Last week I went camping with our tenth graders for the annual class trip. An environmental adventure company provided not only kayaks, food, and shelter, but also four wonderful guides. We set out from a bayside beach flourishing with flora and fauna of all types, paddled three miles toward the open ocean, and set up camp for the night. A strong sea wind prevented us from setting up camps further west, so we stayed at same beachhead from Monday through Friday. Our guides not only provided instruction on kayak and camp craft, but also prepared excellent meals (mixed with a little sand for texture) and even attended our first morning Mass on the beach. With irrepressible energy, the guides led us into a deeper awe of the natural world. Three of the four were raised Catholic and joined our evening rosary around the campfire.
Our guides manifested an impressive knowledge of biology, oceanography, astronomy, and zoology, along with many years of experience navigating ecological systems around the world. On a morning paddle, one of our guides described the fascinating biology of the seabirds spiraling about our little boats. We looked up in wonder as terns climbed into the bright blue, California gulls cried to one another, and pelicans dive bombed between our kayaks. Our guide explained how cormorants’ bones are solid so they can dive for fish under the water, while gulls' and terns' honeycombed (hollow) bones allow them to float above the water for surface food. Cormorants, like heavy sea planes, must preen their feathers free of water to lumber into the air, while gulls’ feathers, like the fins of a paraglider, shed water for quicker movement. Crabs and starfish, magnificent sea lions and cute little harbor seals, undulating eel grass and thick sea kelp, bishop pines and live oaks, sun and moon, rising and falling tides, sand and stars: all wheeled in magnificent coordination around us.
Our guides did not object to our Catholic religion, but they clearly ascribed to another religion. The open book of nature was their bible, and the open skies their cathedral. They were most at peace in the great web of nature, and striving to be one with the cosmos was their constant aspiration. Occasionally, in their instructive talks to us, they would express indignation at man’s irreverence and sacrilege toward the natural world, but most of the time they evangelized their young charges with sheer delight in the great out of doors.
I greatly admire John Muir, one of this country’s greatest naturalists. Muir immigrated from Scotland, one of Europe’s most enchanting landscapes, and found a lasting fascination with his “Range of Light,” the Sierra Nevada. I too have ranged many days and nights through California’s awesome mountain chain, but it was five days with four naturalists last week that showed me how powerful is the religion of nature. I can well understand now how one can worship elemental forces, and how the Greeks and Hindus and Norsemen made gods of the wind and sea and sun and moon.
But we who believe, rather, in one God, the Creator and Sustainer of all the universe, try our best not to stop at the natural world. As Paul says in the first chapter of his letter to the Romans, all the cosmos points to something greater than itself. Every drop of water, every galactic cluster, is sacramental, pointing beyond itself to a greater good. It’s not easy to go beyond the natural world, for the cosmic weight itself seems infinite, or at least beyond wonder. But it is not. What is beyond wonder is He who made it. It is hard, I say, to believe in what must seem to most as an invisible Man behind the curtain. What proof do we have of His existence? We cannot prove God’s existence, actually, but we have an abundance of evidence that the marvelous intricacies of the cosmos are not random. I desire a personal God who made the stars and starfish for sheer love, and as Thomas Aquinas says, no natural desire is unfulfillable. I have the desire because its fulfillment is attainable. There is something more even than this wonderful world.
Our guides manifested an impressive knowledge of biology, oceanography, astronomy, and zoology, along with many years of experience navigating ecological systems around the world. On a morning paddle, one of our guides described the fascinating biology of the seabirds spiraling about our little boats. We looked up in wonder as terns climbed into the bright blue, California gulls cried to one another, and pelicans dive bombed between our kayaks. Our guide explained how cormorants’ bones are solid so they can dive for fish under the water, while gulls' and terns' honeycombed (hollow) bones allow them to float above the water for surface food. Cormorants, like heavy sea planes, must preen their feathers free of water to lumber into the air, while gulls’ feathers, like the fins of a paraglider, shed water for quicker movement. Crabs and starfish, magnificent sea lions and cute little harbor seals, undulating eel grass and thick sea kelp, bishop pines and live oaks, sun and moon, rising and falling tides, sand and stars: all wheeled in magnificent coordination around us.
Our guides did not object to our Catholic religion, but they clearly ascribed to another religion. The open book of nature was their bible, and the open skies their cathedral. They were most at peace in the great web of nature, and striving to be one with the cosmos was their constant aspiration. Occasionally, in their instructive talks to us, they would express indignation at man’s irreverence and sacrilege toward the natural world, but most of the time they evangelized their young charges with sheer delight in the great out of doors.
I greatly admire John Muir, one of this country’s greatest naturalists. Muir immigrated from Scotland, one of Europe’s most enchanting landscapes, and found a lasting fascination with his “Range of Light,” the Sierra Nevada. I too have ranged many days and nights through California’s awesome mountain chain, but it was five days with four naturalists last week that showed me how powerful is the religion of nature. I can well understand now how one can worship elemental forces, and how the Greeks and Hindus and Norsemen made gods of the wind and sea and sun and moon.
But we who believe, rather, in one God, the Creator and Sustainer of all the universe, try our best not to stop at the natural world. As Paul says in the first chapter of his letter to the Romans, all the cosmos points to something greater than itself. Every drop of water, every galactic cluster, is sacramental, pointing beyond itself to a greater good. It’s not easy to go beyond the natural world, for the cosmic weight itself seems infinite, or at least beyond wonder. But it is not. What is beyond wonder is He who made it. It is hard, I say, to believe in what must seem to most as an invisible Man behind the curtain. What proof do we have of His existence? We cannot prove God’s existence, actually, but we have an abundance of evidence that the marvelous intricacies of the cosmos are not random. I desire a personal God who made the stars and starfish for sheer love, and as Thomas Aquinas says, no natural desire is unfulfillable. I have the desire because its fulfillment is attainable. There is something more even than this wonderful world.
Sunrise atop Half Dome. Photo by Sam Flanders.
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