Interview with Tony Jones Reverend Hunter
- Can you share a bit about your background and how you came to be known as the Reverend Hunter?
Fifteen years ago, when I was down on my luck and didn’t have any prospects for hunting, I posted on my blog — remember blogs? — that I would preach for free in exchange for hunting. I got a call from the Episcopal priest in Huron, SD, and all I knew about Huron was that it has a statue of the world’s largest pheasant. I took that as a good sign! I went out to Huron, preached, and hunted. And I’ve gone back every year since. The outdoors editor at the Minneapolis StarTribune heard about my little scheme to find hunting spots, and he asked me to write a story about it for the paper. He gave that story the headline: “The Rev. Hunter,” and it stuck!
- What inspired you to write “The God of Wild Places“?
I started writing this book over a decade ago. It has been a long and arduous journey. And, looking at the finished product, I’m glad that it took me so long. The brilliant memoir writer Mary Carr says that you shouldn’t write about something that is less than 8 years old, and I think she’s right. A lot of these stories, and a lot of the pain that I’ve had to overcome in my life, had to steep in my soul for some time before I could really get it down on paper the way I wanted to. Honestly, I wrote this book because I felt I needed to. I think it will probably help other people, and they will find insights within its pages, but primarily I needed to write it for myself.
- How has your faith influenced your hunting experiences and vice versa?
I think that my faith background has influenced my hunting pretty significantly. To be more specific, I’d say that my training as a pastor and then subsequently as a theologian has taught me how to reflect on experiences that we have as human beings and find meaning in those experiences. So a lot of times, driving home from a hunt, I will spend some time thinking about the deeper meanings of what I just did.
It would be hard for me to even quantify how much my hunting has influenced my faith. In some ways, hunting has supplanted religion in my life, or at least has given my faith a whole new shape. As I say in the book, I’ve learned a lot of lessons in the woods that I never learned in church. And I think I’m not alone in that.
- Has there been a particular hunting experience that has profoundly impacted your spiritual life? Can you share the story?
The first time I ever went hunting, I was about 29 years old. I was a young man, a youth pastor, and in a marriage that was already growing toxic. A guy in the church invited me to duck hunt with him on Lake of the Woods. I didn’t really know what I was getting into. But by the time we arrived at our duck hunting spot, I was deeper into the wilderness than ever been. This was before cell phones, but even now no cell tower reaches the northwest corner of that lake. And what I found was that I loved it. I loved the peace and the danger. In the book, I go to great lengths to explore the meaning behind this hunt. Unfortunately, I did not follow my heart for another decade, and that hunt stood alone in my memory until my life really fell apart and I dove into hunting completely.
- What do you hope readers will take away from your book?
Anyone following the news likely knows that organized religion in America is in precipitous decline. In the generation represented by my own children, Generation Z, those who are unaffiliated with any organized religion approaches 50%. That is unheard of in American history. But just because people have left religion does not mean they have left behind them any sense of the spiritual, meaning, or transcendence. People still want that, and poll after poll reports that people find their spirituality in nature. I hope that people who, like me, pursue meaning (and even God) in wild places, find in my book some helpful guidance, some inspirational stories, and even some useful tools For making sense of their experiences.
- How do you reconcile the act of hunting with the teachings of compassion and mercy in religion?
As I explain in the book, the killing of animals and preparation of meat has been a part of sacred rituals for millennia. The predecessors in my profession —clergy, priests, shamans, rabbis, etc. — used to be the ones in charge of the ritual killing and butchering of animals. Most religions have commandments and rules about how to ethically and cleanly slaughter and butcher animals. I really feel like I’m just continuing on in this tradition, even though it’s been lost by most of the people who are clergy now.
- What is your favorite passage from “The God of Wild Places” and why?
That’s like asking me to choose my favorite child! Here’s a passage about death that I thinks also touches on your last question about compassion and mercy:
We’ve sequestered death, pushed it off to arm’s length. We leave it to the ambulance drivers and doctors and nurses and morticians. Hunting has changed that for me in a way that religion never did. Deciding with my brothers and mother to remove life support and let my father die was not like ringing the neck of a duck or firing a bullet through the lungs of a whitetail deer. But it wasn’t totally unlike it, either.
Because as well as reflecting on the inevitability of my own death, I’ve made the conscious choice to cause death. Anyone who eats meat causes death, but it’s usually outsourced to people who work at kill plants. I’ve chosen to actively participate in the death of my fellow creatures, to end their lives and to take their flesh into my body as food.
They were going to die anyway. Not a single pheasant, duck, goose, grouse, or deer that I’ve shot was immortal. Had I not killed them, each would have died, most of them violently — very few prey animals die of old age. And predators like me are also destined to die. Hunting is my rehearsal for my own death, my obedience to the inscription over the door at St. Paul’s Monastery on Mt. Athos: “If you die before you die, you won’t die when you die.” My ancestors who hunted to survive and were familiar with death, and I can’t help but think that they feared their own death less as a result. I want to fear my own death less, so I hunt.
Photos (c) Courtney Perry Photography, all rights reserved