Claiming Independence from the Indoor-Outdoor Divide, and Getting Some Religion too

It used to be that you could put things in different compartments and they would stay there, divided from one another in their own individual boxes. Nowadays, however— and this isn’t just in my house, either—certain things are getting mixed together in new ways. At first it can be a bit disorienting, like a kind of shift in the earth; but then it seems right and good. You look at your boxes again and wonder what else you can do with them…maybe one for potatoes, one for pictures of the kids; surely those will go on being separate.

Take RELIGION and THE OUTDOORS, for instance. In my life, going way back to childhood, these two things represented different places, different experiences. It just so happened I was born into a family that exposed me way more to the latter than to the former. If there were points of connection, they weren’t highlighted for me. I spent plenty of time up in trees and out in fields, and no time at all in churches.

Last week, however, I went with our son out to Canterbury (appropriate name) to the first part of a three-day event called “Pilgrimage for Earth: From Loss to Hope.” My friend and college classmate, Steve Blackmer, who spent a few decades in forestry and then became ordained an Episcopal priest, was one of the driving forces behind this weekend. It came as a kind of culmination of the work he and others have been doing for some time on launching a place called “Church of the Woods” near his home. Right now there is no church exactly, just a tent. You can learn more about it here.

Since I’ve been reading a biography of John Muir recently, I’m seeing some parallels to the idea of finding holiness right in Nature. Driven by a terribly strict father who practiced an evangelical Christianity in Scotland and then brought his family to America, Muir found relief in green fields and woods at an early age. Once he made it out to California and Yosemite, he became completely enraptured. In this book I’m reading, A Passion for Nature: The Life of John Muir by Donald Worster, there are many passages about how Muir tried to forge a kind of new religion through his love of all things wild. In this, he also resembled someone who had rambled around the bucolic Lake District in England: William Wordsworth:

Both had left behind a society that seemed severely flawed in morality and aesthetics. Both discovered in the high country a renewal of faith, optimism and joy. Conventional faith had ceased to move them, but in the presence of a wilder nature they felt spiritually renewed, recovering a piety that cold, bookish church doctrines had almost succeeded in stifling.  (p. 160)

Wordsworth walked at a good clip but pretty staidly on a whole lot of paths with his sister and then of course Coleridge, seeing sheep everywhere; Muir, on the other hand, did plenty of risky climbing and scurrying and clinging to cliffs all my himself, catching sight of grizzlies and other grand and also elusive creatures. These are small differences, really, considering how much they had in common when it came to seeing holiness in the beauty all around them.

Thinking about these two “Got Nature?” guys, as well as about what my friend Steve is doing out in Canterbury, I drift back in my mind to when I was about 10 years old. We had a lot of beautiful pine trees, planted by my grandfather, in the field in front of our house; I was drawn to them in those days, discovering the wonders of climbing way up on branches that were just the right distance apart. When I went high enough, I could see a patch of blue, which was Long Island Sound. Often I brought some kind of a notebook with me–not sure how I managed that—and divulged my innermost feelings to it. My mother, I’m glad to say, as she often did herself, wasn’t the hovering kind; she might have been a little concerned about my safety if she’d known just how close to the sky I got. It was all just fine. Right now, I can feel the soft breezes, the pine pitch on my fingers, the luscious privacy of being there.

This isn’t me in the picture, but this girl looks just as happy as I felt.

I can’t say for sure that I was having a “religious experience” amongst the pine branches. The fact is, even now that I’ve been a clergy spouse for all these years, I can’t say for sure that I really know what a religious experience is. But I’m pretty sure I can tell when I’m in the midst of something really full, bursting at the seams even. To borrow from Wordsworth, it’s a kind of heart-leaping-up moment or string of moments that I know best. Sometimes these come when I’m in harmony with other people, and sometimes when I’m alone, way up in a tree or –-let’s call this the mid-life version — far out on a trail with my dog, wondering what it might be like to just stay there for a while and not keep any appointments. In either case, it feels like there’s a kind of magic going on.

When I was a new bride, just learning about the Episcopalian experience, church struck me as almost completely an indoor activity. No surprise there, really. Sadly, in a way, the whole climate change crisis has made all of us see any separation between inside life and outside life as artificial; what we do everywhere will make the difference between life and death everywhere, going forward. A new and important report called “Risky Business: The Economic Risks of Climate Change in the U.S.” (read it here) came out just about the same time that my friend Steve gathered a small group of people, in a spirit of calm but also with some urgency, to the new outdoor church here. It’s Independence Day throughout the land today– high time to break down the walls and join hands…for the earth to stand a chance.