In Monday’s Empty Altars episode this week, the theme was “Artists and Innovators.” (You can still register for the course here - it is free and past episodes will be available to you when you sign up.) It was hard to choose just two people from the long list of artistic and innovative “saints” who inspire me and who point the way toward a better future!
On my longer list (limited to those who have already passed away) were a plethora of poets, novelists, actors, academics, and musicians — including Maya Angelou, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Joséphine Baker and Katharine Hepburn, Vine Deloria, Jr., and Elvis Presley!
Eventually, however, I settled on two — Mary Oliver and John Muir, a poet and an innovator, paired because of their shared passion for the environment and theology of God’s presence in the natural world.
Oliver and Muir were born a century apart. Oliver was born in 1935 and died in 2019; Muir was born in 1838 and died in 1914. She was from Ohio; his family immigrated from Scotland and settled in Wisconsin. She was a notorious introvert; his life unfolded in the American media. She found her deepest sense of vocation on Cape Cod; he discovered his in California. In some ways, they couldn’t be more different.
Yet, as I read their work this week, I noticed how often they reached for the same word to describe their longings and the vision of the world that inspired them: wild.
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