Grand Canyon, Generous America, Great God

Grand is not a strong enough adjective. When you first see the canyon the best adjective is the much misused word, awesome. For the vastness, the sheer drops down, the extraordinary colours of the layers of rocks, the endless hills and ridges, shapes and structures, all with their own names like ‘Battleship’ or ‘Vishnu Temple’, which rise up wherever your eye turns, it all takes your breath away. It is truly awesome.  And certainly emotional. It is the only scene of creation I have known that brings tears to your eyes.

As well as the beauty, there is also a generosity about the way the canyon has been kept.
America is meant to be all ruthless commercialism, where Big Mac and Wendy signs have a divine right to appear wherever there are likely to be customers. Well, there are about six million customers a year at the canyon – and there is nothing of out of town America there at all. It’s been kept out.  And apart from the old fashioned Hotel El Tovar, the other accommodation and restaurants have an almost Youth Hostel feel about them. They are simple and the prices are reasonable, indeed generous given the killing the operators could make. And if they sold a few mining rights to the thousands of companies who want to extract uranium from the canyon, they would rake in billions. But they fight all these appeals. Proving that America is not always just about money. Here it’s about making sure ordinary people can see a great wonder of the world.

An important part of the generosity is that for a $25 weekly entrance fee, which you don’t even have to pay if the kiosk is shut, there is ample free parking and a bus service to all the many different viewing points. And these are not busses that come every hour. They come about every ten minutes from dawn to after dusk.

Another part of the generosity is that the canyon has been left exactly as it is. So much so that there are hardly any irritating safety signs, and as you walk on the simple rim path or go down a trail there is usually no fence at all. It’s just you and the canyon. And as you stop and stare again and again at the beauty, you feel grateful for the generosity and determination of America to make sure that people on ordinary salaries could come and enjoy this natural wonder of the world. No doubt they were inspired by Theodore Roosevelt who way back in 1903 said -

I hope you will not have a building of any kind, not a summer cottage, a hotel, or anything else, to mar the wonderful grandeur, the sublimity, the great loneliness and beauty of the canyon.

Leave it as it is. You can not improve on it. The ages have been at work on it, and man can only mar it. What you can do is to keep it for your children, your children's children, and for all who come after you, as one of the great sights which every American if he can travel at all should see.

Grand Canyon, Generous America – and a Great God. Many try to get to the rim for sunrise. There is a hushed atmosphere as the light begins to appear in the sky. People talk in whispers. It is like they are in a vast open air cathedral. And surely there is a sense of worship to the creator as the sun appears over the eastern rim. The beauty is so stunning that the time plus chance version of the universe seems utterly pathetic, too paltry and banal to even be called blasphemous.

The Great Artist has begun another day, and there is an instinctive response in every human heart, to utter a word of thanks, to say ‘How Great Thou Art.’ And for the Christian, the call of the canyon is very much to meditate on the greatness of our God; to be assured that He is more than able to overrule the worries of our own life; that, as with the canyon, all would be well and that His Ways would long out live the passing plastic fashions of the city.