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| The Hubster gazes across the valley at Yosemite National Park. We need to get to Yellowstone. |
(This was also posted on the
Episcopal Cafe's Speaking to the Soul, March 1, 2015)
On this day in 1872, President
Ulysses Grant signed the law establishing Yellowstone National Park in what is
now Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho. With this action, for the first time, the United
States government set apart a large wild space, and declared it sacred. We declared
that this beautiful place would not be seen as merely something to be used—that
we wouldn’t look at the forests and geysers, and start calculating how much
value we could extract for them on the open market, but would instead declare
the value of these things merely in their beauty and existence. In setting aside Yellowstone, we listened to
“a voice crying out from the wilderness”—and acted, placing it upon an altar of
preservation, and we later followed that with other great wonders, such as
Yosemite, the Painted Desert, Biscayne, and Acadia. We responded to the truth
that some places had enough value solely in feeding the spirit. This was a
somewhat surprisingly foresighted act by a nation which was at the same time setting
out on its rapid and sometimes heedless race toward industrialization, a race
that threatened other natural wonders such as this. Yellowstone and her sisters
are sanctuaries made by God— and on March 1, 1872, we declared that we
recognized that they needed to be preserved and set apart by humanity as a
deliberate act of will and honor.
In the
course of my time as a teacher of American history, one of the words that the
students and I would discuss was the word “sacrifice.” Usually one of the first meanings that came
to mind was “a ritual in which something dies in order to appease a deity.”
That’s the meaning we often think of when we see this word used in the earliest
contexts in the Bible. Sacrifices were
often performed to seal covenants or to remind those involved later of the
covenant promises that they had previously made —a topic that will come up
frequently in our readings during this year’s Lenten lectionary selections. Another
meaning of that word that commonly comes to mind, often almost at the same
time, is “something that one gives up.” Coincidentally, this meaning is the one
that we connect to the season of Lent, seemingly as a default response. “What
are you going to give up?” we ask each other. Yet there is another meaning, the
one that was alluded to in the first paragraph, that I like to hold on to when
thinking about “sacrifice.”
In the
etymology of the word, “sacr” means “holy, set apart,” and “ify” means “to do
or make.” Thus, at its basic, building-block level, a sacrifice is something
that makes us holy. It is also something that is set apart from the common
world, and held up as different in a special way. That is the meaning of the
word when we talk of the Eucharist as “a sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving.”
What if we looked at the season of Lent less as a time to give up things (of
which we are usually only mildly fond anyway), and more as a time in which we
are called to set ourselves and our view of time apart? What if we looked upon
Lent not as a time of denial or appeasement, but instead as a joyful time to
try to make ourselves holy and to seek to please God?
In looking
at Lent in this way, we also have to acknowledge that we are not always perfect
in our attempt to set ourselves apart—far from it! We were not always perfect
in our attempts to preserve beautiful places. Many other beautiful places
disappeared before the approaching wave of industry and modernization. The
Arkansas River, which is wild and exultant in its power near the place of its
birth in Colorado, has been dammed and channeled so many times by the time it
reaches my hometown of Tulsa that it is, in most spots, a sand-choked, muddy
trickle in all but the wettest season. Even
within Yosemite in California, we at times faltered in our resolve to preserve
its wild, sacred beauty: the legendarily lovely Hetch Hetchy Valley was flooded
to create a reservoir to slake the thirst of rapidly expanding cities far to
its west. Yet, with Yellowstone, we
began, for the first time in world history, a counter-cultural drive to stop
our heedless rush to remake creation in our image, and instead, we sought to
both preserve and provide access to a wild and beautiful place. In so doing, we
were, in a way, perhaps hoping that this preservation and protection of
Yellowstone’s rivers, geysers, and varied terrain would make US holy. That’s
what a true sacrifice is: something that makes us holy. Something that sets us
apart, and deliberately places us upon a different path.
One of the objectives
of observing Lent is to look again at how we promise to set ourselves apart in
the baptismal covenant that we rededicate ourselves to periodically, and to
examine how we can improve our adherence to those promises. As we begin Lent,
some of us may have recited The Great Litany. Others of us may have prayed the
Litany of Repentance in the Ash Wednesday liturgy itself. Both of these
beautiful prayers serve to remind us both of the pitfalls and sins we need to
avoid, but also of the ways in which we are dependent upon God. They also
remind us that, as Christians, we have promised to set ourselves aside, to set
our very selves apart, in order to be a holy people, a priestly people,
sacrificed and sanctified and made holy by God and by our commitment to God.
Lent can
perform the same function in a different way—it is not a place, it is a period
of time. It is a period of time—40 short days, some of the shortest of the
year, usually—in which we remember the 40 days Jesus spent in the wilderness,
himself being tempted, as we read in last Saturday’s gospel reading from Mark
1:9-15. It is a time when we ourselves may recognize that we need a time in the
wilderness—a time to strip away all the layers of daily concerns that often serve
to separate us or distract us from the call we receive as Christians to
reorient our lives in a Godward direction. On this day in 1872, we recognized
that we all need time in the wilderness, to set ourselves apart. May Lent be
such a time, a time not just of giving up some things, but more importantly a
time to hallow and consecrate ourselves anew to God.
