I just flew in from Yosemite, and boy are my arms tired!
Actually I didn’t fly to Yosemite, I drove. And it isn’t my arms that are tired, it’s my feet.
Jim and I and two friends of ours drove up together to Yosemite last Sunday. While you were worshipping with Everett Howe (I hope you enjoyed him) we were driving up the 405 to the 14 to the 395, through Palmdale, Lancaster, and Mojave. We stopped at Lone Pine for lunch. Then kept going up the east side of California. Mt. Whitney to our left and Death Valley and the ancient Bristle Cone Pines to our right.
By Sunday afternoon we reached Mono Lake and the city called Lee Vining and then turned left into the National Park from the east gate along highway 120 called the Tioga Road.
We drove through the park, to the west edge, where we were staying. We had rented a house in a little community inside the park borders called Foresta. We were able to sit on our porch and look east into the valley with views of El Capitan and Half Dome.
Monday we got up early and drove back up the Tioga Road to Tuolumne Meadows. We hiked beneath Cathedral Peak to Cathedral Lakes, ate sandwiches from our back packs, hiked around the lakes, and then back, a round trip of 13 miles.
Tuesday we started again from Tuolumne Meadows but hiked the opposite direction, north instead of south. Our destination that day was a series of impressive waterfalls near a camp called Glen Aulin. Round trip that day was 14 miles.
Jim and I like to hike. But we only do day hikes. I don’t like to carry any more on my back than water and sunblock and a snack. And I like to come home every evening to a real shower and a real bed. So I’m not a backpacker or a tent camper.
Wednesday, July 4, was our only day in Yosemite Valley, which is the area that most people think of when they think of Yosemite. We parked our car at the Ahwahnee hotel, now called the Majestic Yosemite Hotel. The hotel changed its name a couple of years ago in a legal dispute.
From the valley floor we took a tour bus up to the south rim of the canyon to a spot called Glacier Point. From Glacier Point we then hiked the Panorama Trail which goes counter clockwise around the east end of the valley. From the trail we looked across the valley at Yosemite Falls, Nevada Falls, Vernal Falls, El Capitan, Half Dome. And Oh My God was it amazing. One of the most thrilling hiking days I’ve ever had. 13 miles, mostly down hill, but even so.
And boy were my feet tired.
Thursday morning we did a short, three-mile hike to the Merced Grove of Giant Seuqoias, and then got back in the car and drove home. A really fantastic trip. A real “vacation.”
From Glacier Point, on that Panorama Trail hike, on Wednesday, I got my first really good look at Mount Starr King.
Mount Starr King is a mountain in Yosemite National Park, a little higher than Half Dome, a little to the south of Half Dome, and named for a Unitarian Universalist minister, Thomas Starr King.
Thomas Starr King was born in New York in 1824. He was the oldest of six children.
His father was a minister, for a Universalist church in Charlestown, Massachusetts, just across the Charles River from Boston. Starr King sought the same career for himself
His father died when Starr King was 15. As the eldest child Starr became the breadwinner. He got a job in the Charlestown Naval Yards. He had no time for school, but he studied for the ministry on his own.
At age 21 the congregation at his father’s old church called him as their minister, but after a few years Starr realized they would always see him as a child so he sought a new church where he could establish his own reputation.
Theodore Parker recommended Starr King for a Unitarian church in Boston called the Hollis Street church. The Hollis Street Church had recently suffered a split over issues of abolition and was having trouble calling a minister because of the conflict and because the remnant congregation couldn’t afford a full time salary. Starr King was a Universalist, not a Unitarian, and he had no formal education, so the Hollis Street church must have been pretty desperate to call him. But they did.
Starr King served the Hollis Street church for 11 years, supplementing his part time income lecturing in cities throughout New England and as far west as St. Louis, Missouri.
After 11 years, Starr King realized in Boston, in the shadow of Harvard Divinity School, that his Universalist background and his lack of a formal education meant that he would never be fully accepted by the established Unitarian clergy. His career prospects in New England were limited.
So, in 1860, he answered a call from the Unitarian Church in San Francisco, as far from Harvard as you could go. His first sermon for the San Francisco church was on April 29, 1860. He was an immediate success, recognized for his spirit and intelligence and powerful speaking voice.
That summer, Starr King arranged a tour to see California’s mountains.
