In my short life I have noticed that sometimes things fall down... stock prices, proud buildings, Lego towers. Their absence in our skylines and investments portfolios can be shocking. It is intriguing to me that when things physically fall, the direction they hurl
is toward the core. It is as if they lose the ability to resist the pull any longer.
After an earthquake in California, an immediate consequence is that the phone lines light up. Everyone leaps to connect with people they love. Whatever they had been doing before the ground cracked open~ commuting to work, complaining, deciding between the fuchsia shoes and the scarlet ones~ the only question worth answering is "Dear
one, are you all right?"
I had the chance to visit a mountain I walked on forty years ago. It was still there, although I haven't thought much about it in four decades. What does that tell me, in a language that leaves the spoken word mute? The mountain is there, not because I have tended it, or voted for it. Is there a verb in any tongue that encompasses what it does? Someone whose attention span has acclimated to video games and Google might argue that a
mountain doesn't do anything. But even though its activity may not register on a backyard motion sensor, the endurance of the Catskills nourishes me.
"Majesty" is a personification that we use to sing tribute to them, as if royalty were an embellishment to a mountain's worth. But kingdoms have been known to fall as precipitously as the Dow, with no more evidence of grandeur than the World Trade Centers on 9-12.
The Word has a curious thing to
say about mountains.
"If you say to this mountain 'Be cast into the sea', it will be done." Matthew 21:21
Is it possible not only that God fashioned the Rockies from.... well... whatever resources He had available.... but He can also obliterate them? But wait! Is He going so far as to offer that power to me?
A sense of power is one thing that fell a few years back when by sheer strength of will a
nation tried to make the stock prices go up.
"Who by trying can add one cubit to his stature?" Matthew 27.
How can they both be true? Mountain flinger one day, height enhancement wannabe the next?
When my sweet mother lay on her deathbed, she was the picture of weakness. Decision making, mobility, and strength all fell through her boney fingers in those last weeks like sand on the Jersey shore. But hours
before her final breath Mom whispered of an imminent power that embraced movement, change and joy that were not visible in her pallid skin or atrophied limbs.
"What are we celebrating?...Amazing!...You did that?...I can't believe it!...I have everything."
She could no longer resist the pull.
Christmas is an extravagant holiday. But what
are we celebrating?
An 80 year old woman with cancer registers pretty high on the "powerless scale". Yet even she is second runner up to a minutes old baby sleeping at His mother's breast.
How could a nursling exert a gravitational tug that draws angels, wise men and shepherds to their Core? Was falling down before Him more urgent than whatever
tasks they had been pursuing before the heavens cracked open and Divinity fell upon us with the speed of love?
This King was here forty lifetimes ago, and I daresay will be forty hence. Maybe that's the mountain's message for me, if I listen with my heart.
My Mountain Man has the power to connect me to the people I love. He might even let me hold my mother's hand again. But next time it won't be
boney.
