John Muir: The godfather of Seattle’s spiritual life and a racist – Crosscut

Seattles church of St. Muir

The Northwest is a bastion of so-called "nones" people who belong to no formal religion but consider themselves secular but spiritual.

I belong to this undefined congregation. I was raised in the church of John Muir, a nearly sainted figure from my childhood on.

I grew up on a green, Olmsted-designed boulevard in a neighborhood shaped, like many in Seattle, by turn-of-the-century racist housing covenants. The landscape was designed to cultivate and preserve nature in the city, allowing appreciation of trees and such to flourish in our yards and parks. That landscape is what I knew and loved, from Lake Washington to Rainier Avenue.

My father, aunt, both of my sisters and I attended John Muir School in Mount Baker, from the 1920s to the 1960s. The school was originally part of the Columbia City schools, called Wetmore, and later York. In my fathers day it ran through the eighth grade; in mine it was an elementary school. The Muir name was adopted in 1921 to honor the man who made frequent and much-publicized visits to Seattle as he went to and from Alaska. He climbed most of the major peaks in the Cascades, including Rainier. Muir was a scientist who learned about how glaciers shaped the land, as well as an author and advocate. His name is on Camp Muir at Rainier.

After Muir's death in 1914, Edmond Meany gave a lecture on Muir in memory of one of the great naturalists, poets, and philosophers of the Coast, wrote The Seattle Times at the time. The lecture was held at a Unitarian Church on Boylston Avenue and was said to feature seventy-five hand-painted stereopticon pictures of the mountains Muir loved. It must have felt like a church service featuring mountain gods.

In the 1920s, the John Muir school was transformed from a typical Seattle school into a kind of chapel in the church of Muirs nature worship. There are many ideas expressed in his writings. He regarded woods as temples and felt deeply the sacredness of nature. He described those who would dam Yosmites Hetch Hetchy as temple destroyers, selfish despoilers of every type, from Satan to Senators.

The clearest way into the universe is through a forest wilderness, Muir wrote in his journal. If the view was exclusionist in conception, it was also attuned to powerful feelings evoked by witnessing the wilds, in standing with the natural world against what Muir saw as greed, commercialization and the brutality of industrialization. If Seattles John Muir students couldnt climb mountains or walk remote tracts in their daily lives, they could still be imbued with the faith as they played in parks that sought to give them some hope of meeting the universe in their own neighborhood. Muirs message was that the wilderness untamed offered spiritual uplift.