The naturalist John Muir who is responsible for the establishment of several of the USA’s national parks, such as Yosemite and the protection of thousands of acres ofother natural sites, was born into an ultra-Calvinistic family. He grew up having memorized much of scripture under the punishing supervision of his father. Today he is renown as a one of the greatest modern prophets for his ecological activism and consciousness. His early years were lived in Scotland where he fell deeply in love with everything that was wild. “The earth is a divine incarnation.” Muir came to see that there was another sacred text and that was the “big book of the cosmos.” Once having immigrated to the US he became almost one with the natural world he so loved, spending years in his little cabin in Yosemite, immersed in this other text.
He understood intuitively that “Christ is all and in all!” A Celtic forbearer of Muir Alexander Scott wrote, “The awareness of the sacred that we access in nature is not a doctrinal or propositional knowing. It belongs to some deeper part of the human being. It is the way lovers know each other, with their whole beings, heart and mind, body and soul, knowing the spiritual in the physical…Forms, colors, motions, sounds, -- it is through these that we encounter the presence of the divine… This is the value of the sun, moon and stars, of trees and flowers, of the bodies of men and women, the looks of human countenances, the tones of human voices…. It is through these that the divine is made knows to us.”
Much more to be said about all that.