A Place Called Providence

Providence Canyon, Georgia

Between Chattanooga and my hometown, I drive a long stretch of Highway 27 through the prosaic farmlands of southwest Georgia. In the early 1800s, plantation owners and other farmers clearcut the native forests of Stewart County to grow cotton mostly, also peanuts. Being the big-brained geniuses they were, they failed to consider rain runoff, which cut the soft soil like a hot knife in butter. By the 1850s, a vast network of ditches 3-5 feet deep ran throughout the county. By the end of the nineteenth century, those ditches became gullies, and the gullies became canyons that now descend as deep as 150 feet into the earth.

They call it Providence Canyon. It's a state park now; considered one of Georgia's "seven wonders" with hiking trails, scenic overlooks, and backcountry campsites. All of this, even though there is nothing naturally wonderful about the place. Georgia's "Little Grand Canyon" is the product of human activity: the forced removal of the Muscogee by European settlers, the destruction of native forests, and the short-sighted implementation of unsustainable farming practices. 

It took God, the Everlasting Song of the Universe, eons to carve the many canyons of the world. It took careless Georgians less than a century.

Without getting too deep in the theological weeds, certain reformed protestant traditions understand providence to mean that God governs the course of nature and history down to its minute details. I think this view of things is bogus but it is held by a great many people, both in its hardline Calvinist and slightly softer Augustinian formulations. 

According to this view, God orchestrated (Calvin) or oversaw (Augustine) the Creek Wars of 1812 and 1836, the clear-cutting of native pine forests, and the implementation of unsustainable farming practices fueled by the horrors and human misery of the Atlantic slave trade. And finally, God pushed the rainwaters through the fields in such a way that a canyon worthy of a spaghetti western formed in the coastal plain region of southwest Georgia.

If this view of things is correct, then it would also be true that God breached the human-made earthen work dam on Pennsylvania's south fork of the Little Conemaugh River that killed 2,200 people in 1889. The private owners of the dam even argued in court that the dam's failure was the product of divine providence rather than human negligence, despite overwhelming evidence of the latter. They won. Think about that. Their legal defense was "God did it" and they paid zero dollars in legal compensation for the losses. If folks want to fill up the Sunday morning pews to worship a god like that, I cannot stop them; but I will not. 

It seems much more likely, moral, and coherent that God's initial aim for the world is one of beauty and flourishing for both the human and non-human world. Humans inhabit a space of open possibilities and may accept this aim or reject it. Because God is love and love, by nature is noncontrolling, then God needs humans to actively participate in working towards that aim or expectation of wholeness, order, and flourishing -- what the Hebrew writers called shalom.

Pope Francis wrote in the 2015 encyclical Lautado Si that "The present world system is certainly unsustainable from a number of points of view, for we have stopped thinking about the goals of human activity." He continues, "If we scan the regions of our planet, we immediately see that humanity has disappointed God’s expectations." We often reject the "initial aims" or "goals of human activities" for short-term gain, private interests, and profit margins.  

Hence Providence Canyon, hence the Johnstown Flood, hence a lot of things. 

The walls of Providence Canyon are diminutive compared to the canyons of the Four Corners region. The destruction is also small compared to the man-made disaster of the Johnstown Flood. But Providence Canyon does bear witness to the awful potential of human ignorance and avarice. That's not to say you shouldn't visit it. It is truly something to behold. So go. Hike. Picnic. And when you do, consider the irony of its name because Ignorance and Avarice Canyon State Park doesn't roll off the tongue quite as well.

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