It’s been a beautiful day this Sunday—thanks to fossil fuels.  We’re actually snowbound, the snowfall having transitioned from a standard weather system last night to one of Michigan’s unique “lake effect” events today.  So the snow amount has doubled since the 8 inches we received on Friday.  But the wind is now the big issue.  With sustained winds at 25 mph and temperature at about 9 degrees, the windchill is around 15 below.  Wisely, most churches canceled their services for the day.

My outdoor experience today, other than shoveling the walk and tending the bird feeders, has been vicarious: spending a few hours with John Muir in Yosemite.  So like our furnace, my old recliner has gotten a good workout.  I’ve had a workout as well—cognitive and affective: a Christian who loves God’s creation cannot spend much time with Muir and not be challenged intellectually and touched emotionally.

When Muir had become nationally known through his published journals, sometimes his father, Daniel, would hear about one of his son’s harrowing mountain experiences in the local paper before he received a letter from him.  Daniel would have been able to accept risks to his son’s life and health if he had been a missionary, but not a naturalist. On one such occasion, he wrote a stern letter back to his son:

I wished I had not seen [the newspaper report]. . . . Had I seen it to be God’s work you were doing, I would have felt the other way, but I knew it was not God’s work, although you seem to think you are doing God’s service.  If it had not been for God’s boundless mercy, you would have been cut off in your folly.   All that you are attempting to show the Holy Spirit of God gives the believer to see at a glance of the eye, for according to the tract I send you, they can see God’s love, power, and glory in everything, and it has the effect of turning away their sight and eyes from the things that are seen and temporal to the things that are not seen and eternal, according to God’s holy word. . . . You cannot warm the heart of the saint of God with your cold icy-topped mountains.  O, my dear son, come away from them to the Spirit of God and His holy word, and He will show our lovely Jesus unto you, who is by His finished work presented to you, without money and price. . . . And the best and soonest way of getting quit of your writing and publishing your book is to burn it, and then it will do no more harm either to you or to others. [Emphasis as it was in the original letter.]

Teddy Roosevelt and Muir

What a sad letter for us to read from our vantage point, knowing that Daniel Muir had beaten his son mercilessly,—often for no good reason—had forced him with a whip to memorize Scripture, had compelled John and his brother to work from dawn until dusk to maintain the farm while he sat in the house reading Scripture and writing tracts, and showed them a Jesus who was anything but “lovely.”  That John Muir retained his faith in a loving Creator is a wonder.

How sad too that Daniel Muir somehow missed the meaning of God’s great discourse with Job, how after hearing Job and his miserable “comforters,” like the elder Muir, pompously claim to know how God works His ways with man and nature, the Creator took Job on a vicarious tour of the wonders of His creation in order to compel the patriarch to understand that the natural world is what John Calvin, Daniel’s mentor theologian, called “the theater of God’s glory,” and that it has meaning and purpose that transcend both our understanding and our self-centered utilitarianism.

Knowing of John Muir’s bitter experience with the “church” of Daniel Muir, we can at least have a better grasp on John’s avoidance of formal Christianity.  From Yosemite, John wrote this in a letter to his more sympathetic brother, David:

I have not been at church a single time since leaving home.  Yet this glorious valley might well be called a church, for every lover of the great Creator who comes within the broad overwhelming influence of the place fails not to worship as they never did before.

May we not fail to learn something important to our faith from the very different “churches” of Daniel and John Muir.

See you outdoors!

Dean