The Doves Didn't Go Anywhere

What Losing Touch with Creation Has Cost Us

Note: Today I’m privileged to publish this guest essay by my friend Shane Morris.

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Last year I started seeing TikToks and Reels highlighting how many people find the call of mourning doves nostalgic. One of the more popular videos refers to it as “the bird that made billions of childhoods.” In a comment that received thousands of “likes,” one user sighed: “It was worlds ago…when the sky was bluer, time was slower, a world where we were living not just existing.” You can scroll through hundreds of similar comments (most apparently from millennial or gen-z users) lamenting the loss of mourning dove calls, with some even confessing that the sound makes them want to cry. 

But mourning doves haven’t gone anywhere. They are with us and well. Two such doves frequent our suburban back yard (my kids have named them “Bonnie and Glide”). The species inhabits virtually all of North America. Nostalgia junkies who have selected this bird as their soundtrack for an irrecoverable past need only venture outside with attentive ears to hear the song of their childhood again. What’s stopping them?

Probably the same thing that’s stopping millions from seeing, hearing, and experiencing aspects of the natural world that nearly all humans, for all of time, took for granted. The presence and variety of birds; the different types of trees and plants; the names and significance of water bodies, moon cycles, and solar courses; the seasons, even the very hue of the sky, have all become, to the average person, obscure, distant, and theoretical. 

This is not the consequence of some economic downturn (none of these costs a penny to enjoy), environmental disaster (they’re all still here), or government conspiracy (birds are real, I checked). Rather, it is the result of a cultural withdrawal from objective, God-ordered reality into a dizzying funhouse of digital artificiality that has often left us blind to wonder, deaf to revelation, and dangerously ambivalent to the givenness of our world. 

Cultivated Blindness

The characteristic posture of the smart phone era is a downward gaze, shoulders hunched, chest concave, arms squirreled up to present a six-inch screen to transfixed eyeballs. Many people hold this posture while walking, their bodies in a kind of peripheral autopilot while their minds surf wireless ephemera far away. The characteristic posture of a nature photographer—especially one fascinated by birds—is an upward gaze, eyes scanning the sky and trees for familiar shapes, colors, and flight patterns. 

Throughout the year at a lakeside reserve near my home in Florida, I take pictures of bald eagles, sandhill cranes, pileated woodpeckers, great horned owls, a circus troupe of herons and egrets, and a Broadway cast of songbirds (my kids’ favorite is the painted bunting).

Pileated woodpecker (photo by author)

When I share these images on social media, people often post comments along the lines of, “Where is this? I never see these,” or “Your pictures make me feel blind,” or “You live in a different world!” Maybe I do. Florida is a great place, and I have my favorite hangouts. But allowing for local variability, none of these species is especially rare. All are found throughout much of the continental United States, and a visit to the nearest state park or even streamside would likely reward you with a sighting. 

This cultivated blindness to what’s all around us often interacts with photography in telling ways. There is the “Instagram vs. reality” trend, where users post TikTok videos or Reels comparing social media portrayals of a natural destination with a “candid” video of the same place, usually looking drab, dirty, or crowded. The point is supposed to be that the dreamy tourist destination is unrealistic and airbrushed. 

But anyone who has spent any time behind a camera knows that most of the difference comes down to lighting, composition, getting there at the right time, and checking the weather beforehand. So accustomed have we become to photographers doing all this staging for us that we show up and expect the world to spontaneously produce a kind of motion picture. We have lost the ability to see through our own eyes, so we rely on someone’s lens. 

The Genesis of Worship

An ability to see creation around us and not just “out there” is crucial because it is the genesis of worship. 

It draws us out of our own mental worlds, where human subjectivity reigns, and back into concrete realities alive with purpose we did not decree. Notice how obedient the trees are as they fulfill their natures, how faithfully a caterpillar executes an ancient transformation it did not plan. See with what leisure an alligator governs its realm, indifferent to how over-excited human imaginations perceive it. Realize that whole dramas are unfolding under a leaf, oblivious to your existence, your civilization, and your delusion of being the universe’s main character. 

Encountering a world that doesn’t take notice of us as it carries out God’s orders is essential. It’s a kind of recalibration. It’s also, given creation’s scale and artistry, the birthplace of wonder. 

C.S. Lewis’s wonder was famously first stirred by a miniature garden in a biscuit tin.¹ For me, the inconsolable longing for something beyond nature first struck in nature, during a close examination of a Gulf fritillary’s wings. This common butterfly sports slashes of reflective silver on its ventral side, two shaped like the eyes of a snake, against an inferno of sunset reds and oranges.

Gulf fritillary (photo by author)

When I first saw it, I was overcome. Here was beauty, wildness, warmth, southernness—distilled into a gossamer masterpiece whose colors declared, as Augustine wrote of all creatures, “We are not your God, seek higher than we…He made us!”² 

Even today, to see those wings is to experience again that flash of otherworldly wonder that fades to fond resignation. Of course, a butterfly’s wings are not what my soul most desires. But the desire kindled by them for a split second is better than any satisfaction. 

