Late one spring, my husband and I took our three children on a vacation which included a few days in Gatlinburg, Tennessee. They were 11, 8 and 6 at the time, old hands at experiencing the joys of lakes, rivers and the ocean, but they had never seen mountains up close.
We arrived in Gatlinburg shortly before midnight. I had been there before and even in the darkness, I could sense the presence of the mountains looming around us like sleeping giants. The kids, however, were oblivious to everything but the need for a bathroom, a vending machine and a TV, in that order. We herded them into a hotel room, allowed them to stuff themselves with a weird variety of junk from the vending machine down the hall and then stuffed them into bed.
We awoke to a morning shrouded in heavy fog. Our goal for the day was to hike to the top of Clingman's Dome. Armed with a travel brochure, chewing gum, and refreshments to sustain us through half a day's journey, we piled into our vehicle. We left the bustling town of Gatlinburg and set out on a narrow, winding mountain road. It was early June and the trees were in full foliage. As the sun burned the last of the fog away, the trees crowded close to the road and we drove into deep shade. Joe turned the headlights back on. In the backseat, the kids suddenly realized that they were in close proximity to each other and began their usual negotiations over personal boundary lines, distribution of snacks and control of hand held video games. Joe and I entertained ourselves by making predictions on how long it would take for Operation Backseat to escalate into World War III.
"When are we gonna get to the mountain?" our daughter, Becca, asked a few minutes later.
"We're on the mountain." Joe answered. "We're going up the mountain right now."
By this time, the road was so steep that our vehicle was practically vertical.
“I don't see a mountain," our youngest daughter, Anna complained.
"Me neither." our son, John mumbled.
“I don't think you're going the right way, Dad," Becca advised. "There's no mountains around here, there's only trees."
"You can't see the mountain because we're on the mountain," I explained patiently. "Don't you feel your ears popping?"
Unfortunately, this question prompted the simultaneous unwrapping of approximately thirty pieces of chewing gum.
“That's nice," sighed my husband, "Now it sounds like a hog pen in here."
"Tell me when we get to the mountain," came a muffled voice from the backseat.
A few minutes later, fate dealt us a lucky card in the form of a small sign with the words, "Overlook - Viewing Area Ahead" printed on it. Joe pulled the car over to a small parking area and we all piled out. We followed a little pathway around a bend in the road and the kids gasped in unison.
The trees fell away, and there, spread out before of us was a half circle of green giants with their shoulders to the sky. Far, far below lay a valley floor which appeared and disappeared in lavender and periwinkle mists, as if there really was a giant somewhere around, smoking a purple peace pipe.
"Oh my God!" whispered a dazzled voice beside me, "Look where we are. We're on the mountain!"
Often, we think of the Kingdom of God as a destination that we will arrive at after death - and then only if we managed to stay on the straight and narrow route through life paved by our religion. We think of spiritual practices or religious services as a kind of rest stop where we meet up with fellow travelers and stock up on refreshments. Prayer is like a two-way radio that we turn on and off. We speak to God, listen intently for his reply and try not to get discouraged when there isn’t one. It’s hard sometimes, not to give up hope, but we comfort ourselves with the knowledge that one day, we will stand, dazzled and humble, in the presence of God - after we die, of course. Life on the narrow road is sometimes painful, sometimes scary and often boring, but it is better than the fiery alternative that so many of us have been threatened with, so we stick to it.
Somewhere along the route, however, many of us begin to get this niggling little feeling that we are missing something in life - that there might be more to our present existence than working to attain security, wealth and the approval of other people who are also working to attain security, wealth and approval. This feeling often shows up in the most difficult moments of life's journey - usually when we are in the midst of some kind of personal crisis. It appears in the empty space after a devastating loss, in the wreckage of a broken relationship, at the unmarked grave of some buried dream. When feel it, we slow down for a moment to ponder what it is that we might be missing, but then we shake the feeling off and keep going, sure that the peace and joy we seek lies at the end of life's road.
