A life in vain?

Wide eyed and ultra enthusiastic, John Muir, American naturalist and writer, exalted after visiting a sequoia grove in autumn, writing to a friend and counselor:

"The King tree & me have sworn eternal love - sworn it without swearing & I’ve taken the sacrament with Douglass Squirrels drank Sequoia wine, Sequoia blood, & with its rosy purple drips I am writing this woody gospel letter. I never before knew the virtues of Sequoia juice. Seen the sunbeams in it, its color is the most royal of all royal purples (.) No wonder the Indians instinctively drink it for they know not what, I wish I was so drunk & sequoical that I could preach the green brown woods to all the juiceless world, descending from this divine wilderness like John Baptist eating Douglass squirrels & wild honey or wild anything, crying, Repent for the Kingdom of Sequoia is at hand."

Over the top yes, but Muir literally climbed over the tops of America’s highest mountains. To this same, dear friend, Muir, who read "the great book of Nature," exclaimed: "I am hopelessly and forever a mountaineer." In 1861 at the age of 22, he agreed with a college Professor friend that "nature is the name for an effect whose cause is God." He also sympathized with Charles Darwin who in the 1830's wrote that the Amazon rainforests in South America are "temples filled with varied productions of the God of nature."

John Muir continues in the tradition of believers in the divine. The heretic priest Giordano Bruno who was burned at the stake in 1600, always saw God as "an all-pervading world-soul." The author G.K. Chesterton who died in 1936, said: "I had always believed that the world involved magic: now I thought that perhaps it involved a magician." Following in Chesterton’s footsteps, the author of "The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, C.S. Lewis, who incidentally died on November 22, 1963, the same died President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, penned into the jaws of Aslan, his Christ-figure, words of a "deeper magic," an obvious allusion to divinity. A current film critic, pretentious in his film reviews, likes to use phrases like "authentic beauty and commanding consequence." Too bad this critic rarely fathoms that such words apply to a divine presence. That God and nature interchange and intersect to the benefit of man with both inexplicable beauty (and sadness) and eternally spiritual consequences.

Unfortunately, the Sierra Club that Muir created to preserve the wild and natural, has been hijacked and perverted by wide eyed and ultra liberal environmentalists who have abandoned the transcendental and spiritual quality of Muir’s thoughts and actions and forsworn the divine inspiration that drove his passion for nature. Today, environmentalism itself is a religion, a substitute for God. How sad that the mountain man who died in 1914 seems to have lived in vain.