Today marks the beginning of Illinois Prairie Week. Illinois Prairie week is observed every year during the third full week of September, thanks to a law passed by the state legislature. The purpose of Illinois Prairie Week is to help people understand and appreciate prairies.
Because I grew up in California, learning about the prairie wasn’t part of my education. I do remember one line from a National Geographic kids book I had, a sentence which, strangely, I remember word for word: “grasses grow taller in the east, and shorter in the more arid west.” Apparently, I thought that was interesting. I don’t even know if I knew what the word “arid” meant. It was a new word for me. Maybe that’s why that sentence caught my attention, and lodged in my memory.
But now that I’m a resident of the Prairie State, I’ve learned more about prairies. Prairies historically covered nearly a third of North America, and two-thirds of Illinois. From here in Illinois, the native prairies stretched south to Texas, north to Saskatchewan, and west all the way to the Rocky Mountains.
And, yes, the grasses do get shorter the farther west you go.
Sadly, the native prairies are, today, almost all gone. Especially here in Illinois. I’ve seen a few remnant prairies—not even “remnant”, really, but reconstructions, an acre or two at most, meant to remind us of what the prairies once looked like. There’s one in the park near my house. There’s another at Camp Walter Scott. But in the entire state of Illinois, only 0.01% of the prairie remains.
In native prairies, many types of grasses and wildflowers all grow together. It’s a mature and complex ecosystem, that also supports a wide array of wildlife. Acc. to a National Park Service website, “Prairies developed into one of the most complicated and diverse ecosystems in the world, surpassed only by the rainforest of Brazil.”
Prairies are a miraculous wonder of creation.
A lot of what makes the prairie special is underground. The roots of some prairie plants grow 10 to 15 feet deep, and often, the roots interweave so thickly that early settlers cut bricks out of the sod to build homes and schools.
(I did read Willa Cather in high school, and I wondered how the sod homes she described could be so sturdy. Now I know.)
Prairies are a mix of dozens or even hundreds of different types of grasses and plants, all growing together. A healthy prairie has a kind of wild, untamed look to it.
Few people want a prairie for their front yard. What most people want is a lawn, a manicured expanse made up of a single species of grass, mowed short, giving the yard a uniform, unblemished appearance.
On the west coast, where I’m from, there are more forests than grasslands, but forests, too, have many different species of plants growing together.
For a long time, foresters thought it would be better if they could create forests of a single species of tree. They thought that having all these different species growing together made it harder for trees to grow. But if you could grow a forest of just one species of tree, and those trees grew faster, that would be better for loggers and lumber companies. So they set about trying to create forests of a single type of tree.
But it turns out that trees don’t grow faster or stronger when there’s only one type of tree growing in the forest. The trees grow faster and healthier when there is a diversity of species growing together. For example: pine & fir get nitrogen from alder; the nitrogen travels from the alders to the pines and firs via the fungi that connect their roots underground.
That’s just one example; in many ways, different species of trees actually help each other grow stronger and healthier and more resistant to disease. And lumber productivity actually doubles when there’s a variety of species all growing together.
The same is true for the grasses of the prairie. A prairie is a much healthier ecosystem when there’s a diversity of species present. A prairie is much better for the ecosystem than a lawn that has only one species of grass.
Healthy prairies protect and purify water, clean the air, prevent erosion and soil loss, and provide habitat for countless species of animals, including bison, elk, deer, antelope, grizzly bears, cougars, and wolves, all of which thrived in Illinois before the prairies were destroyed.
When humans come together and form tribes and communities and nations, we try to do with groups of people the same thing we try to do with our lawns: limit them to a single type. Make everyone the same.
We want our clan to be made up of people just like us. Our interactions with those who are not like us tend to be more hostile than the interactions we have with people with whom we have much in common.
Today’s Bible story is about a woman who was a Gentile, of Syrophoenician origin. Among first-century Jews, she was an alder in a forest of pines. She was the black-eyed Susan in a field of big bluestem. She was a weed in their well-manicured lawn… and they didn’t really want anything to do with her.
And she should have known better than to speak to Jesus. A woman wasn’t supposed to speak to a male. A Syrophoenician wasn’t supposed to speak to a Jew. They were supposed to be kept separate.
How audacious of her, to show herself, and to speak, without invitation, to Jesus.
She’s not just any weed; she’s that one weed that sprouts up faster than the rest, the one you can’t get rid of. She’s that honeyvine milkweed I have in my yard; I pull it up one day, and it’s back the next. Very persistent.
