Ken Burns Talks to Commonweal
On Wednesday I was fortunate enough to conduct a phone interview with celebrated documentary filmmaker Ken Burns, the subject being his forthcoming series on America’s National Parks (the six-part series starts airing on PBS on Sept. 27. ) He’s hyper-articulate, and utterly impassioned about the history and symbolism of the parks and their impact on visitors, past and present. We spoke, among other things, about the spiritual impulses that were critical factors in the creation of the first parks–people who felt God’s presence, or at least some kind of transcendence, in spectacular natural scenery.
Wouldn’t you know that my house’s fire alarm went off for no reason (the first time it’s ever done this; last time it sounded, I’d burned an apple crisp) right in the middle of the interview, disconnecting the phone. Mr. Burns graciously called me back. And the fire department didn’t show up until the interview was concluded….
Look for an article about the series in a September issue of Commonweal.
Tags: Ken Burns, national parks, nature
Ms. Wren,
Interesting about the religious tie-in. I wonder if it’s the influence of Protestants like Jonathan Edwards who was acutely aware of the presence of God in nautre. I’ve run across only one Catholic mystic who had an overwhelming sense of the presence of God in nature — Thoas Merton, and he was raised Protestant. Seems we Catholics have something to learn from the Protestants, and maybe some of hte Asians too.
Of course, some centuries before Jonathan Edwards, there was St. Francis, no slouch in recognizing the presence of God in nature. (There was also, for those interested in the history of mountaineering, a sixteenth century — ?? date uncertain — Swiss priest from Luzern, whose name I’ve long since forgotten, who climbed the nearby peak of Pilatus, in part to prove that the ghost of Pontius Pilate, said to inhabit a lake near the summit, was not there after all. But also because, many years before the Romantics discovered Alpine glory, he liked a day in the mountains).
Of course Ann Olivier may be right, and whatever there may be in the Catholic tradition about the presence of God in nature, we may have not paid sufficient attention to it, and had to wait for the Protestants to come along and point out the obvious.
mr. Clifford –
Without a doubt St. Francis appreciated nature both in itself and as God’s handiwork. But his writings do not show any overwhelming intuition of the presence , the immanence of God in his natural works. In Bernard McGinn’s history of Christian mysticism, St. francis is not mentioned as one of them.
I think there are very few Protestant “nature mystcs” who are not pantheists. But they are notable, at least to me, by the intensity of their awareness and love and gratitude for the great gift of the beauties of nature. (Merton is different in this respect — what he finds at Pilunnawars (so?) is God-as-Compassion. Fascinati g.)