prophetic look at the “river of life” as well.

Those who fight for life in the river are advocates for wholeness. They envision a whole river, not a segmented one. For Christians it is almost impossible for us to imagine our river whole. Our perspectives have been fractured. We understand machinery much better than we do life. We have faith in the organizations within our control. It's a faith of membership rather than a faith of relationship. We have substituted small order for the great divine natural order. And like the Columbia we are paying the price. In a larger moment, those in the work of restoration are aching for that great, almost mythic river of the past. They see through the mechanical complications a dynamic and uncomplicated wholeness. In their story and struggle they baptize us into seeing things whole, through the veil of the natural and into the spiritual.

The political struggles of those who have fought gallantly against the management regimes of the river to restore life in the Columbia and other rivers are the voices for change you'll hear. I just happen to hear it in a new way and am passing what I heard along. And any vision of this river I see, I see through their eyes. This is not an indictment of Christianity, but rather a meditative work to see around the edges of our machinery and organization and get a glimpse of something that we could call life.

When the ultimate concept of wholeness of this great river began to creep into my consciousness, I began to understand that I would have to suspend my narrow concepts of belief in ideologies I had been taught. I would enter a new realm where pat answers would not suffice, for the river posed innumerable lively questions and very few answers. Leaving the certain world of belief, into the fluid constantly changing world of the river, I would have to become a seeker, someone who really doesn't know but has a sense of something yet to be defined.

The old man on the sidewalk told me about another river. To our right was one of the main bridges that crossed the Sava river. He pointed at it. “We lost a great mathematician on that bridge. You see, when the bombing started we were afraid that they would blow up the bridges.” He put his bags on the sidewalk. We would talk more.

“Every night we would crowd onto the bridges--many, many of us,” he continued. I tried to think how many people can crowd onto a bridge a mile long and four lanes wide. Directly behind us were the crowded tenements of Belgrade; many, massive, ten-storied, grey Soviet-style, concrete buildings. The old man wore a long woolen coat and a woolen cap. His smile showed a few teeth missing. His eyes were bright and there was no malice in his voice.

“You see,” he continued, “If they blew up the bridges we would have no food.”

I imagined the nightly exodus of the people from the tenements down to the bridges. They became a human river connecting the city center and the tenements on the other side, while precision bombing missions were being carried out overhead.

“You know Bobby Fisher played Boris Spatsky in that hotel.” He pointed to our hotel. Then the man on the sidewalk in Belgrade, whose world perspective was framed by rivers, picked up his bags and sauntered on.

The river man left me with my first real picture of a human river, a river that moved through the low places. Desperation had brought them together and in being shoulder to shoulder stretched out across the bridges there was a hope in this river of bodies. They had stood in the open air, crammed together in the darkness while guided missiles dropped from bombers droning above their heads exploded around them. They became a river that ran below the politics, war and strife. There was hope still running through the people. Here was a man in a country whose notoriety in the world at the time was barbaric and ethnic cleansing. His city had been bombed, and my country had bombed it. We stood on opposite sides of a political chasm. He took his place, though, in the world, as a man of the Danube and the Sava Rivers and gave me a chance to be a man of a river, the Colorado. We were river men and being such, our worlds connected at that moment.

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