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Last fall my wife and I lost our home in a California wildfire. Then, in the spring, we got the call in the middle of the night that all parents dread; minutes later we were in the emergency room at our local hospital, our son before us in a coma, his forehead crushed in an auto accident. Thanks to the healing hand of God, our son survived and is almost back to normal. And our house is being rebuilt in good time. What my wife and I have found, however, now that summer has just begun, is that it is we ourselves who are still in need of repair.

So it was that over the solstice we made a trip to Yosemite, the place where we first met. Backpacking into our first night's campsite, I fell into the first creek and Sharon fell into the second. Somehow that didn't matter. We were getting old, and out of practice, but we were in Yosemite, and we set up our tent under Jeffrey pines at the base of a sloping, sandy meadow that reached up and away to a shining cluster of granite domes. The next day we broke out the rope and climbed the highest we could see, and the day after that we hiked to a summit farther afield and from its spine admired the rocky sprawl of the Sierra Nevada, "gazing afar," as John Muir put it in My First Summer, "over domes and peaks, lakes and woods, and the billowy glaciated fields."

What we noticed was, we were happy again. Our anxieties and irritations had fallen away, and we felt grateful to be in the presence of one another in this good place. Not incidentally, this was just as John Muir, the patron saint of Yosemite, had predicted over a century ago: "Climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Nature's peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop off like autumn leaves."

Muir seems to be on to something, as my wife and I can and do testify from our own experience. The question for Christians, I suppose, is whether these "good tidings" so near and dear to John Muir's heart have anything to do with the good news of the gospel. Is "Nature's peace" that which passes understanding or just some sort of pagan bliss? Why go to Yosemite when we could have been attending a Focus-on-the-Family marriage renewal seminar in some respectable hotel ballroom?

The answers to these questions about John Muir's core beliefs are complicated. To guess at them we must briefly look at the family he came from, the mentors he found, and the life he chose.

Muir was born in 1838 in Dunbar, Scotland, the son of a reasonably prosperous grain merchant. His father, Daniel, ran the family with military discipline and evangelical zeal. Already the member of a local dissenting congregation, Daniel Muir became attracted to the newly formed Disciples of Christ, who wished to dispense with clergy altogether. At the urging of this group he took his family to Wisconsin in 1849 and broke ground on a farm north of Madison.

From age 12, John Muir, the oldest son, labored from dawn to dark at the plow while his father traveled the region as a lay preacher. The farm was to support this ministry, no questions asked. The family was reduced to one vegetarian meal a day, and no reading material was allowed outside of the Bible. John Muir was made to memorize all of the New Testament and much of the Old. An inventive young man, when he displayed an "early rising machine" at the state fair (a contraption that literally catapulted the unfortunate sleeper out of bed), his father wrote him a long letter on the sin of vanity. When the son showed interest in being a naturalist, the father insisted that the study of geology was blasphemous, and botany almost as wicked. By the time John Muir left home at age 22 for the University of Wisconsin, he and his father were at implacable odds.

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