"a differently ordered space"

Uncle Ric wrote an interesting article for Jesus Radicals. I replied to part of it:

I liked this: "A wild space is not a disorderly space, but a differently ordered space. It is an order that may look like disorder to those who are overly domesticated and tamed. Wild spaces encourage, allow, and empower us to imagine alternative ways of living. Without wild spaces we are doomed to a deeper domestication, perpetually constrained by the circles that misshaped us in the first place."

I wonder about your next sentence, though: "Wild spaces are where we are free to be different, to experiment, to imagine, to risk, to dare, to dream, to play." I agree that wild, undomesticated places demonstrate an alternative, a rightly ordered alternative. But that's not that same as freeing us for any alternative, is it?

Those who have encountered nature in the raw and tried to survive there don't see it as a place where they're "free to be different," as far as I know. It's a place where they have to discover the order there, and submit themselves to it, learn it, obey it. Or they die. I think it's a good order to live by, offering some important advantages over the (dis)order of modern living, but it's not a place to just try anything.

I think it's the same with the church community. We are offered a real alternative community by Jesus, with an order to it that we may not understand, that we have to discover. That alternative, if we submit to it by closely following Jesus, frees us to be who God created us to be. But that's not the same as simply seeking "alternatives."

Maybe I'm a bit influenced by the blizzard that just dropped a foot of snow on us, knocking out our power for several hours yesterday, with more snow and -10F expected tonight...