Ansel Adams talks about how natural preservation invites a spiritual experience. I was thinking about this as my sisters and I hiked in the Hoh Rain Forest, a national forest, this weekend. There are many good reasons to set up nature reserves and national parks and forests. We often think of it as a way to protect what would otherwise be lost. We live in a fast-paced world, full of traffic, machines, noise, and high rises. Not many of us are in the constant contact with nature as our great-grandparents may have been. Urbanization and industrialization have left their mark, for good or ill. Yet there does seem to be a longing in all of us for contact with the natural world. For a previous generation, their lives were regulated by the seasons, the cycles of sun and moon and harvest. They were intimately aware of the plant and animal life around them, if only to survive. Our society has largely seen natural resources only in terms of how they can be exploited and our individual contact is more minimal.
Perhaps this is the whole point of national parks; the creation not only of a refuge for nature but for ourselves. It seems to be a kind of "sacred space;" a place to leave behind the bustle of everyday life and reconnect with the water, trees, and sky. To find ourselves. Even, to find God.
For myself, no church building rivals the old cedar groves and rushing river banks of the Olympic Peninsula. God as trinity, as creator, sustainer, redeemer, makes himself known in the "book of nature."
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