Squatchin'

 

Pastor’s Epistle—April 2021

We have a patch of woods just to the east of our house, a place of refuge for foxes and deer and whatever other forest critters our dogs like to bark at in the night. It’s a lovely thing to watch the sun rise up between the trees each morning, a clear indicator of the seasons as leaves bud and grow and green and fall. And if you were to look left across our field, following the line of trees north into town, you’d get a glimpse of Bigfoot.

Ah, it’s not really him, of course—more’s the pity—just a life-sized seven-foot sasquatch silhouette mounted by our neighbors to a birch in their backyard. Yet it’s delightful enough that I’ve seriously considered purchasing one of our own and bolting it to the trees beside our house, much to my wife’s mortification.

The truth is that I’ve been on a bit of a Bigfoot kick lately, and I’m old enough now to let my weird little heart wander in whatever ways to which it inclines. It might be more accurate, however, to say that I’ve noticed how everyone else seems to be on a Bigfoot kick lately, and I’m just along for the show—of which there are plenty, mind you.

We pay $5 a month for the Discovery+ streaming service, and it’s just chock-a-block with Bigfoot hunting shows. One of them has been running for 10 seasons straight, despite a clear track record of 100% failure. What a wonderful job that must be: camping out in the mountains, playing with drones and thermal cameras, excitedly running about the woods at night, never worrying about whether or not you could truly catch the beast.

I see Bigfoot bumper stickers, Bigfoot books, Bigfoot horror movies; even Bigfoot rides, if we’re willing to include his Tibetan cousin the Yeti in the equation. Expedition Everest at Disney World is a hoot. Upstate Minnesotans even have our own local variation, the Vergas Hairy Man, not half an hour from town. And all this commercialization is built upon a solid foundation of folklore, for indeed the Bigfoot phenomenon is just one iteration of a worldwide woodwose obsession.

“Woodwose” is the general term for a wide variety of wildman encounters, ranging from Russia through Europe to the Pacific Northwest. Every country, every state, has some sort of woodwose, a few far crazier than any seven-foot ape. Yetis have spiritual significance in Tibetan Buddhism. Native Americans have told stories of woodwoses for centuries. And to this day, Slavs still speak of the Leshy who guards the forest primeval. We should note, however, that wildmen such as these are viewed more as spirits than as any sort of undiscovered primate. And therein lies their appeal.

Why do people want to believe in Bigfoot? Why do we enjoy the idea and the adventure even if we can’t quite believe that it’s true? I think it has to do with enchantment, with the universal human longing for a world of wonder, of gods and of monsters. Deep down we yearn for forests to contain magic and mystery, beyond our mundane view of reality. Materialism isn’t just philosophically untenable; it’s spiritual drudgery. How boring a world of particles and ping-pong balls!

It isn’t a stretch to say that the longing for Bigfoot is the longing for God, and not a tame God either. No, we want a God who is wild, exciting, mysterious, and free; a God we glimpse in nature; and God forever playfully beyond our reach, just off camera, just out of focus, mocking our technological mastery and our smug certainty about the world and our place in it.

Lazy minds dismiss religious faith as though it were little more than chasing after fairies in the garden or sasquatch in the woods. But I think that our delight in fantasy, folklore, and fairytales points to a far deeper truth of the human condition, a conviction that simply will not go away: that this miraculous world we find ourselves in is a gift, and its mysteries run deeper than we could ever quite manage to delve.

And so I take heart whenever I see a Bigfoot sticker on the back of a car or a hulking silhouette in the woods. For these indeed are signs that, whether we realize it or not, we are all of us on a quest for the Creator behind the Creation. And we shall continue to seek Him out, until at long last He finds us.

In Jesus. Amen.