'Lying between the earth and the heavens': Spirituality of place in 19th- and 20th-century American nature writing (Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, Annie Dillard)

In Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture, Victor and Edith Turner discuss how pilgrimage is rooted in place and time. Pilgrimage points to the historicity of God, the belief that an infinite Absolute is found in particular places at particular times by particular people. In suggesting that natural landscapes can be the site of spiritual revelation, 19 th and 20th century American nature writers subscribe to a similar belief that Divinity is made manifest in particular natural places. Henry David Thoreau points to such a spirituality when he notes in Walden that "God himself culminates in the present moment" and that "Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads."; This discussion of spirituality of place in 19th and 20 th century American nature writing focuses on liminal images in texts by writers such as Thoreau, John Muir, and Annie Dillard. In describing sojourns into nature's liminal places---watery shores and rocky summits---these writers suggest that in such places the sacred is made manifest and the eternal intersects with time. In such cases, the boundary between nature's here-and-now and the supernatural realm of the Hereafter is figured in tangible spatial terms.; Although the image of the nature hermit persists in 21st century texts, this trope is misleading. The spiritual quest is a social quest, a search for communion with nature and with other humans. The social element of the individual religious quest is what transforms particular landscapes into spiritual habitats that maintain, sustain, and nurture individuals and communities. Finding themselves to be members of an ecosystem rather than isolated subjects in a solipsistic world, these protagonists realize to varying degrees the ways in which nature favors communities over lone individuals, survival being a matter of communion rather than isolation. The personal is political, feminist theory reminds us; so, too, the spiritual is ecological, an awakening that spurs one toward the world as acknowledgment that all life is connected in nature's web.