mountain climbing
reflections from Parish Bible Study
What happens when you climb a mountain? You breathe thinner air—it’s different up here—and so are the trees. You may even go past the line of air where trees can grow. You can see much farther than you usually can, and you can see clearly—above the smog or fog or even, sometimes, clouds.
People say—they have said for a long time—that the divine dwells on top of mountains.
On Mount Sinai, Moses spoke with Jacob’s God. Zeus held court on Mount Olympus. Mount Kailash in Tibet was the family home of the god Shiva, the destroyer. Mountains are the topography of the sacred: they strike awe in your heart. No one has fear of the Lord anymore, just small fears. But when you see a mountain, you have fear of the Lord: to have Fear of the Lord means that you are living in a spiritual world, you remember as you walk through your waking day that we are not just flesh and blood, we are not just squirrels, busy burying away nuts for a rainy day, but we are citizens of a softer world. We walk each day in a world of the spirit, and this is the world we are beholden to and must answer to—if not today, then one day in the future. What is the shape of our heart? How tender is our soul? These are the questions we ask ourselves when we have fear of the lord. Mountains are creation on a grand scale: they remind us that humans are also creation on a grand scale, a spiritual scale.
The first time I saw God on top of a mountain, I never wanted to come back down.
Hiking in Connemara National Park, wading through grass, and picking our way across rocks and herds of sheep, I looked down over Kylemore Lake.
We had to turn and go back down, for some reason. Probably Mass or dinner. We were the three-person ministry team for a two-week long retreat for Irish school teachers. We had days to hike while the teachers were in theology classes or doing other services.
So we had gotten up Diamond Hill during a spare day. It was bright and sunny, and the ground was boggy and lush. It was an easy hike, you barely noticed we were slowly making our way upward until you could see the valley, the lough, and the Benedictine abbey where we were staying, stretching out beneath your feet. We had become removed from the scenery of every day we usually moved among. Suddenly, you have a new perspective.
I wanted to go farther, up to the summit.
If this is what the world reveals to you, standing just a few hundred feet above it, I wanted to see what could be seen when you had exhausted all possible upward movement. What would you see at the peak: when there is no longer any earth above you?
We couldn’t go any higher, we had to turn around. But we were just a few minutes from the top. I stood for a moment, feet planted in the grass, listening to quiet, the stillness only interrupted by the bleats of sheep carried on the wind. I looked up at the rocks above me, a dark afternoon cloud blowing in behind it. What would I see, looking down from the top of that small Irish mountain? What would I understand, sitting in the silence of wind, sheep, and heartbeat? What would I know, if I had a few spare minutes to climb just a few feet higher?
That is the mystery mountains invite us into: climb to find out what you don’t know, and to what you knew before with new eyes.
When you go back down into it, you’ll have a kind of revelation in your heart that Creation is larger than just our everyday scenery. You’ll remember the world goes higher up than maybe we’re allowed to raise our eyes every day. And perhaps that’s why, when we look up at mountains, we know the divine has a message to give us, if we’ll only climb up a little higher to hear it.