In the Pacific Northwest, religious experience is rooted historically in contact with the landscape.

"In the Pacific Northwest, religious experience - the charged and creative moment of encounter with the sacred - is rooted historically in contact with the landscape.  This is certainly true in Native American culture, and Euro-American explorers and settlers, too, found the vast and imposing geography of Cascadia both overwhelming and awe-inspiring . . . 'The Journals of Lewis and Clark,' for instance, show a preoccupation with the physical grandeur of the country . . . Even today, Northwesterners find moments of mystical illumination in contact with nature.  The prototypical religious experience of nature in the American West is the mountain epiphany, embodied in the adventures of John Muir, who writing of a sojourn into the wild, said: 'I will touch naked God.' "

Mark A. Shibley

Southern Oregon University

Photo: Rosy Spirea, Picture Lake, and Mt. Shuksan; Mt. Baker Wilderness, WA; July 22, 2013