Lewis argued that such wonder, or joy, or whatever you prefer to call it is the gateway to faith. It’s also the beginning of knowledge. In Christian Philosophy as a Way of Life, Ross Inman writes that

When we experience wonder, our current understanding of the world is shown to be too small or simply inadequate to truly depict what it is that we are experiencing. When this occurs, we are summoned to enlarge the narrow confines of our soul to make room for the new experience and perhaps even to correct the mistaken way that we once viewed the world.³

Digital blindness, to the degree that it pushes our gaze downward and then inward, deprives people of this. The sight of clouds, the feel of water, and the sound of wind in trees cost nothing and are available everywhere. They’re also creation’s prescription for human flourishing. Time in nature restores attention, relieves mental fatigue, and even lowers blood pressure. Going without it for weeks, months, or years on end is analogous to going without Vitamin C. Wonder is an essential nutrient of the mind. 

Our estrangement from the natural world is a theological crisis. How, for instance, will the Psalmist’s reference to a deer running to water (Psalm 42) evoke meaning for those who’ve never seen a deer do that? How will the heavens declare the glory of God (Psalm 19:1) to people who’ve never seen the stars through light pollution? How will someone who has never waded through wildflowers “consider the lilies of the field” (Matt. 6:28)? How many ants get visited and considered by those who need wisdom (Prov. 6:6)?

The problem of the night sky is particularly vexing. This was a regular experience common to all who could see, for all of human history, until just decades ago. The Navajo depicted it on the ceilings of caves. Christians frequently replicated it in the vaults of cathedrals. Today, the full vista of the universe—a sky sprayed with numberless thousands of stars, dotted with planets that blaze like ships on a dark sea, and bisected by the ghostly glow of the Milky Way—is a sight many people die without seeing. Indeed, electric light pollution has rendered it available only to those who already live in rural areas or who have the knowledge and means to drive to designated “dark sky” zones.

All of these cultural transformations add up to an ignorance, and possibly numbness, to the God-revealing size and scope of our universe. As John Piper once observed, “The reason the universe is vastly disproportionate to man's size is that it is telling the glory of God, not the glory of man.” A world that is shrunk to the size of a smartphone is not a world that humbles us into belief.  We have lost much in losing the night sky. It is likely a bigger factor than we can imagine in making unbelief plausible to the average man. 

Ambassadors of Wonder 

The paradox of this blindness to creation is how easy it is to reverse in theory, yet how hard it is to reverse in practice. Even solid advice becomes little more than a meme when it goes through the algorithm: e.g., “Touch grass,” the jibe commonly used on Twitter/X to suggest that someone is overly online and needs to spend more time in the real world. 

This is because, as Jonathan Haidt points out in The Anxious Generation, digital addiction is not just an individual problem, but an entrenched social habit that poses a collective action problem. A critical mass of people must reassert their humanity and reawaken to nature in order for the full benefits of that reawakening to accrue.

Haidt suggests compulsory changes for children and students, removing smart phones and tablets from their hands during school and unstructured play, and changing laws to curb underage use of certain sites and apps. The best hope for adults seems to be giving them a kind of revelatory moment, a challenge to look around and experience reality again that, if successful, can turn them into ambassadors for wonder. Haidt writes of assigning his college students to take “awe walks” during which they wind up noticing natural beauty in a way they haven’t in years.⁴

My own suggestions reflect the strategies I’ve used with my four children. I encourage and lead them in unmediated observation of nature, noticing the living things around them and the many purposes they pursue. I shepherd my kids’ reactions to God’s creatures, not allowing an “Ew, gross!” to sum up the six-legged Samurai that is an eastern lubber, or a bird song to pass beneath an oak canopy without someone shouting the correct name of the singer. 

photo by author

Names of creatures really are essential. A relish in learning them and a dissatisfaction with your own ignorance is the most deeply human response to the natural world. As Hadden Turner argues, it’s an Edenic calling that was never revoked, “an act of love” which “bestows value, dignity, and identity on what is named.” A good field guide can become a passport to awe in things that once would not have rated a second glance. It can transform the bokeh of “critters and weeds” at the edge of experience into a fellowship of friends to greet and appreciate, and give you eyes to see new friends in different regions.  

We can be alert to those spontaneous moments of wonder—to watch our children’s eyes for that familiar flash of longing for something beyond the world. I’ve often caught it when I least expected it; despite meager investment or planning on my part, God’s glory simply ambushed us. 

Maybe that’s how it is supposed to happen. Whether in the starry host or a birdsong that sparks childhood memories, perhaps the speech older than language is always meant to catch us off guard. Maybe joy is always a surprise, like the surprise that mourning doves didn’t go anywhere. They’re still cooing in the trees.

Shane Morris is a senior writer at the Colson Center, and host of the Upstream podcast. His work has appeared at WORLD, The Gospel Coalition, The Federalist, and The Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood. He and his wife, Gabriela, live with their four children in Lakeland, Florida.

1. C.S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life (Harcourt Brace & Company, 1955), 5.

2.  St. Augustine, Confessions, translated by Henry Chadwick (Oxford University Press, 2008), 184.

3. Ross Inman, Christian Philosophy as a Way of Life: An Invitation to Wonder (Baker Academic, 2023), 7.

4. Jonathan Haidt, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness (Penguin, 2024), 212-213.