Holy Ground

I’m sharing some short nature-based spiritual reflections from my “Jesus Walks” book I’m working on this summer. As you read these, try to imagine sitting at a park or by a lake on a perfect summer day. Enjoy!

“Surely the Lord is in this place, and I was not aware of it.” Genesis 28

Ideal Setting: A sunny meadow or soft place to nap in the grass.

In 1845 Henry David Thoreau built himself a hut on the edge of Walden Pond, and lived there in solitude for two years, keeping a journal which later grew into his book “Walden.” In his 1862 essay on “Walking,” he opens with a fascinating lesson on the origins of the word “sauntering.”

I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks,—who had a genius, so to speak, for sauntering: which word is beautifully derived from “idle people who roved about the country, in the Middle Ages, and asked charity, under pretense of going a la Sainte Terre,” to the Holy Land, till the children exclaimed, “There goes a Sainte-Terrer,” a Saunterer, a Holy-Lander. They who never go to the Holy Land in their walks, as they pretend, are indeed mere idlers and vagabonds; but they who do go, these are saunterers in the good sense, such as I mean… For every walk is a sort of crusade, preached by some Peter the Hermit in us, to go forth and reconquer this Holy Land from the hands of the Infidels.

I like this image of walking into nature, sauntering in search of Holy Land—our own enchanted forest, a private Holy of Holies by a bubbling brook, a stairway descending from Heaven where we sense God’s angels among us. Like Jacob awakening from his wilderness dream in Gen. 28, we go sauntering in hopes that God will use nature to rouse us from our spiritual slumber and make our trail the gate of heaven.

There is no place we walk that cannot at any second become Sainte Terre, Holy Land, when we have eyes to see his footprints and ears to hear his whisper in the wind. The danger, Thoreau suggests, is to yield our enchanted, God-bathed world to the Infidel spirit of disenchantment; to accept a desacralized life of computer screens, shopping malls, office buildings, parking lots, nonstop noise and busyness—an existence void of a sense of the Holy. The Infidel of Modern Enlightenment thinking has kicked God upstairs and left us here in a mechanistic world of cold, hard science and cause-and-effect laws of nature. Yet, our souls know better, and crave a return to the Garden, Holy Ground.

Find a stone pillow and lie down in the grass for a nap. Before dozing off, read Genesis 28 and ask God to open your eyes to see what Jacob saw: “Surely the Lord is in this place, and I was not aware of it… How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God; this is the gate of heaven” (Gen. 28:16-17).

LISTEN to the introduction to “Jesus Walks” on my Anchor Podcast episodes #150 and #151 here.