Sacred Fire ©
Reverend Janet Parsons
Gloucester UU Church
April 23, 2023
“Every bush is a burning bush…”. (John Muir)
It’s always fascinating, to look back at someone’s life, and try to understand how they were able to become who they were intended to be. Time and time again we encounter people who transcended the most ordinary of beginnings to follow paths that no one could ever have anticipated.
Who could ever have imagined that John Muir, the renowned naturalist, emerged from profound spiritual poverty to become a mystic? Muir was born in Scotland, raised by a stern, angry Calvinist father, who asserted that the Bible was the only book anyone ever needed. Young John was forced to learn the Bible by heart, often beaten when he made mistakes while reciting. He could have grown to have been angry and narrow minded. But Muir loved the wilderness from a young age, guided by a grandfather, and came to feel deep within that the universe itself is also a sacred text. “The earth, Muir realized, is like a ‘divine manuscript.’” He described scripture as the little book, and the cosmos as the big book.” “The beauty of its letters and sentences burn through me like fire, he said.” (in Sacred Earth, Sacred Soul, John Philip Newell, p. 151.)
The Muir family emigrated to Wisconsin when he was 11. Throughout his youth, John Muir would rise at 3:00 a.m. in order to study before it was light enough to begin farm chores in the morning. This devotion to learning led him to the University of Wisconsin. But when the Civil War began, Muir realized that he could not possibly take another person’s life, and like many men 100 years later during the Vietnam War, he left college to take refuge in Canada. A few years later, he and his life became completely transformed by an accident that almost robbed him of his eyesight. In fact, instead of being blinded, his vision expanded, until he could see the cosmos and everything within it as unified, and connected. His soul caught fire until he could proclaim that ‘every bush is a burning bush.’
We are fascinated by the shifts in perception that can take place in human lives, that lead some of us to be regarded as mystics. There is mystery in this transformation, this perception of all things being as One. A mystic’s concept of God – of what is holy – expands: God is no longer above the world, separate, but present within us, as we are present within God. Julian of Norwich, who Lucille told us about earlier, felt this. She wrote, “We are in God, and God, whome we do not see, is in us.” We do know that people are profoundly changed by a mystical experience. Some turn inward, seeking to go ever deeper within to seek Unity. Others, such as John Muir, see everything around them as unified, and can turn outward, can even become prophets. And frequently, people describe their experiences as being full of light, or even fire.
Today, as we commemorate Earth Day 2023, we think of those who experienced the cosmos in a new way; as a unified whole that they were a small part of. Today we are honoring those whose vision suddenly caught fire, and who were able to share their perceptions and experiences with us all. They are our guides in remembering to feel awe and love for the creation.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was a scientist and a Jesuit priest and mystic who lived from the late 19th century to the mid 20th century. As a young priest he struggled to understand why he had always, since childhood, experienced the world as being on fire for him – full of light. “It was,” he said, “like a burning bush ‘lit from within.’” (Newell, p. 172.) Teilhard feared that, by loving the light around him, he was rejecting his traditional beliefs that matter, the material world, is separate from God, and less than God. And then at the age of 30, he had a mystical experience when a voice told him to no longer “be afraid to see matter as sacred.” do not be afraid to adore this Light that is deep in all things,” the voice said. “It is I.”
Teilhard developed the conviction that God was to be found in all things, and that matter, as sacred, could be worshipped and addressed in prayer. Sadly this vision of God led the Jesuit authorities to silence him, to forbid him from preaching or writing about his sense of unity with the cosmos. They banished him to archeological digs in China. But the light, the sacred fire, and the conviction that everything is holy, could not be taken from him. And eventually, his writings did make their way into the world.
John Muir also was able to share his visions and voice with the world. In 1868 he made his way to California, and ultimately to the Yosemite Valley. He had this to say upon his arrival: “Now we are fairly into the mountains, and they are into us. We are fairly living now. What bright seething white-fire enthusiasm is bred in us…We are part of nature…(which like a fluid seems to drench and steep us throughout, as the whole sky and the rocks and flowers are drenched with God.” (Newell, p. 155.)