Starr King had always been attracted to nature. While in New England, Starr King had enjoyed vacations in New Hampshire’s White Mountains. He was eager to have similar experiences in the natural landscape of California. And he wrote sermons for his congregation and letters he sent to newspapers in Boston describing his experience for people who couldn’t see the natural wonders for themselves.
He is an excerpt from a sermon Starr King wrote following a trip to Yosemite in the summer of 1860.
“A fresh impression of the marvels of nature always awakens a religious emotion. I thought of this more seriously than ever before, when, about two weeks ago, I first looked down from the Mariposa trail into the tremendous fissure of the Sierras. The place is fitly called ‘Inspiration Point.’
… A vast trench, cloven by Omnipotence amid a tumult of mountains, yawned beneath us. The length of it was seven or eight miles; the sides of it were bare rock, and they were perpendicular….
All this, no doubt, seems tame enough in the wording; and even if a vivid picture of the actual scene could be given here by an adequate description, some of you might say that it is only a pile of rock overhanging a river-course—not very remarkable, and certainly not religiously suggestive.
But I do not think that there was one in our party who had the feeling, when that surprising view first broke upon us, that he was looking merely upon a freak of natural forces, or a patch of chaos. I am sure we all felt that something more than matter was shown to us—a clear gleam of the Infinite Majesty. …. If the emotion which that first view excited could remain with us, I am sure that all life would be more reverent and loyal.
And that is a large portion of the value of such impressive wonders in nature. They break in, for a moment, if no more, upon our materialistic and skeptical estimate of the world, and show us that it is penetrated with Divine meaning—that it is an expression of Infinite power and thought.”
Yosemite Valley was cloven by a glacier not by Omnipotence, but that makes it no less awesome. Starr King is right that, “A fresh impression of the marvels of nature always awakens a religious emotion.” I felt it myself, standing at the same Inspiration Point in Yosemite. Standing at the foot of the Giant Sequoias in the Merced Grove. Standing at the base of the waterfalls, or at their top. Looking across the clear lakes, or up to the jagged ridge of Cathedral Peak. I felt the immensity of existence, the privilege of consciousness, the humbleness of the human ego. I felt the peaceful stillness of the stately trees, the solitude of the forest trail. I felt it even in the sting of a mosquito on my neck, or a chubby marmot running across a rock, or a friendly crow that would fly to our porch at the rental house and eat walnuts we set out for him from the porch railing. How far it all is from the troubles of human politics, fear and anger. How trivial it seems standing near trees that measure their lives in centuries.
How far it seems from work.
Now I love my job. Don’t get me wrong. Thank you for this pulpit, and this chance to be a minister, and this full time salary. But we need vacation, too. So thank you also, for giving me time for vacation. Even those lucky enough to have work that is satisfying and fulfilling, need rest. We need retreat. We need Sabbath. We need the reminder that we are not at the center of existence, but at the edge. That there is all this amazing stuff going on, trees growing, water falling, mountains rising by volcanoes and plate tectonics, and being worn down by glaciers, that have nothing to do with invoices and meetings and email. Outside work, outside ourselves we could, for a time, just stand aside and be, instead of do. It’s refreshing. It’s humbling. It’s necessary.
The spectacular views of nature attract us because we know in our cells that the same forces that created the canyon and the mountains created us also. We are kin, the wonders of nature and us. Our eyes were made to recognize this particular kind of beauty. We see ourselves. And at the same time our narrow selves are so expanded to encompass the scale of the mountains and the river and the time represented in their creation. It is that expanded feeling that we call spiritual. It is the religious feeling.
A signpost at the trailhead for the Cathedral Lakes Trail that we hiked on Monday has a quote from John Muir. After he made the first recorded assent of Cathedral Peak, in 1869, he wrote in his journal, “This I may say is the first time I have been to church in California.”
That religious feeling. That feeling that we have “been to church” in nature, is renewed with every visit to nature. But we lose it again so quickly when we return to our regular lives, that we must go back, regularly. Starr King says, “If the emotion which that first view excited could remain with us, I am sure that all life would be more reverent and loyal.”
Here is another excerpt from another Starr King sermon. This is from 1863, titled, “Lessons from the Sierra Nevada”
“I believe that if, on every Sunday morning before going to church, we could be lifted to a mountain-peak and see a horizon line of six hundred miles enfolding the copious splendor of the light on such a varied expanse; or if we could look upon a square mile of flowers representing all the species with which the Creative Spirit embroiders a zone; or if we could be made to realize the distance of the earth from the sun, …, if we could fairly perceive, through our outward sense, one or two features of the constant order and glory of nature, our materialistic dullness would be broken, surprise and joy would be awakened, we should feel that we live amid the play of Infinite thought; and the devout spirit would be stimulated so potently that our hearts would naturally mount in praise and prayer.”
