Faith That Grows With Us

In the years I was a college professor, I would look forward to summer months when I could read and reread books by favorite authors. Even now in retirement, I associate summer with spending time with these literary friends. The author who is at the top of my list is Sigurd Olson.

Sigurd Olson is one of those writers who is perhaps unknown by the majority of readers while being beloved and treasured by others. While he wrote some fiction early in his writing career, he is best known for his essays on the importance of wilderness.

Living most of his adult life in Ely, Minnesota, and spending his summers as a wilderness guide in what is now the Boundary Waters, Olson drew upon first-hand knowledge of life in wilderness areas in north-eastern Minnesota, Canada, and Alaska. In many ways, Olson was an evangelist for the spiritual benefits of taking time away from modern urban life and traversing remote wilderness areas in canoes and tents as our ancestors once did.

Many of the essays in his numerous books are accounts of adventures, but that is not the reason I read Olson every summer. I check in with Olson during the summer months because he was and remains such a beautiful writer.

Some credit for this achievement should go to his willingness to revise and edit. Olson didn’t stop when an essay was “good enough.” He wasn’t satisfied until each essay flowed like a song or poem.

Many years ago, I had an opportunity to read Olson’s notes for one essay, “Easter on the Prairie,” the notes held in the archives of the State of Minnesota in Minneapolis. To my delight, I found five versions of the essay, which were written over thirty years. I say “delight” because each version of the essay offered more than cleaned-up grammar. Each essay offered a window into how Olson’s thinking changed over those decades.

While each version described a boy sitting in a church on Easter Sunday morning and looking out of the window, what the boy—clearly young Sigurd—noticed and paid attention to differs in the five versions. Both Olson and I are sons of ministers, so I wasn’t surprised that the first version focuses on the tension felt by the boy as he tries to pay attention to the service while the sounds of the birds outside the window distract him. I remember doing the same as I sat through one worship service after another as a boy.

As Olson reworked the essay over and over again, the balance of the boy’s attention shifts increasingly away from what was happening inside the church. Instead, the boy pays more and more attention to the sounds of nature outside. By the final essay, which Olson included in his first book, The Singing Wilderness, the boy applies the Easter theme of resurrection to springtime on the prairie.

Given that Olson is supposedly recalling a genuine experience that he had as a boy, we could ask, “Which version tells the truth?” But that is to miss the point of the five versions. With each change, Olson wasn’t saying “Forget the last version. This version describes what I really felt as a boy.”

Instead, Olson used each version to describe how his understanding of the Holy was shifting in his adult life, from the view found in the organized religion of his father to a more personal and mystical appreciation of nature.

In leaving behind the five versions of “Easter on the Prairie,” Olson lets us in on how his mind and heart changed over time. Does it really matter that Olson’s spiritual path took a different direction from mine and maybe yours? Can we appreciate that Olson didn’t spend his life hanging on to what he was taught as a boy, that even as he grew mentally as well as physically, so did his view of the Holy?