An odd hunting buddy

a PSE bow and a Pascal book

Photo by Mister A on Unsplash

Deer Hunting

Once a year, two of my best friends and I head a little way south to do some deer hunting. We’re on the family property of one of the guys, and it is always a blast. His dad treats us like royalty, and there is little better than time with the guys around the fire, the table, or the proverbial skinning pole.

But learning to hunt whitetail deer in the Midwest has been a bit of a learning curve for me. I grew up out West, hunting large tracts of public land, or private land that was big enough to be hunted as if it were public. Go stomp around for a few hours, hopefully see something, and either make a quick shot (if it’s close), or put on a stalk (if it’s not so close).

You don’t do that when you’re hunting 60 or 80 acres in the Midwest. You don’t do that even if you’re hunting a bigger piece. You find a good spot for a ground blind, or a likely place to hang a stand in a tree. And then, you sit there. And wait.

This is a great way to get to know what is happening in the woods, because you are seeing the transition from one part of the day to another, and really once you’ve been settled in for even a few minutes, all of the smaller critters like squirrels and birds go back to business as normal.

But I’m really impatient. So it’s easy to get bored. This wouldn’t have been an issue a generation ago - I have had experiences where I get bored and then your mind sits down into a sort or creative or contemplative state, and it’s really kind of nice. I’ve done most of my best thinking as a result of boredom.

But this is the 21st century, and I have a smartphone in my pocket. Part of me wants to just turn the dumb thing off, but I am trying to keeps tabs with my buddies on what’s happening where they’re at, and especially on morning hunts I aim to be available if there are any calls from work. So there’s this constant pull to check my email, scroll, etc.

One way I’ve found to combat that is by having a book - thus my mind is occupied, but not in a way that pulls my attention down to a 3x5 screen. It’s a lot easier to be aware of the world around you with a physical book in your hands than with the phone in the same place.

But finding the right book can be a little tough. I don’t really want a novel - too potentially engrossing. I don’t want to miss a buck walk by because I wanted so badly to know what happens next - page, after page, after page. I also don’t want something where there is a lot of complex argument to be followed - not the time for a tough theological read (sorry, Owen).

No, what I need is something short, and bite-sized. A couple of years ago I read The Heidelberg Catechism in a tree stand (this is a nice edition). That was great. The theology in that catechism is quite profound, but it is not not or hard to digest.

This year I decided to take a book that I have been poking at for a long time - the Pensées by Blaise Pascal. This was an excellent choice.

Now, to be perfectly frank, I didn’t make the progress I had hoped to. I still lost the battle with my phone - which is to say, the battle with my own self - multiple times over, and was checking email, not reading a classic. But I did spend some decent amount of time in the stand with Pascal. And it was worthwhile.

Thoughts

If you aren’t familiar with this work, it is a collection of fragmentary thoughts - not a cohesive book. There is no through-line. It is more like a giant notebook that might have at some point been pulled into a book, or books, at some point in the future. But Pascal, a polymath who “left his mark on mathematics, physics, religious controversy and literature”¹, died 1662, at the age of 39. So the proper book was never written. Instead, for the past 460 years, people have been reading these fragments that he left behind.

But when you read them - though some are obscure, weird, or just impossible to understand - you realize there are real gems. To paraphrase Lewis, classics are classics for a reason. Here are a couple of stand-outs from my time in the stand:

251 “Anyone who wishes to give the meaning of Scripture without taking it from Scripture is the enemy of Scripture.”²

231 “If we claim that man is too slight to deserve communion with God, we must indeed be great to be able to judge.”³

199 “Let us then realize our limitations. We are something and we are not everything.”⁴

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1. Blaise Pascal, Pensées, A.J. Krailsheimer, translator(London, England: Penguin Books, 1995), i.

2. Quoting Augustine, ibid 76.

3. Ibid, 72.

4. Ibid, 62.