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Some clouds. Low 52F. Winds light and variable.

On this day, April 21, in 1838 was born one of those rare men who, though lacking any aspiration for self-acknowledgment, simply by their lifestyles and noble values, positively impacted the world for untold generations.

His name was John Muir, and while born in Scotland, he found a love for America that was more akin to enchantment. He never completed his university degree yet succeeded as a naturalist, botanist, environmental philosopher, zoologist and glaciologist. His contributions to us today come in the form of Yosemite National Valley and Sequoia National Parks, as well as the Sierra Club.

Muir is more often remembered for some of his simple quotations concerning hiking, such as, “Of all the paths you take in life, make sure that a few of these are dirt,” and, “Into the forest I go to lose my mind and find my soul.”

But few of his biographers and certainly none of his detractors have given much time to researching and writing of his spirituality.

Born into a Scottish Presbyterian Church family, in America he became part of the congregational movement encouraging greater lay participation and joined the Disciples of Christ which was something of an offshoot of the Presbyterians (And happens to be my denomination.).

His longterm hiking was legendary, one of which was 1,000 miles, but he was also known to take little with him. Said he, “Only by going alone in silence, without baggage, can one truly get to the heart of the wilderness.”

In a sense Muir did take a Bible, but not one bound and printed — he carried it in his head having memorized the entire New Testament and three-fourths of the Old.

In one particular way Muir’s religious belief was a reflection of that of Christ.

Most of us can remember Jesus retreating into the wilderness after His baptism and other times stealing away from the crowds into the fields in order to meditate and pray. Quite similarly Muir is quoted as having observed, “Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play and pray in, where nature may heal and give strength to body and soul.”

There was fitting similarity in their personalities that from time-to-time just felt overburdened by the populous, but Muir perhaps expressed it better than I can when he said, “I bade adieu to mechanical inventions, determined to devote the rest of my life to the study of the inventions of God.”

Even as Jesus felt a mission to evangelize the world with the good news of God’s love, the great naturalist Muir spoke, “I care to live to entice people to look to nature’s loveliness. Heaven knows that John the Baptist was not more eager to get all his fellow sinners into the Jordan than I to baptize all of mine in the beauty of God’s mountains.”

Reading the Gospels’ accounts of Jesus’ teachings about God, there can be no doubt but that Christ saw the Lord’s handiwork not only as evidence of Him as the Master of Creation, but also His ever loving presence.

“Behold the lily how they grow they neither toil nor spin but even Solomon in all his glory was never arrayed like of them.” John Muir walking among the great Sequoias as well as the minute flowers beneath the California giants preached to his congregation, “Every natural object is a conductor of divinity and only by coming into contact with them… may we be filled with the Holy Spirit.”

Johnny A. Phillips is a retired minister residing in Leland and may be contacted at phillips.sue@gmail.com.

Thadd White can be reached via email at twhite@apgenc.com.

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