It was about this time last year, when I was on the search for air conditioned outings—as one does in the summer in Portland—that I found myself at the Pompeii exhibit at OMSI. Perhaps some of you visited it as well? It was a breathtaking installation, at once intimate and cosmic in scale. There were well-preserved fragments of people’s ordinary domestic lives before the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in 79 AD, and then there were the shocking reminders of the speed and scale of the destruction of the city. Entire bodies were cast from the cavities left in the ash and lava that overtook human beings and animals.
It was a carefully curated and dramatically-staged exhibit, designed to maximize the emotional impact of the Pompeii experience. You might think of it as the 21st century expression of booths built to memorialize something that happened on a mountain. But for me, it paled in comparison to the much simpler exhibit in the adjacent hallway, which featured the active volcanoes of the Pacific Northwest. Mt. Baker, Glacier Peak, Mt. Ranier, Mt. St. Helen’s, Mt. Adams, Mt. Hood, Three Sisters. Rooted in the primal matter of the earth’s creation, these mountains are powerful and dangerous. That’s the geography we live in, and it rightly inspires awe.
Not every mountain is awesome, however. Last week, I was traveling from a pastoral visit in Happy Valley to parts northeast, and found myself driving through the Mt. Tabor neighborhood. Which is was intriguing to me because—in Christian tradition—Tabor is the name of the mountain where the Transfiguration occurred. So I was looking around for something dramatic; a mountain worthy of the glory of God as Peter and James and John experienced it in our Gospel reading today. And after peering around charming bungalows, I finally managed to get a glimpse of the gently rounded hill that rises a modest 400 feet above the surrounding neighborhood. Just for comparison, the Biblical Mt. Tabor is 1800 feet high.
Today we heard two stories of awe-inspiring mountain events. One is about Moses’ encounter with God on Mt. Sinai, from which he returns with a face so bright that nobody can bear to look upon it. The other is about Jesus and his disciples on Mt. Tabor, where the prophets Moses and Elijah appear in brilliant light. It’s from stories like these that we get the metaphor of “mountaintop experience” to describe a particularly impactful spiritual encounter. And that’s not just a contemporary pop-spirituality expression: throughout the Bible, mountains are the places where God is revealed.
Belden Lane, author of The Solace of Fierce Landscapes: Exploring Desert and Mountain Spirituality, describes Christian spiritual growth as a journey from desert to mountain to cloud. Of course he’s borrowing from the geography of the Exodus, and the mountain above the Sinai desert where Moses guided the recalcitrant Hebrews for forty-some years. What mystics call the purgative way—that is, the process of letting go of the old in order to be open to a new relationship with God—is symbolized by the desert. It’s an inner and outer landscape wherein people learn to travel lightly, consume minimally, and listen deeply.
The mountain, which the ancient Hebrews and Jesus’ disciples arrived at by way of desert sojourn, was the real and symbolic place of God’s self-revealing. That’s what Christian mystics would call the illuminative way. It’s how people encounter sacred truth. And even though illumination can happen anywhere and everywhere on earth, it manifests with a kind of clarity and perspective that resembles the view from a mountaintop. The face-shining, clothing-bleaching, transfigurative glory of God does not show up exclusively on mountains and their metaphorical equivalents. But the air is thin there, the visual obstacles and few, and we all know that some settings make it easier to see what’s already all around us. That is, to see what’s hidden in plain sight.
Which brings me to the third movement of spiritual growth: deepening connection to God, which the mystics call it the unitive way. Belden Lane uses the metaphor of the cloud for union with God, an obvious reference to the Transfiguration story we just heard. Recall that after the glorious appearance of Moses and Elijah alongside Jesus, an event which Peter utterly bungles by trying to turn it into an OMSI exhibit, a cloud overtakes Jesus and the disciples. From its misty interior God speaks clearly and audibly. In the cloud metaphor, union with God is not so much about sight—that stunningly clear vision from the mountaintop—but about insight. It is the assurance of God fully present even when unseen: behind the veil of Moses, inside the cloud with Jesus, hidden within the recesses of our hearts.
Today we will baptize Jonah Gaynor Strauhull, and you’ll notice that everything about this liturgy is designed to evoke a mountaintop experience. For him, for his family, and for us. We’ll make bold promises rooted in ancient revelations of God. Canon Matthew will anoint Jonah with oil and the skin of his face will shine like Moses’. So will yours if we are energetic with the asperges. And then we’ll all have to decide what to do about this particular mountaintop experience. Which—like all illuminative events—is inherently temporary. If the gospel is any guide, mountaintop clarity is usually followed by cloudy obscurity.
Obscurity. Lack of clarity. Blurring of certainty. That’s what happens within the cloud, behind the veil, in frankly in all the ambiguity of post-mountaintop life. Like Peter, I’d really like to box up God’s revelation in a place where I can see and admire it clearly. Maybe Install Moses and Elijah and Jesus at OMSI like historical relics from another mountain. But instead, God’s method seems to send disciples back down, catch them on the downslope in the obscurity, and tell them to listen to Jesus. Maybe because we listen better when we can’t see? Maybe because we see better when we’re using insight?
I’ll confess that—at least for me—it’s pretty hard to let go of the desire for clarity. I’d like my religion and my understanding of the world to inhabit well-built dwellings in landscape where there’s plenty of light and structure and the boundaries and clear. It helps me to know who and what belongs in the neighborhood. But for some reason, that doesn’t seem to be God’s preferred method of communicating. God may be visible from the mountaintop, but God’s voice speaks to us from the places of ambiguity. It’s from there that God calls the uncertain ones and cares for the outcast ones and enters the world through the dark of a womb into the dust of a cave.
So if things seem particularly unclear, ambiguous or messy in your life right now, that’s entirely OK. Let me assure you that God is already fully present with you in whatever cloudy space of uncertainty and ambiguity you may be inhabiting. God is calling you by name and inviting you to listen. That’s how God does it. You may not be able or ready to hear God’s voice yet, in which case I suspect you have some desert and mountain spiritual journeying yet to do. But Jesus’ story reminds us that God is already right here with us in the cloudiness of everyday existence. Our inner journeys simply serve to lead us home to where we are. To arrive where we started, as TS Eliot put it in his poem “Little Gidding”—
With the drawing of this Love and the voice of this Calling
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always–
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well.
Amen.
