Into the wild – Life Lessons From Monks and Duck Dynasty

Christian Monasticism began to flourish in the desert of Egypt. It was here monks left the world to focus their life on prayer. They didn’t necessarily see it as an escape. It was more than just leaving the “world”. For many, it was the best place to pray for the world. As the centuries progressed, they became timeless examples of prayer and the battle we all face with ourselves. Show me someone depressed and ready to give up on life, the first place I tell them to look is in the mirror. Good monks become experts at this type of reflection.

In my own life, it is when I’ve seemed furthest from God and my life unsettled, that my soul has seemed to long the most for the wilderness. And thankfully, I’ve more often than not heeded that call whether it was a long motorcycle ride, a weekend escape, long road trips, camping or pilgrimages to a monastery. Go to a place where you are alone with your thoughts and shielded from the noise of modern media and technology, your focus on life becomes clear, the answers straight forward and simple. While hard, it becomes much easier to look in the mirror and face the truth of ourselves.

So what does this have to do with Duck Dynasty? While it is popular for a variety of reasons – humor, family values, guns and the outdoors – I believe the writer of the infamous GQ interview with Phil Robertson, Drew Magary, nailed it.

“He is welcoming and gracious. He is a man who preaches the gospel of the outdoors and, to my great envy, practices what he preaches. He spends most of his time out here, daydreaming about what he calls a “pristine earth”: a world where nothing gets in the way of nature or the hunters who lovingly maintain it. No cities. No buildings. No highways.”

“We hop back in the ATV and plow toward the sunset, back to the Robertson home. There will be no family dinner tonight. No cameras in the house. No rowdy squirrel-hunting stories from back in the day. There will be only the realest version of Phil Robertson, hosting a private Bible study with a woman who, according to him, “has been on cocaine for years and is making her decision to repent. I’m going to point her in the right direction.”

“It’s the direction he would like to point everyone: back to the woods. Back to the pioneer spirit. Back to God. “Why don’t we go back to the old days?” he asked me at one point. But now, I’m afraid, I must get out of the ATV and go back to where I belong, back to the godless part of America that Phil is determined to save.”

Read more here at gq.com!

What intrigued the writer I believe is what ultimately draws the viewer – we long for deeper, more meaningful lives. Duck Dynasty is fundamentally about large families, hometowns, simple pleasures, and faith. The average person today has none of these – families are small and spread apart, we don’t live in our hometowns, life is filled with expensive and high technology pleasures, and faith is something most people do out of habit rather than belief.

The kind of longing we can feel when we watch Duck Dynasty is closer to what those monks who left for the desert felt than you might think. They knew their lives were becoming busy, easy, and leading away from faith. Not everyone was meant or called to literally go into the desert, but for those that did they represented the longing of all of us to lead deeper and more meaningful lives.

Of course all is not simple on the DD front. Their “wilderness” life has brought them great riches, and for many in the Robertson family, it will confront them with a momentous struggle. If it hasn’t already. Will their souls stay in the wilderness, or will they be pulled away. Thanks to their “Patriarch” as they called Phil in the midst of the controversy, they will be facing it together, doing their best to stay in the wilderness.

Phil Robertson is far from a perfect man. He is no monk and in doing the show he has brought the very temptations to his family that he has worked so hard to avoid. But when he says, “we are all sinners”, I believe he is sincere. And that is what I like about him most.