WIDE-OPEN SPACES fill my heart with a sense of awe.
It can be a desert, a view from a mountaintop or the great ocean’s horizon.
Wide open spaces bring me in contact with the sacred elements of life in ways that few churches, temples or mosques ever have.
I’ve sat with this mystery most of my life, wondering what it is about wide-open spaces that so consistently touches my heart and the hearts of others.
The opening feels to me not so much like an emptiness but an invitation, a beckoning, a call, a welcoming.
Wide-open spaces draw me into a place that feels familiar, a spiritual home of sorts.
Like Ralph Waldo Emerson, I believe that God and my relationship to God is most easily revealed through nature.
As he writes in his essay, “Nature:
“Standing on the bare ground — my head bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into infinite space — all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or parcel of God.”
It would be a different world if our egotism could vanish more readily and we could feel these currents of the Universal Being circulating through us.
How beautiful it would be if we all read the scripture of nature verse by verse each time we hold an autumn leaf in our hands, smell the moist moss in the woods, or witness an orca breaching in the distance.
For surely, we would more readily grasp our interconnection with all life, and treat nature with the same reverence and respect that we would treat a Bible, a Qur’an, a Buddhist Sutra, an indigenous creation story and every other sacred text.
This, in turn, could change the ecological ethics for the faithful: the destruction of nature is not merely bad stewardship, it is akin to destroying the very signs by which we detect the presence of God.
This love of wide open spaces moves us beyond the ethics of caretaking and custodianship.
It is a reminder that we as human beings are part and parcel of the fabric of the natural cosmos.
To destroy nature — as we are doing — is also to destroy a part of our own beings.
We are fortunate to live in the North Olympic Peninsula, surrounded by majestic beauty and wide open spaces.
The minute that we ascend the road to Hurricane Ridge, or step onto the shores of the Salish Sea, something within our hearts responds to the presence of an unseen holiness.
The vastness, grandeur and opening reminds us of a truth we’ve always known, even if we haven’t had the words for it.
It beckons us to take our place in the “family of things.”
We tend to live lives disconnected from meaningful contact with fellow human beings, from a touch that heals, from nature, from the sacred.
And yet there is something in us that responds to the call of the wild.
There might be something about our love of wide open spaces that stems from a desire to be bigger, grander, more connected, to lift up our gaze from the micro-dramas of our own lives to be more attuned to the larger rhythms of the cosmos and the cosmic artist behind it all.
I encourage you to take some time this week to step into the sacred depths of nature.
In so doing, may your soul feel nurtured as you find your part and parcel in this great mystery we call life.
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Issues of Faith is a rotating column by five religious leaders on the North Olympic Peninsula. The Rev. Kate Lore is a minister at the Quimper Unitarian Universalist Fellowship in Port Townsend. Her email is katelore@gmail.com.