And with that persistence, she seeks Jesus out, and begs him to heal her daughter. But Jesus looks at her, and what does he see? A weed. A plant that doesn’t belong. And he dismisses her.
He even insults her.
Does Jesus’ reaction here bother you? It’s always bothered me. For years, I’d read this story, and wonder what I was missing. Why was Jesus so rude? So unkind?
I find this portrayal of Jesus problematic.
But lately I’ve been learning a new way to read Bible stories like this. I’ve learned that there are quite a few Bible stories, actually, that start out just playing into our expectations. These stories describe a scene that seems to confirm the ideas of the intended readers, their preconceived notions, their biases… It’s a literary device that sets us up for the big shocker that comes at the end, which takes all those ideas and turns them on their head.
For example:
There’s the story of Noah and the flood. Many ancient religions had a flood story, and they all were similar to each other. The one we have in the book of Genesis starts out like all the others: God gets angry at humanity, and God sends a flood to destroy humanity.
I find the notion that God decides to destroy humanity problematic, but it's a setup that plays into ancient ideas of how gods behaved.
At the end, there is a twist that is unique to the God of Israel. This God makes a promise, a covenant: that never again will God do such a thing.
So the story starts the way anyone familiar with those ancient flood stories would expect, but the main point of the story comes in the surprise ending.
The near-sacrifice of Isaac works the same way. Every ancient religion had stories of sacrifice. People were expected to provide and offer sacrifices to God—sometimes even human sacrifices.
So the story of Abraham and Isaac begins with God demanding that Abraham take Isaac, his only son, and sacrifice him. I may have a problem with a God who issues such a command, but to the ancient way of thinking, that was not a surprising thing for a god to do. It’s what one would expect a god to do.
But then, in the end, God stops the sacrifice of Isaac, and instead, God provides the sacrifice. In no other story of sacrifice in the ancient world does the god provide what is to be sacrificed.
It’s another way of showing that this God is not like any other God.
When Jesus reacts in a negative, hostile manner toward this Syrophoenician woman, that’s what was expected, in the first century. That’s how Jews treated Gentiles.
Whether Jesus actually displayed such hostility toward this woman, I don’t know. But when Mark wrote his gospel, he knew that his readers would expect a good, honorable member of their community to react a certain way toward a Syrophoenician woman, and that’s how Mark wrote the story…
But then…
The woman makes a comment that stops Jesus in his tracks. Her comment changes the direction of the story. It completely alters the plot. And Jesus is awed and impressed by what she says, and by her incredible faith; and Jesus agrees to show kindness to her and heal her daughter.
That is not the ending that any first-century reader would have expected. Jesus’ community, and the gospel writer Mark’s community, did not expect kindness to be shown to a Syrophoenician woman.
Like a parable, this story toys with your expectations. A first-century reader would expect the story to go a certain way, to follow a familiar path… but then, BAM! You get this ending that just shocks you! It rattles you, it shakes you, it turns your world upside down.
In this story, in the end, this Syrophenician woman isn’t sent away, she isn’t ignored. Instead, Jesus not only grants her request and heals her daughter, but Jesus himself seems to have been taught by this woman, educated by her, corrected by her!
What! That just didn’t happen in the first century! And yet, in this story, it does happen.
In this story, she opens his eyes to look at her and see not an ugly weed, but a beautiful human, a flower, an essential part of the prairie ecosystem.
And his faith was strengthened by her just as the pine and fir trees are strengthened by the alder. Together, they were both made stronger and their community was made stronger.
Just like the interwoven roots of dozens of prairie plants, creating a material strong enough to build houses, this story shows that when the lives of women and men, Syrophoenicians and Jews, are interwoven together, the end result is something much stronger and healthier.
That’s the beauty of the prairie. That’s the beauty of a world of diversity.
I read a book this summer by Lore Ferguson Wilbert called The Understory. It’s a book about forests, religion, and humanity.
In that book, she writes: “We need diversity, not just for diversity’s sake but because we are, like the trees of the forest, mutualists. We cannot get what we need only from our own kind, those who think like us, act like us, vote like us, and plan like us.
There are a lot of people today who worship differently than I do, and who vote differently than I do, and I disagree with them on a lot of things, and they disagree with me on a lot of things.
But, despite our differences, we need each other. Together, we are all a part of the prairie. Together, we can be stronger. Together, we can find healing. Together, we can learn and grow.
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