What’s Sacred Got to Do with It?
Everything. We protect only what is sacred. The rest gets sold off.
Like many of you, no doubt, I find Trump troubling at a breadth and depth few politicians ever touch. That discomfort is deeper than policy or ideology; it reaches into the realm that can only be called soul or spirit. And it is there that Trump poses his biggest threat. John Muir would agree.
One of the most admirable aspects of Muir’s mission was his soulful encounters with the sacred in the wild. Time and again, his writings detail moments of epiphany, of manifestation, when the underlying mystery of the cosmos broke through in a transforming flood of awe.
Awe encompasses reverence and respect mixed with wonder, and sometimes even a little edge of terror. It arises when you stumble into the presence of something much, much bigger than you are, and your soul goes, “Oh, wow.”
One such awesome experience changed Muir during his first winter in California while he was tending a flock of sheep in the Sierra Nevada foothills at Twenty-Hill Hollow:
Never shall I forget my baptism in this font…. The Hollow overflowed with light, as a fountain…. Light, of unspeakable richness was brooding the flowers. Truly, said I, is California the Golden State — in metallic gold, in sun gold, in plant gold.
Muir lost himself in this awesome reverie as his sense of self dissolved into something greater:
Presently you lose consciousness of your own separate existence; you blend with the landscape and become part and parcel of nature.
Raised in the fierce Calvinism of the Disciples of Christ, Muir found the metaphor for his mystical breakthrough in the sacrament of baptism. And when he defended mountain treasures like Yosemite’s Hetch Hetchy Valley against the dam that threatened its sacred existence, his imagery again turned ecclesiastical:
These temple destroyers, devotees of ravaging commercialism, seem to have a perfect contempt for Nature, and instead of lifting their eyes to the mountains, lift them to dollars and dams. Dam Hetch Hetchy! As well dam for water-tanks the people’s cathedrals and churches, for no holier temple has ever been consecrated by the heart of man.
Muir understood deeply that the inherent value of the wild and natural has nothing to do with the economics of dam building and everything to do with the awesome place itself and the sacred mystery it enfolds. Put a price tag on it, and that mystery vanishes. The awesome and the sacred is literally priceless; it is crucial, too, to living lightly, gently, and well on this earth.
Just last week, in doing background research for a gestating book idea, I stumbled across this to-the-point passage by Thomas Berry, a Roman Catholic priest, historian, and writer who focused on the threat posed by the environmental crisis:
An absence of the sense of the sacred is the basic flaw in many of our efforts at ecologically or environmentally adjusting our human presence in the natural world. It has been said, ‘We will not save what we do not love.’ It is also true that we will neither love nor save what we do not experience as sacred…. Eventually only our sense of the sacred will save us.
I’d love to eavesdrop on the conversation Berry and Muir could have on the subject of the sacred wild. And if Thomas Merton were invited to make it a threesome, that chat would become even more intriguing.
Merton was the Trappist mystic who authored the ever-popular Seven-Storey Mountain and whose prolific writings dive deep into the awesome sacred. Like Muir, he found it in the world beyond human control, in the free and natural and wild. Even the rain pounding the roof of Merton’s hermitage became sacramental:
Let me say this before rain becomes a utility that they can plan and distribute for money. By “they” I mean the people who cannot understand that rain is a festival, who do not appreciate its gratuity, who think that what has no price has no value, that what cannot be sold is not real, so that the only way to make something actual is to place it on the market. The time will come when they will sell you even your rain. At the moment it is still free, and I am in it. I celebrate its gratuity and its meaninglessness.
All this snapped into focus for me as I was writing my post on the chainsaw wounds Trump and the bad tech-bros of Elon Musk’s DOGE are slashing across wild America. To Trump, Musk, and their ideological gang members, public lands have value only as resources to be monetized. Trees into lumber, mineral deposits into mines, natural gas and petroleum into wells, national parks into admission and accommodations fees. Trump is ordering an increase in timber sales from national forests, planning to strip protections against mining from the Bears Ears National Monument lands sacred to the five tribal nations of southeast Utah, boosting American energy production by unfettered drilling on public lands and tribal reservations, and savaging the national parks. Strip it, sell it, pocket the profit.
This raid on the sacred comes at a deep cost: destroy the sacred, and we shrink into nothingness. In its absence we drift free, lost, disconnected from world and meaning. We can’t let that happen.
Up next: John Muir’s money.
Ways to fight back
Please share your strategies and tactics for opposing Trump’s raids on the sacred in the Comments. It’s time to join together and rise up.
Love how you connected nature with the sacred. Thank you!