Professor John Moriarty was always on a religious quest. In the lecture I listened to after all these years, he said he wanted to walk beautifully on the earth!
Moriarty describes the earth this way:
“The universe is a continuous manifestation of wonder biding over, wonder overflowing any container it could be in…The only space journey we should ever take should be to take us home to the earth, the great and sacred earth.”
Moriarty then refers to a story in Exodus Chapter 3 where Moses encountered a burning bush in the desert of Sinai. The bush kept burning and burning. It should be consumed quickly because it is a dry bush in a desert but it keeps on burning. Then Moses hears a divine voice—the voice of God—who tells him to take off his shoes because the ground on which he stands is “holy ground.”
To this Moriarty adds,
“all ground is holy ground. You cannot be standing anywhere on earth and not be standing on holy ground. And every bush is a burning bush. Like any bush in Connemara… They are burning with green fire in the spring. They are burning with red fire in the autumn… It took someone like Van Gogh to show us that every tree is a green column of flame. Is green fire.”
Moriarty wants us, each one of us, to take off our shoes and experience holy ground. He also wants each of us to take off our shoes of European thinking. We must get rid of European creeds. We must be open to new experiences. We must “walk the earth with a barefoot heart and a barefoot brain.” Like Elvira Madigan we must have the courage to get off of what is safe and experience the new and the dangerous. We must experience a year of thinking dangerously. No, we must experience a lifetime of thinking dangerously. Safety is a trap that can deaden the heart and the mind that should be open to the new.
As Moriarty says, he does not want to be interrogated after his last day on earth and be asked if he ever set foot on the earth. To say no would be heart-breaking, for “setting foot on the earth is to set foot in paradise.” This is what I have been calling a new attitude to nature. An attitude filled with wonder. Not a desire to conquer it.
Like Henry David Thoreau, he does not want to admit on that last interrogation that he never lived at all. That would be a heart-breaking admission.