Sacred Landscape

by

Practicing Faith

Special to United Methodist Insight | June 10, 2026

“I lift my eyes to the hills – from where will my help come?” asks the Psalmist in Psalm 121, which is titled “a song of ascents” – a song about a pilgrim approaching Mount Zion, the hill on which Jerusalem stands. The pilgrim is on the way to celebrate the high holy days – many of the Psalms were sung along the way. “Sing for joy, O heavens, and exult, O earth, break forth, O mountains, into singing!” chanted the prophet Isaiah (49:13). The pilgrim sings of the landscape, the landscape sings back to the pilgrim.

Roberta and I just spent two weeks on the road through the great Southwest – Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, Nevada, the desert of California. When we got to Highway 95 in Utah, the landscape sang to us. And our souls sang back.

White Canyon’s softly rounded gorge undulates through pale sandstone, with a bosque of cottonwoods and verdant grass along its occulted watercourse, for miles and miles and miles, loomed over on both sides by huge monuments and cliffs of deep red stone and scree. From the intersection of Highway 12 in the miniscule burg of Hanksville, huge towers of grey mud rose glowing in the desert distance, giving way to the turns and twists of the trickling Fremont River beckoning us into the magic kingdom of Capitol Reef’s enormous vertical walls of yellow, pink, and orange, spangled with sun and shadow, compact clouds of white and gold and grey scuttling across the ragged slice of sky above. A landscape so staggeringly beautiful that it was hard to believe that it was not sculpted and painted for the deep satisfaction of human pilgrims like ourselves.

And yet the awareness that this glorious scenery had nothing to do with our puny human preferences, the awareness that nothing we have ever imagined or created came close to what we were witnessing, the consciousness of the utter otherness of it all, impressed itself into our souls as we reverently drove along. In Bryce Canyon I took a hike up a little stream of cold water whitened by the sediment of the pale rock through which it cut, under huge hoodoos and towers and cliffs of weirdly eroded sandstone. Up, up, up I went until I found a spot where the stream flowed over a flat slab of rock into a little waterfall, where I took a dip, joyfully dunking my head under the cold rush. Baptized into worshipful bliss, giving myself over completely to the stunning landscape.

No wonder, then, that the Mormon settlers of Utah referred to the land as Zion. Sacred scenery. A land made holy by the awe with which those settlers first beheld it.

In Santa Fe, Roberta and I and our friends went outside to see the sunset on a blustery evening – and suddenly we were pelted by three-quarter-inch hail! The glorious New Mexico sky changes by the minute – its moods shift from bright to brooding, gold to grey, puffs of cloud to piled-up thunderheads… reminding me of this passage from Job 37:

“Hear this, O Job;

stop and consider the wondrous works of God.

Do you know how God lays his command upon them

and causes the lightning of his cloud to shine?

Do you know the balancings of the clouds,

the wondrous works of the one whose knowledge is perfect,

you whose garments are hot

when the earth is still because of the south wind?

Can you, like him, spread out the skies,

hard as a molten mirror?...

Now, no one can look on the light

when it is bright in the skies,

when the wind has passed and cleared them.

Out of the north comes golden splendor;

around God is awesome majesty...”

The interface between the natural landscape and the human soul is an expression of incarnational spirituality. Spirituality that isn’t just a head-trip – spirituality that is integral with the tangible, the visible, the visceral. Before going forth on his three-year mission, Jesus went to a beautiful place – a mountain with a spectacular vista of the Jordan River valley and the desert on either side of it, dropping down to the shimmering jewel of the Dead Sea. That was his spiritual food for forty days and forty nights. That vista de-centered him from his small-“s” self and re-centered him in the transcendent dimension of divine consciousness.

Deep attentive appreciation of natural scenery is a potent form of love. Your mouth hangs open in awe and ahhhh…. And your context shifts from your quotidian concerns and into the realm of the deep geological time displayed in the strata of the layered stone of the cliffs and mountains.

We were meant to lift our eyes to the hills. We were made to stop and consider the golden splendor and the awesome majesty…

The Rev. Jim Burklo is pastor of United Church of Christ, Simi Valley CA. This post is republished from his Substack blog, “Musings.”