This article appeared in this past Sunday's Indianapolis Star.Percy B. Shelley in his poem, Mont Blanc, writes, “Thou hast a voice, Great Mountain, to repeal large codes of fraud and woe…” With such faith I’m off to summit Mount Shasta in California. Summer is a time for such things. It’s a time for visiting a National Park, walking in the woods, or simply resting by the local creek. We speak of such a time as a “get-away” with a kind of escapist excitement. William Wordsworth, for instance, admitted that as a younger person he would climb the hills above Tintern Abbey, “more like a man flying from something he dreads, than one who sought the thing he loved…” We need to escape the technical demands of contemporary life even though we may not always have the courage to leave the cell phone at home. “Retreats” help us attend to our deepest selves.
Yet, Wordsworth’s mountain-climbing became a
way of actively seeking in nature “the
thing he loved.” The word “recreation,”
suggests that we might be “re-created” while at leisure. Many religious traditions
testify to a restorative experience of our own smallness in nature that cuts
against the narcissistic grain of our age.
George Hartzog, the former director of the National Park Service,
suggested this kind of experience can be universal. He said of being among Sequoia trees, “You
can’t stand there, all alone, without understanding there’s a power in the
world that is far greater than anything you’ve ever imagined… and that you are
connected to that power…”
Since
I was a boy I have felt such power as Van Gogh painted in his hills; I’ve
sought to see beyond sensory horizons like the Psalmist, who felt the throb of mountains,
“skipping like rams.” Such poetics point not merely to the
Psalmist’s subjective state, but to what is most real in the Mountain--the disturbing
Mystery which Wordsworth said was “deeply interfused” within all things. The Apostle Paul spoke to Athenians, some of
whom had built an altar to an unknown numinous presence, when he declared that
this God was in fact knowable in Christ: “in him we live and move and have our
being.” It is this God that I seek to encounter on the mountain.
I know
that for many today this personal God, heard about in Sunday-school texts, seems
like a flannel-graph reduction of their experience of the sublime. But if
the Divine does not have a personality, then god becomes by default an
indifferent and indistinct force, no more predictable than the weather. This, for me, has always been the real
reductionism. For if God is responsible
for our own conscious and relational existence, God must be at least personal. The God of Trinitarian Mystery is certainly far
more than what we can quantify as a knowable personality, but any God
responsible for our personal experience cannot be less. There is a sense within each of us that
recoils at the raw and often murderous power of the Mountain. This raging force renews us about as much as
cancer, parasites and childhood disease.
And so I flee to the Mountain, not merely to get away from all the
sickness of society—but to connect deeply with the Spirit of Love that
mysteriously beats beneath as well as within so many square miles of rock.
It’s good to make time for such things.