I believe he’s right.
Starr King took his first trip to Yosemite in the summer of 1860, just a few months after arriving in California.
That year, there were three candidates running for President. Abraham Lincoln of the Republican Party. Stephen Douglas of the Northern Democrats. And John C. Breckinridge representing the Southern Democrats.
California had entered the union as a Free State ten years earlier, in 1850. But California in 1850 and still in 1860 felt very isolated. The Transcontinental Railroad wouldn’t open until 1869. In 1860 there wasn’t even telegraph service connecting the east and west coasts of the US. California was mining impressive amounts of wealth in the Gold Rush, and sending taxes to a Federal Government that felt very removed from Californian concerns.
Democrats controlled every level of California state government and Starr King worried that the state would vote for one of the Democratic candidates. He campaigned for Abraham Lincoln and a unified country in a series of speeches throughout San Francisco and the small towns of northern California.
Abraham Lincoln was elected in November 1860. California’s 4 electoral votes went to Lincoln, with Starr King given the credit. South Carolina seceded the next month, December 1860. The Confederate States of America were organized in February, 1861. Abraham Lincoln was inaugurated in March. In April shots were fired on Ft. Sumter and the Civil War began.
Starr King spent the war years serving his church in San Francisco, and also serving the cause of the Union Army. Far away from the war itself, Californians were not recruited to fight, but Thomas was contacted by his friend Henry Whitney Bellows who was organizing a Sanitary Commission: a system of medical care for wounded soldiers. They needed money. Starr King used his speaking throughout the state and into the Pacific Northwest to eventually raise more than a million dollars, a full quarter of the entire budget for the Sanitary Commission.
The work wore him out. Starr King died in 1864. He was recognized as a hero in California, and nationally. His wartime efforts had kept California’s gold on the side of the Union Army. And his descriptions of the natural beauty of California awakened the consciousness of the nation to the importance of protecting our environment.
Yosemite was first legally protected by California in 1864, the year that Starr King died. That same year they named a mountain for him.
The core of healthy spirituality is our quest to realize our personal connection to something larger than ourselves. It’s not that we invent a connection to some greater thing; it’s that we see that we are already, in our essence, the expression of something larger than the narrow individual ego that constantly strives to take priority in our consciousness. When we can lift our spirits beyond and above the small, the narrow, the everyday, we see ourselves as one with the vastness of the universe, the enormity of creation, the rolling eons of time and infinity of space, then we come into the spiritual perspective of peace, of gratitude, of love. It is there we are our best. It is from there that we can do our best. It is from there that truth becomes separated from bias, and courage removed from self-preservation, and love becomes self-less.
Places like Yosemite almost force us into that perspective, which is why their preservation and accessibility are so necessary. It’s gratifying to see the crowds enjoying themselves in National Parks and knowing they are getting that enlivening and enlightening spiritual perspective that we all need. It’s also great to go out on a long hike and get away from the human crowd and just be in the stillness of nature.
But you don’t need to go to a National Park for that spiritual experience of connection to something larger than ourselves. You can get it at a city park, or at the beach. You can get it sitting on your couch with a book, or sitting on a chair meditating. The place you usually can’t get it is at work, because work necessarily focuses on the small and the self. So we all need time away from work. Regular Sabbath time built in to every occupation. Vacation time. A time and a place to get away.
And it’s great, that, in a place like Yosemite, filled with sights calling us to larger connection, there stands a mountain with a name that reminds me of my faith. Our connection to Unitarian Universalist history is another way to recognize our connection to things larger than ourselves. We are New Englanders, and Harvard graduates, and self-taught elder brothers, and small congregations fractured over debates about important issues. We are eloquent speakers, and prophets, and fundraisers for important causes and we are the people who hear the speeches, and are inspired, and who give generously. We are heroes, because there have been heroes in our faith who would claim us as we claim them.
So it is us, too, who are named in that mountain, Mt. Starr King, even though we never stand on it, nor never see it. We are attached to it, connected to it, connected as it is to the park, and to the planet, and to this something, this every thing, greater than ourselves, which guides us, inspires us, and loves us, calling us to our best, calling us to itself.