Saint John Muir

John Muir -- St. Gregory of Nyassa Episcopal Church

I hadn't realized until two weeks ago how close environmental icon John Muir's birthday (April 21st) is to Earth Day (April 22nd). In what I figure is a happy coincidence, we are reminded that a century before the founding of Earth Day the Scottish born Muir was rambling about the wilderrness of Canada and the United States. He ecstatically immersed himself in the beauty of the natural world and eventually working to protect areas which are now part of Yosemite National Park in the States, as well as founding the Sierra Club. Early in the 20th century, In his mid-sixties, Muir took President Theodore Roosevelt camping for three days in Yosemite and the experience deepened the president's commitment to the national park system.



President Theodore Roosevelt and John Muir

Before this year's Earth Day I saw the heading Saint John Muir and it captured my attention. We often associate Saint Francis of Assisi with a love and respect for Creation and he is the patron saint of the environment in the Roman Catholic church. Muir was raised as a Protestant and had a rather conflicted relationship with religion because of the way he was indoctrinated into the Christian faith. His fundamentalist father required him to memorize scripture (he could recite all of the New Testament and much of the Old) and would beat him when he faltered. Yet Muir regularly acknowledged the Creator and in my estimation he was a Creation mystic. He used God-talk in his writing and made allusions to biblical passages:

In the Divine Calendar this is still the morning of Creation...The last days of the glacial winter are not yet past; we live in "creation's dawn.The morning stars still sing together, and the world, though made, is still being made and becoming more beautiful every day. 



I went back to Richard Cartwright Austin's thoughtful book about Muir's spirituality called Baptized into Wilderness. I also discovered that Muir is celebrated as a "saint" in "The Dancing Saints Icons" project at Saint Gregory of Nyassa Episcopal Church in San Francisco. He is portrayed in a pantheon of 100 less conventional saintly figures in a grand mural within the sanctuary. I would love to see this!

I'll happily convey some form of sainthood on Muir, or at the very least I'll admire his earthy spirituality. As a Groundling Christian baptized and born again into wild places, could I have any other outlook?