Yes, you have the choice of staying dry inside and watching through a window, but I've always believed that being protected from the wind and water is missing half the experience of a religious revelation. As I weave back and forth on deck, nearly swept off my feet by the pounding wind and spray, a sheer terror and awe pulsate through my body and soul, a sure knowledge of the danger of near-annihilation. These are the feelings Moses must have experienced in the presence of the Burning Bush - the unmistakable Presence of God.
Because God is Present in these magnificent Falls. God lives within them as surely as God lives in me, though in totally different ways. I'm not saying the Falls ARE God because they are not. But God created them and they bear the seal of His love and carry His life within them. In their presence we experience a sense of His raw power and sublime majesty in an unforgettable way.
Nature is a sacrament because it gives us the opportunity to encounter God: our healing God, majestic God, beautiful God, gentle and seductive God, frighteningly powerful God. All of Nature's faces and sounds and scents and touches and tastes usher us into His enormously varied and diversified Presence. We too are part of Nature, part of God's creation, and as St. Francis intuited, everything that lives and breathes in this world is our brother or sister in Christ.
One poet who understood that experiencing Nature is meant to be a religious experience was Denise Levertov. She was born in England; her mother was Welsh, and her father was a Russian Hassidic Sefardic Jew who became an Anglican priest. Later she married an American writer and came to the United States, where she became a naturalized American citizen.
Denise knew she was meant to be a poet from her childhood, and her poetry details in part her own slow spiritual journey from agnosticism to Christian faith, a journey marked by doubt, mystery, questioning, and affirmation. Shortly after her move to Seattle in her fifties to be near her beloved Mt. Rainier, she converted to Catholicism. In one of her poems, she compares God to a mountain. She says that when clouds cover a mountain, it is still huge and massive and in existence. God is the same; even when he is clouded, we know He is there.
One of Denise Levertov's most beautiful poems, one that speaks of experiencing the attributes of God in nature, and which, at one point, reminds me of my Niagara Falls experience, is "To Live In the Mercy of God":
To lie back under the tallest
oldest trees. How far the stems
rise, rise
before ribs of shelter
open!
To live in the mercy of God. The complete
sentence too adequate, has no give.
Awe, not comfort. Stone, elbows of
stony wood beneath lenient
moss bed.
And awe suddenly
passing beyond itself. Becomes
a form of comfort.
becomes the steady
air you glide on, arms
stretched like the wings of flying foxes.
To hear the multiple silence
of trees, the rainy
forest depths of their listening.
To float, upheld,
as salt water
would hold you,
once you dared.
To live in the mercy of God.
To feel vibrate the enraptured
waterfall flinging itself
unabating down and down
to clenched fists of rock.
Swiftness of plunge,
hour after year after century.
O or Ah
uninterrupted, voice
many-stranded.
To breathe
spray. The smoke of it.
Arcs
of steelwhite foam, glissades
of fugitive jade barely perceptible. Such passion -
rage or joy?
Thus, not mild, not temperate,
God's love for the world. Vast
flood of mercy
flung on resistance.
God's passionate torrent of mercy envelopes the world; how often is it flung on our resistance? How often do we cower behind the closed windows of our own sadness or even despair, when opening them can free our faces for the mighty winds and currents of the Holy Spirit's grace? On days when we want to wall ourselves off from God and grace, a walk barefoot through springy grass, surrounded by a riot of perfumed wildflowers, or a climb up a mountainside, or a ride under a waterfall, can bring us close to God again. To be scoured clean by that wind and spray. To be filled to the brim with joy by the sight of dancing flowers. To be gentled by peace as our fingers wander through the cool water of a stream. To be humbled by the view from a peak.
Encounter God in whatever vistas of Nature surround you. Allow your heart to come home to the God Who waits for you there to embrace you!