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Morning Devotion for the Season
April 22, 2024
Invitatory
Let the earth glorify the Lord, praise him and highly exalt him forever. Glorify the Lord, O mountains and hills, and all that grows upon the earth, praise him and highly exalt him forever.
Glory to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit: as it was in the beginning, is now, and will be forever. Amen.
Excerpts from today’s witness John Muir, naturalist and writer:
God who is Light has led me tenderly from light to light to the shoreless ocean of rayless beamless Spirit Light that bathes these holy mountains.
- John Muir - Letter to Mrs. Kate N. Daggett, December 30, 1872, in Life and Letters of John Muir, Chapter 10.
Few are altogether deaf to the preaching of pine trees. Their sermons on the mountains go to our hearts; and if people in general could be got into the woods, even for once, to hear the trees speak for themselves, all difficulties in the way of forest preservation would vanish.
- John Muir,
- "The National Parks and Forest Reservations"
All the wild world is beautiful, and it matters but little where we go, to highlands or lowlands, woods or plains, on the sea or land or down among the crystals of waves or high in a balloon in the sky; through all the climates, hot or cold, storms and calms, everywhere and always we are in God's eternal beauty and love. So universally true is this, the spot where we chance to be always seems the best.
- John of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir, (1938) page 299.
Meditation-Rebecca Northington
I have heard of John Muir, have been to Muir woods in California, have bought a t-shirt with sketches of said woods from Old Navy. But I did not know that Muir was recognized by the Episcopal Church in our lectionary as a person of note, amongst Saints and other significant contributors to our tradition.
“Muir's biographer, Steven Holmes, states that Muir has become "one of the patron saints of twentieth-century American environmental activity," both political and recreational. "Muir has profoundly shaped the very categories through which Americans understand and envision their relationships with the natural world," writes Holmes. Muir was noted for being an ecological thinker, political spokesman, and religious prophet, whose writings became a personal guide into nature for countless individuals, making his name "almost ubiquitous" in the modern environmental consciousness.”
When you read the excerpts above, or the many others you can find online, or better yet-when you read some of Muir’s work in full, you come to understand that he was so much more than a naturalist who helped dedicate a vast amount of green space in the West. He was also a theologian with a deep and lasting understanding of scripture and God’s presence in our lives-especially as found in nature.
Muir's Family emigrated to the US from Scotland to seek a more strident religious community. It is said that “By age 11, young Muir had learned to recite "by heart and by sore flesh" all of the New Testament and most of the Old Testament.” But as he became a young man he found God more personally in the woods than on the page, and urged others to explore nature with that same sort of divinity and sacred attention to all of God’s creation.
Every year we spend a handful of RYG meetings out in nature; at the waterfalls on Dove Lake road, on the ridge above Richie Ashburn park at dusk, in the gardens at Chanticleer on a cool spring afternoon, or in Saunders woods. To me it can be a wonderful partner to the spirituality found inside a beautiful church like Redeemer. The outdoors can take your breath away with all of God’s beauty and majesty, as though it is nature’s liturgy of thanksgiving.
Places like the Sierra Mountains and the Grand Canyon are dramatic landscapes and absolutely worth the trek to see them; but we must never under-appreciate God’s natural beauty all around us. As we come out of the little death of winter, and find ourselves alive again in spring, let us marvel in the power of God’s creation, in the weeping cherry trees, the natural perfume of the lilac or the orange blossom, the twittering nestling, and the growing leaves day after day. Muir brought attention to the wonder of this creation, and as we remember him today I hope you take a moment to savor all that God provides.
PRAYER
Blessed Creator of the earth and all that inhabits it: We offer thanks for thy prophets John Muir and Hudson Stuck, who rejoiced in your beauty made known in the natural world; and we pray that, inspired by their love of thy creation, we may be wise and faithful stewards of the world thou hast created, that generations to come may also lie down to rest among the pines and rise refreshed for their work; in the Name of the one through whom all things art made new, Jesus Christ our Savior, who with thee and the Holy Spirit livest and reignest, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
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