Last evening I plopped into our old recliner and picked up another of my used-book finds: The Wilderness World of John Muir, a collection of accounts from Muir’s journals and books.  I was soon captivated.  Here’s an account I enjoyed of one of John’s experiences in Tennessee:

Once I was very hungry and lonely in Tennessee.  I had been walking most of the day in the Cumberland Mountains without coming to a single house, but in crossing a dark-shaded stream whose border trees closed over it like a leafy sky, I found the frail Dicksonia [a southern hemisphere tree-fern very rare at that latitude] that I had looked for so long, and the first magnolia, too, that I had ever seen.  I sat down and reveled in the glory of my discoveries.  A mysterious breathing of wind moved in the trees, and the stream sang cheerily at every ripple.  There is no place so impressively solitary as a dense forest with a stream passing over a rocky bed at a moderate inclination.

Feelings of isolation soon caught me again among these hushed sounds, but one of the Lord’s smallest birds came out to me from some bushes at the side of a moss-clad rock.  It had a wonderfully expressive eye, and in one moment that cheerful, confiding bird preached me the most effectual sermon on heavenly trust that I had ever heard through the measured hours of the Sabbath, and I went on not half so heart-sick, nor half so weary.

Although I have read many snippets of John Muir’s writings, I am feeling compelled to dig much deeper into this man’s thoughts to see what he might teach about the tension that evangelicals have in seeking to reconcile the truths of God’s general revelation (His works) and His special revelation (His Word).  Muir is ideal for such a study, since his father was an outspoken, but cruel, Christian fundamentalist who believed that the natural world and its creatures were gifts to mankind to use as we wish and that to study the natural world instead of the Bible was sinful.

This thinking was common among many of the Christian pioneers of the upper Midwest.  For instance, after a great slaughter of passenger pigeons near the Muir farm in Wisconsin—for pigeon pies—one of the children said, “It’s awful like a sin to kill them.”  Muir goes on: “To this some smug, practical old sinner would remark, ‘Aye, it’s a peety, as ye say, to kill th’ bonnie things, but they were made to be killed, and sent for us to eat as the quails were sent to God’s chosen people when they were starving in the desert.’” [Ironically, the world's last passenger pigeon and John Muir died within four months of each other in the fall of 1914.]

John Muir went on to question that purely utilitarian view of God’s creation in many ways over the following decades, much to the displeasure of his father, Daniel, who to his dying day sought to turn John from celebrating the wonder of God’s creation to preaching the Gospel to the lost—as though one had to be sacrificed for the other.

So I’m making a New Year’s resolution early: to, in part, use the year 2009 to learn more from the life of John Muir and his struggle with the twisted form of Christianity demonstrated by his father. Along the way, I will likely share a bit with the friends of WOC.

See you outdoors!

Dean