If you click on the “Ambling” page on the top menu bar, you will find some of Dean’s musings on day-to-day experiences with the wonder of God’s creation.

Today’s comments relate to a close encounter with a bald eagle.

This Sunday, March7, and next Sunday, March 14, on the ION cableTV network at 7:30am.  Click here  to discover where you can watch this newly released celebration of the grandeur and wonder of wilderness.

---

Celebrating the Wonder of Wilderness

The grandeur of trees, water, mountains, and their inhabitants come together in an amazing display on this Day of Discovery 2-part series.  Enjoy a guided tour of some of the most dramatic and inspiring locations in the Alaskan wilderness and other majestic regions throughout the United States.

Discover the wonder of the wilderness as you listen to the stories and adventures of those who have been changed by the splendor and beauty of God’s creation.  Take the journey and explore what the wilderness reveals about its creator and what it reveals about ourselves.

Each program will be viewable on the DOD website after its first airing.

A new feature has been added to the Wonder of Creation site: It is found on the top menu bar under the term “Ambling.” 

Here WOC host, Dean Ohlman, writes an occasional journal on his outdoor adventures—bringing back one of the earlier features of the Website.  Dean also includes his photos on this page.

Take a look at Dean’s musings today: a report on his current sojourn in Northern Ontario where he is trailing
 along with a Native Odawa fur trapper.

And of Joseph he said: ‘Blessed of the LORD is his land, With the precious things of heaven, with the dew, And the deep lying beneath, With the precious fruits of the sun, With the precious produce of the months, With the best things of the ancient mountains, With the precious things of the everlasting hills, With the precious things of the earth and its fullness, And the favor of Him who dwelt in the [burning] bush (Deut. 33:13-16, NKJV).

One of my favorite pastimes is woodworking.  My love for working with wood came essentially from my high school shop class when our first project was to make a small cedar jewelry box for our mothers.  The smell of aromatic cedar had always captivated me—in part because that was the smell that arose whenever my mom lifted the lid on her hope chest in my folks’ bedroom.  It was where her precious things were stored.  Her taking us to that old cedar chest for something was always an adventure—an adventure similar to going to the attic.  Probably what made these quests so enjoyable was that they were almost always accompanied by  stories of my mom and dad’s past.

I believe that chest came from Stickley Brother’s Furniture in Grand Rapids, the first place that my mother had worked as a young woman.  Our dining room suite came from Stickley Brothers as well. And Mother’s first purchase there, a Windsor chair that she got for $7, remains in our home—still solid as a rock after some 85 years of use.  That chair remains while many other cheap pieces of furniture we accumulated over the years have gone to the landfill.  The famous old furniture factories of Grand Rapids, once called the “Furniture Capital of America,” knew the value of both good wood and good work.

Having those influences in my life, I was especially captivated by the words of Wendell Berry in reference to our use of the precious things of the earth that we often fail to properly value:

Wendell Berry

By denying spirit and truth to the non-human Creation, modern proponents of religion have legitimized a form of blasphemy without which the nature- and culture-destroying machinery of the industrial economy could not have been built—that is, they have legitimized bad work.

Good human work honors God’s work.  Good work uses no thing without respect, both for what it is in itself and for its origin. It uses neither tool nor material that it does not respect and that it does not love.  It honors nature as a great mystery and power, as an indispensable teacher, and as the inescapable judge of all work of human hands.  It does not dissociate life and work, or pleasure and work, or love and work, or usefulness and beauty.  To work without pleasure or affection, to make a product that is not both useful and beautiful, is to dishonor God, nature, the thing that is made, and whomever it is made for.  This is blasphemy: to make shoddy work of the work of God. But such blasphemy is not possible when the entire Creation is understood as holy and when the works of God are understood as embodying and thus revealing his Spirit.

In the Bible we find none of the industrialist’s contempt or hatred for nature.  We find, instead, a poetry of awe and reverence and profound cherishing, as in [the] verses from Moses’ valedictory blessing of the twelve tribes [above].

