If you’re like me, you are well aware of the literary giants of the past, but seldom actually read their works.  And we are the poorer for it.  John Muir is one I always wanted to get around to reading, and finally have—to my enrichment.

In earlier posts I mentioned how, by his extremely harsh discipline and appalling reflection of the Christ he preached, Muir’s father, Daniel, had turned his son away from the church.  One of John Muir’s biographers, Edward Hoagland, remarked, “This amok Presbyterianism helped to estrange Muir from Christianity but not from religion, and paradoxically made him gentler toward everyone but himself.”  Hoagland, himself an accomplished nature writer, also had a poor attitude toward the Christianity he knew.  Both he and Muir decried “the emphasis Christianity placed on the afterlife at the expense of what seemed a proper reverence for life on earth.”

Hoagland in his introduction to Muir’s book The Mountains of California pointed out that well before Muir, Christianity had been seen even by some of its own adherents as having a totally inadequate understanding of our stewardship responsibilities regarding the creation of the God we claim to love and worship.  He quoted an earlier American naturalist: George Perkins Marsh.  In his book Man and Nature, Marsh “counterposed to the biblical theory that Nature was a wilderness mankind should ‘subdue and rule,’ the idea that ‘Man has too long forgotten that the earth was given to him for usufruct alone, not for consumption, still less for profligate waste. . . .  We are, even now, breaking up the floor and wainscoting and doors and window frames of our dwelling. . . .  The earth is fast becoming an unfit home for its noblest inhabitant.’”

Ever heard the word “usufruct”?  I had not until I began reading Wendell Berry.  What a great word it is.  It means “the right to use and enjoy the profits and advantages of something belonging to another as long as the property is not damaged.”  It’s what Thoreau did when he borrowed a neighbor’s ax and returned it to the man sharpened to a finer edge than when he received it.  And it is an apt description, I believe, of what we should be practicing regarding the natural world given over to us by our Creator to care for and use in a non-destructive manner—indeed, used in such a way that its value is enhanced rather than diminished.

But back to John Muir the bard:  Regardless of the mess his father made of the faith, Muir kept his belief in a loving God, and throughout his life he continued to utilize biblical terminology in his nature writings.  In The Mountains of California, the great naturalist spoke of the glaciation that created his beloved Yosemite Valley as the result of untold billions of snowflakes he called “flowers of the sky.”  Here is one of his many poetic descriptions about that awesome natural wonder:

Contemplating the works of these flowers of the sky, one may easily fancy them endowed with life: messengers sent down to work in the mountain mines on errands of divine love.  Silently flying through the darkened air, swirling, glinting, to their appointed places, then seem to have taken counsel together, saying, “Come, we are feeble: let us help one another.  We are many, and together we may be strong.  Marching in close, deep ranks, let us roll away the stones from these mountain sepulchers, and set the landscapes free.  Let us uncover these clustering domes.  Here let us carve a lake basin; there a Yosemite Valley; here a channel for a river with fluted steps and brows for the plunge of songful cataracts.  Yonder let us spread broad sheets of soil, that man and beast may be fed; and here pile trains of boulders for pines and giant sequoias.  Here make ground for a meadow; there for a garden and grove, making it smooth and fine for small daisies and violets and beds of heathy bryanthus, spicing it well with crystals, garnet feldspar, and zircon.”  Thus and so on it has oftentimes seemed to me sang and planned and labored the hearty snow-flower crusaders; and nothing that I can write can possibly exaggerate the grandeur and beauty of their work.

Sitting here growing weary of a long and hard winter that still has an aggregation of “snow flowers” a foot deep outside my door, I have to confess that Muir has stirred up a great longing in my soul for another visit to that awe-inspiring “theater of God’s glory” (using the words of John Calvin, a far better balanced “Presbyterian” than Daniel Muir.)

See you outdoors!

Dean