Voice in the Wilderness

In the ever new, ever old search for meaning, the wilderness often has been where the spirit speaks.

Hebrew Scriptures recount that God spoke to Moses in the wilderness. The devil tempted Jesus in the wilderness. It was in the wilderness of Mt. Hira that Muhammad is said to have been told by an angel that Allah had chosen him to be his prophet.

Ian Player would be the last to count himself in such august company. But the 71-year-old South African conservationist--who is credited with saving the white rhinoceros from extinction--knows the value of the wilderness in awakening the spirit and wonders why organized religion has been so slow to see the light.

Player says it took a native Zulu to lead him from “the arid midst of our technological world,” as another author and friend put it, into South Africa’s province of Natal to discover the wilderness as both geographical place and spiritual metaphor.

Since 1957, Player, the founder of the Wilderness Leadership School and the World Wilderness Congress, has been leading young people and adults into the wilds. Now Player--the brother of golfing great Gary Player--has written of his experiences in a book, “Zulu Wilderness: Shadow and Soul,” published by Fulcrum Publishing of Golden, Colo.

It is the story of a 40-year friendship with the late Qumbu Magqubu Ntombela, who died in 1993 at age 93 after working for Player as a game warden with the Natal Parks Board and later as a trail leader with Player’s Wilderness Leadership School. Although Player on paper was Magqubu’s supervisor, he says his Zulu friend became his spiritual guide and someone to whom he learned to defer.

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Recently over coffee and blueberry muffins in the Mid-Wilshire district, far from the hiss of crocodiles and the roar of lions, Player recounted his spiritual journey into the Zululand wilderness.

“I was brought up in the Christian church as a very strict Anglican person, where anything that deviated from it was sinful and that paganism was bad, was evil,” Player said. “Here am I now living and working in the wilderness, and I’m being guided by a man who communicates with the animals--talks to them, thinks like them, imitates them, loves them--and I’m caught up in this. And I think to myself, ‘God, I’m becoming a pagan!’ ”

At first he resisted, he said. But the more he saw of Magqubu’s insights, the more disaffected he became with Western Christianity, in large part because it failed to care for creation. It had, he said, been overtaken by “materialism gone mad,” played out in overdevelopment, destruction of wetlands, pollution and the loss of species.

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“It comes from the insatiable urge to make more money,” Player said. “It’s an overwhelming, insatiable, non-satisfying urge that seems to possess people.”

In 50 years of attending church, Player said, he had never heard a sermon on the environment.

For Player, the two worlds began to come together in a dream he had while sleeping on the banks of the Black Mfolozi River.

“In the dream, I go into a glade and there’s an old Norman church, like the ones I attended in my youth, and I look at the church and growing into the church is a eucalyptus tree,” he said. Well-read in Jungian psychology, Player believes in listening to dreams--and sees the tree as representing the wilderness.

“I said out loud in the dream, ‘If the church falls down, the tree will fall down. If the tree falls down, the church will fall down.’ ”

Wilderness and faith go hand in hand, in other words.

Player’s epiphany in the wilderness of Zululand made the biblical stories of Moses and Jesus more real to him, he said.

The inspiration for the Wilderness Leadership School, Player said, came one night as he kept watch amid the wild sounds of Africa while Magqubu slept. Player said he stared into the dancing flames of the campfire and was transported back to his boyhood at an Anglican school and to a candle at an Easter vigil.

“I went to a church school, and we had to go to chapel three times a day. The only thing that ever stuck in my memory is that at Easter we had to go down into the crypt, the great stone crypt, and watch over the body of Christ,” Player said. “I was about 12 years old, and that made a great impression on me--sitting there for an hour and watching that candle flickering, and then I understood something about the spirit.”

Now, when he takes his charges into the wilderness to experience unalloyed nature, where beauty and danger can be mere heartbeats apart, all must take turns standing watch at night by the campfire.

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Their job, Player said, is to keep the fire burning to ward off wild beasts. Their job also is to listen. Between the startling sound of a twig snapping in the dark or the distant growl of an unseen lion there is time to think, to experience fear and awe, to know oneself as both vulnerable and affirmed and to question one’s place in the great scheme of things.

Player might point to a diary entry by a teenager, Irene Swart, included in another book called “South African Passage,” for which he wrote the introduction:

“I think of God,” Swart wrote. “Does he really exist? I do believe that in this quiet, peaceful and beautiful wilderness he does live, but how can he live in the mad cities, where no one stops to think or consider why he is living where everything is rushed, with no time to realize or to even think about God?

“Is God Nature? Is he the whole, the everything, or is he ‘Someone,’ living in heaven, apart from the Earth and us earthlings?

“Inevitably, I think of me. Where am I going, where have I been? I think of my life, my job, my friends and loved ones. At this moment I love everyone--wishing that they too could enjoy this second, this moment in time where everything seems perfect.

“I realize regretfully that my turn of night watch is at the end, it is time for someone else to enjoy the stillness, the quiet and the peace of the night in the wilderness.”