Wendell Berry. Christianity and the Survival of Creation. Pantheon Books, 1992-3.
[Cedar chest photo from Lynda True]
[Stickley Brothers photo source]

Great is the LORD and most worthy of praise; his greatness no one can fathom. One generation will commend your works to another; they will tell of your mighty acts. They will speak of the glorious splendor of your majesty, and I will meditate on your wonderful works. They will tell of the power of your awesome works, and I will proclaim your great deeds. They will celebrate your abundant goodness and joyfully sing of your righteousness.The LORD is gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and rich in love. The LORD is good to all; he has compassion on all he has made (Psalm 145:3-12)

In one of his books, John Muir mistakenly attributed the death of a simple-minded neighbor to the man’s brother who was rumored to have forced him into such hard labor that the physically overtaxed man died and fell forward onto a pile of firewood he was splitting.  Though no names were mentioned, the accused man’s son recognized that it was his father that the naturalist was describing as the abuser.  So the man, then in his seventies like Muir, informed Muir that the rumor was not true—yet still confessing that he, like Muir, had been regularly beaten by his father merely for not working hard enough or meeting his father’s nearly impossible requirements.  Muir felt so bad about the mistake that he had the publisher redo the book galleys.  In a letter to his former neighbor, however, John spoke of his feelings about abusive parenting which grew out of his experience as the oldest son of Daniel Muir:

When the rod is falling on the flesh of a child, and, what may oftentimes be worse, heartbreaking scolding falling on its tender little heart, it makes the whole family seem far from the Kingdom of Heaven. In all the world, I know of nothing more pathetic and deplorable than a broken-hearted child, sobbing itself to sleep after being unjustly punished by a truly pious and conscientious misguided parent. . . .

Your father, like my own, was, I devoutly believe, a sincere Christian, abounding in noble qualities, preaching the Gospel without money or price while working hard for a living, clearing land, blacksmithing, able for anything, and from youth to death never abating one jot his glorious foundational religious enthusiasm. I revere his memory with that of my father and the New England Puritan types of the best American pioneers whose unwavering faith in God’s eternal righteousness forms the basis of our country’s greatness.

Editor of The Life and Letters of John Muir, William Bade, wrote of this incident:

In accordance with a fairly common custom among God-fearing pioneers of earlier days, morning and evening family worship was regularly observed in the Muir household. But how easily morning prayers may become a devastating substitute for a day of real religion was apparently exemplified glaringly in both these households. Under such circumstances children often react sharply, not only against the external forms, but also against the substance of religion. The religious convictions of a shallower nature than John Muir’s would never have survived the bigotry and rigor of his father’s training.  [Emphasis mine].

In spite of the unloving, abusive nature of his father and the ugliness of Daniel Muir’s “Christianity,” John Muir’s writings exude expressions of God’s love and of the unfathomable beauty of God’s creation.  An example of this is Muir’s thoughts on finding a dead Yosemite bear:

Toiling in the treadmills of life we hide from the lessons of Nature.  We gaze morbidly through civilized fog upon our beautiful world clad with seamless beauty, and see ferocious beasts and wastes and deserts.  But savage deserts and beasts and storms are expressions of God’s power inseparably companioned by love.  Civilized man chokes his soul as the heathen Chinese their feet.  We depreciate bears. . . .   They are not companions of men but children of God, and His charity is broad enough for bears. . . .  God bless Yosemite bears! [Read Job 38-41]

To me this sounds a bit like the biblical “naturalist” David who wrote of the Creator, “You bring darkness, it becomes night, and all the beasts of the forest prowl.  The lions roar for their prey and seek their food from God.  The sun rises, and they steal away; they return and lie down in their dens.  Then man goes out to his work, to his labor until evening.  How many are your works, O Lord!  In wisdom you made them all; the earth is full of your creatures” (Psalm 104:20-24).

Daniel Muir’s “Christianity” suffered a great deal from mistaken understandings of biblical truth about the creation.  It seems, however, that even more than a hundred years later, many followers of Christ the Savior are still depreciating the natural world for which Christ the Creator was, in part, crowned with thorns to restore, liberate, reunify, and reconcile to the Father (Acts 3:21; Romans 8:21; Ephesians 1:10; Colossians 1:20).