More sacred fire. Muir took to walking barefoot, as God ordered Moses to do, in order to experience the sacredness of the earth with his whole body. And of course, over the years, John Muir became a prophet: working to preserve the American wilderness, helping to establish national parks, leading a losing battle to preserve a beautiful valley, the Hetch Hetchy, from being flooded to create a reservoir for San Francisco’s drinking water. Over the years, we have remembered and honored all his contributions to conservation movements, but we have seldom heard about his mystical existence.
John Muir was deeply influenced by the Transcendentalists, especially Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. Transcendentalists, of course, believed that the holy was to be found in the everyday world, rather than being only found in heaven. God was not separate, but flowing through us and around us, much as John Muir described. Because of the belief in holiness on earth, the Transcendentalists revered nature. Emerson in particular could become ecstatic in his descriptions of nature. In his famous essay on Nature, Emerson had this to say: “In the woods, we return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can befall me in life,—no disgrace, no calamity, (leaving me my eyes,) which nature cannot repair. Standing on the bare ground,—my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space,—all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God.”
To feel himself as a part of God; to be at one with the world. This description of a mystical, ecstatic experience calls us back to the quote from Julian of Norwich earlier – “we are in God, and God is in us.”
John Muir was honored to meet Emerson when the latter visited Yosemite, and took him on horseback through the forests of giant trees and among the mountains. But it was Thoreau who perhaps had the most influence on Muir. Muir referred to himself as Thoreau’s disciple. It’s easy to imagine why: the two shared a philosophy of living as much as possible in nature, in rejecting the more mundane striving to succeed in a materialistic way. And Thoreau’s powers of observation, and his writings about all he observed, would have provided Muir with hours of pleasure as he discerned a kindred spirit. As I wrote this, I was remembering Thoreau’s description of the spring thawing of sand in Walden. He observed, walking along the bank of the railroad tracks, how the sand would thaw in the sun and begin to flow down the bank, creating tiny streams that then would pool on the flat ground at the base. Thoreau noted the resemblance of the liquid sand to branches and leaves, and he referred to it as ‘sand foliage’. He commented, “I am affected as if in a peculiar sense I stood in the laboratory of the Artist who made the world and me – had come to where he was still at work, sporting on this bank and with excess of energy strewing his fresh designs about.” (Walden, p. 295-6.) In studying the forms the sand took, Thoreau noted not just the resemblance to leaves and stems, but also to the wings of birds and butterflies, and then to blood vessels in lungs, and to rivers. “Thus,” he concluded, “it seemed that this one hillside illustrated the principle of all the operations of Nature.” (Ibid., 297.) From ordinary sand to human anatomy to geography. All is part and particle of God.
And what of us, on this weekend of Earth Day, here in 2023? We have spent time this morning expressing our sorrow, our regret, for the conditions here on earth that begin to feel beyond our control. We fear the rising heat, the rising sea levels. Where will people live safely?
We have lamented. How do we turn toward hope? How do we express our love of the world?
We begin by remembering that we need the creation more than the creation needs us. As John Philip Newell put it, “We are not called to be masters of the earth, but lovers of the earth.” (Sacred Earth, Sacred Soul, p. 157.) What if we were to turn toward the natural world, to return to our Transcendentalist forebears, to come back into relationship with the wild places of the earth? What if, instead of seeking to control, to conquer, to monetize the natural resources, we allowed ourselves to learn from nature, to listen to it, observe it, and to once again act in rhythm with it – with the seasons, with the tides?
We try hard these days. We recycle. We explore heat pumps for our homes, and electric or hybrid vehicles. We cheer for wind power and solar power over fossil fuels. But let us not forget that, in the midst of studies and statistics, and economics and reviews of one technology over another, we have another task. That is, to simply honor and love and revere the creation, and to know ourselves as an intimate piece of it. To remember that we are in the creation, and the creation is in us. We are one. Let’s remember to enjoy the world, to pause and to feel awe. As Emerson said, “In the woods we return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can befall me in life… which nature cannot repair.”
In closing, let’s remember the words we spoke together earlier in the service:
“All living substance, all substance of energy, being, and purpose, are united and share the same destiny…May we have the faith to accept this mystery and build upon its everlasting truth.” (David Eaton, “A Common Destiny,” Singing the Living Tradition, #557.)
Love your Mother.
Blessed Be.
Amen.