During a somewhat difficult time in my life, when everything seemed dull and bleak, I decided that I needed to get away from it all to find some kind of different perspective. Since I had a young and needy family at the time, my options for "getting away from it all" were somewhat limited. The farthest away I could get was the local library, where I checked out a stack of books and tapes on different types of meditation and centering prayer. At first, I was disappointed because I could not clear my mind as the experts instructed. As soon as I dispensed with one thought, thirty more would crowd in to take its place. But I persevered, and after a while, my thoughts began to thin out and I began to get little glimpses into the spaces between them. Then, one day, something startling happened: All of my thoughts cleared away, and in their place, there was nothing but deep silence and yawning black space. I let myself rest in this space, weightless and free, for a long time. When I came out of it, a beautiful truth appeared before me. It was not a dream, a hallucination, or a religious vision. It was just my ordinary, every-day life, spread out before me in a way that I had never seen before - a life that was alive with such goodness, truth and love that I was dazzled by its beauty. There were painful scars running through it, but they were like a sculptor's marks, carving out works of art. In the midst of the stillness, I sensed a towering, silent presence. The peace of God swirled around me.
In that moment, I realized that the Kingdom of God is not a place that I am going to, it is a truth that I am waking up to. Suddenly, all of those strange scripture passages about staying awake began to make sense. In the years since then, after countless hours of meditation, reading, and walking on and off the narrow road, I have come to realize that heaven is all around me, but most of the time I am just too blind to see it. And I am not the only one. Blindness is a part of the human condition and has been ever since the first humans decided to start picking life apart and judging it by its separate details.
In order to condemn something as bad, one must close one's eyes to the good in it. When we close our eyes to good, we close them to God, from whom all good things come. Like Adam and Eve, we pick from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil and condemn ourselves to traveling through life like miniature gods, compulsively separating the bad from the good. We separate a person’s bad qualities from their good qualities and find them unworthy of our love. We separate the painful events of our lives from the joyful events, and we say that life is hard and cruel. We separate our problems from our blessings and line them up until they are like armies, impossible to face. We focus on the separate details of our lives until we lose sight of the one glorious Life that contains all those details.
We can train ourselves to pause, from time to time, to rise above the details and see the beautiful whole; but when the prayer ends, or the meditation is over, or the door to the church closes behind us, the details always crowd in again, obscuring our ability to see where we are. We are forced back into the shadows of our own doubts. We say that we believe that God created us, but doubt that we are good enough for him. We say that those who mourn are blessed, but we doubt that beauty can grow from sorrow. Like Thomas, kneeling before the scarred Christ, we say that we believe in the Resurrection, and yet we doubt that pain in our lives has the power to carve out a masterpiece. We are like people standing at the rim of the Grand Canyon, lamenting the ugliness of our own scars. But what is the Grand Canyon but a scar, carved out of tumult and chaos?
Many years ago, my sister called me one morning to relate a funny story involving her three-year old son. He had crawled into her bed in the early hours of the morning and as they lay snuggling, he pointed to a picture of our grandparents in a frame on her nightstand.
"Is that your Grandma and Grandpa?" my nephew asked.
"Yes, it is," my sister replied.
"Are they dead?" Daniel asked with a puzzled frown.
"Yes, they're dead." my sister affirmed.
"Then how come their eyes are open?" asked Daniel.
My sister said she struggled to hold back her laughter as she explained to her son that our grandparents were not dead at the time the picture was taken. I laughed at the story too, but years later, I realized that, like many childhood observations, it holds a kernel of elemental truth. We compare death to "going to sleep", but I think it might be more like waking up.
We live in a state of near constant illusion, believing ourselves to be separate from each other, separate from peace, separate from happiness, separate from God. We are like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, tossing and turning in her warm bed in Kansas, endlessly longing to return to a place she had never really left. And like Dorothy, we will wake up someday and find that life has been unmasked and that we are surrounded by love.
Until then, as we travel through the shadows of doubts that grow out of our own judgments, maybe it will help us to remember that God looks upon all he creates as "good", and that his eyes are open, even when ours are shut. We see details and doubts, but he sees the whole masterpiece.
Marshall McLuhan, communications theorist once said, "We're not sure who discovered water, but we're pretty sure it wasn't the fish."
The Garden of Eden and the Kingdom of God belong to eternity and I could be wrong, but it seems to me that if eternity has no beginning and no end, then that must mean that we are already in it.
I'm pretty sure this is it, guys.
We're on the mountain.
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Jackie D
August 04, 2021
Love this as usual!