Spiritual Sunday
Last night I attended the annual gathering of the Southern Cumberland Regional Land Trust, a group dedicated to preserving wilderness areas in the southern Appalachians. Although the group doesn’t describe itself as a spiritual organization, its efforts have the feel of a sacred trust.
From the beginning American poets, including such noteworthy figures as Emily Dickinson and Mary Oliver, have looked to the woods to find God. Here’s one such poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
Longfellow’s foil is Europe’s gothic cathedrals, with their stately towers and elaborate tombs. “My Cathedral” resembles Dickinson’s “Some keep the sabbath going to church,” which opens:
Some keep the Sabbath going to Church –
I keep it, staying at Home –
With a Bobolink for a Chorister –
And an Orchard, for a Dome –
For Longfellow, the dome is two stately pines, and he too looks to the avian world for his choristers:
Like two cathedral towers these stately pines
Uplift their fretted summits tipped with cones;
The arch beneath them is not built with stones,
Not Art but Nature traced these lovely lines,
And carved this graceful arabesque of vines;
No organ but the wind here sighs and moans,
No sepulchre conceals a martyr's bones.
No marble bishop on his tomb reclines.
Enter! the pavement, carpeted with leaves,
Gives back a softened echo to thy tread!
Listen! the choir is singing; all the birds,
In leafy galleries beneath the eaves,
Are singing! listen, ere the sound be fled,
And learn there may be worship without words.
The concluding couplet appears to allude to Keats’s fading nightingale in his ode to the bird:
Adieu! adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades
Past the near meadows, over the still stream,
Up the hill-side; and now 'tis buried deep
In the next valley-glades:
Was it a vision, or a waking dream?
Fled is that music:—Do I wake or sleep?
Each morning I walk beneath towering oaks and pines as I make my way from the guest cottage where Julia and I reside to my mother’s house. Unfailingly I experience a sense of awe, as though I am in an outdoors sanctuary. I have a glimpse of worship without words.
