Column on Vacation and Sabbath

“Sometimes I have loved the peacefulness of an ordinary Sunday. It is like standing in a newly planted garden after a warm rain. You can feel the silent and invisible life.” 
― Marilynne Robinson,.

Almost five years ago, my cancerous prostate was removed, and then I had 40 radiation treatments. Around that time, our youngest daughter said, at my advanced age, it was time to start checking things off the bucket list. To my surprise, most of that list included national parks. This year Olympic and Mt. Rainier National Parks were checked off the list.

For me, national parks are cathedrals of the natural world. While I have no patience for Christians who studiously avoid worship and say that they worship God by themselves outside, I do find them to be gateways of religious experience. Religion is about reaching out to  the beyond in some fashion. Years ago, Rudolph Otto called the religious experience of the divine, the holy to be the numinous. It has the sense of  placing our live sin the perspective of something larger and greater. What a pleasure to be captured within grandeur, apart from distraction and cries for attention. The parks provide such a chance for people to enter into a totally different environment, a different public space than the bustling activity of the normal day. it provides Sabbath time for the careworn soul. No campaign signs obscured vision along the trails or were reflected in the lakes.

How I have tired of the recent use of awesome as a word expressing mere approbation. for a while, contemporary church services seemed to make its constant repetition mandatory. How can a Biblically tutored viewpoint not think of Ps. 19 in Olympic? In one park one can see the glaciers off on the range that includes, yes, Mt. Olympus. Mountain goats gathered around the summit of the Hurricane ridge trail as fog from two directions started to shroud the walkways in mist. In another section at the huge Hoh Rain Forest, moss and ferns grow on 250 ft. trees. In its small section of beaches, cedar logs come crashing in with the tide and rocks of a hundred hues line the shoreline. At Rainier, if the weather is right, one can capture a  look at the mountain by peering at the Reflection Lakes. On a walkway, seals were  easily seen, and even humpback whales spouted and offered a glimpse of their enormous torso.

I am not romantic about nature. The system of aesthetic pleasure also carries cancer in it, and mosquitoes that harbor diseases, and wild animals may well attack. In Seattle, works of the glass artist Dale Chihuly are presented near the Space Needle. there his artistry fits in with garden landscapes, so natural forms are matched with human craftsmanship and artistry that fits our anthropocene age. The National Parks may have inns, often of local materials that allow tired travelers the chance to rest in comfort without the natural pleasure of sleeping on the rocky ground. So, wisdom indicates that we seek a balance between the artificial and the natural and realize that the wild and the safe in natural settings are balanced. Random events fit with predictable patterns constantly.

Human beings need and deserve Sabbath time, time to pray, rest, and reflect. Sabbath time offers recreation in the sense of re-creation. Sabbath helps us to discover, or re-discover the best parts of ourselves that get lost in the flurry of activity that we give such moral weight. “Sabbath is a period of 'trying on' God's promised completion, trying on God's future.  Sabbath is the inviting of all creation to be still and imagine the coming of God.”