Many years ago, too many for me to put an accurate number to, a few friends and I hiked up into not-always-easy to navigate trails and footpaths of the Cascades National Park in upstate Washington. Fortunately for me, my companions were familiar with the trails and requirements, so my principal contribution was to serve as a beast of burden for some of the supplies we carried in with us. They were old hands. I remember climbing for what was probably no more than half an hour up a steep and pointy-rocked path, though at the time I would have sworn we’d been forging a new and dangerous trail for several hours. We stopped (finally!) atop a little flat. The small clearing was circled by big, thick pines; it was decidedly chilly. As my experienced friends rummaged through our packs for the ingredients for lunch, I wandered to the edge of the clearing and pushed my way through branches and branches until the trees gave way. A small lake stretched before me, reaching a thick cover of pines on the other side. Towering 9,000 feet above the lake and me rose Mount Shuksan. Thick snow wrapped its peaks and covered its crags. The lake, clear as polished glass, reflected the sky and mountain and snows and mists which enveloped it. I couldn’t move. To this day, considering the many wonders my eyes have seen, it remains The Mountain. It was too much—too much beauty, too much majesty for me to take in. There was no sound, just the lake, the mists, the mountain and me. As much as I felt it was too much—maybe even felt the beauty hurt my eyes—I couldn’t turn away. It seemed as if this vision had been placed there just for me. I looked and looked, knowing I could never remember it as it was.
At some point I heard my name being called. An excited convert, I stumbled back to the clearing. “You’ve got to see this, it’s unbelievable! You’ve never seen anything like it in your life!”
“What? What is it?”
“Come and see.”
I lead the group, who abandoned our still-preparing meal, through the brush and dramatically held aside some branches. “Look!”
They crowded past me. “What?”
Wordless, I swept an arm across the vista. There were a few frowns and indulgent smiles. “Yeah, that’s Mount Shuksan. Quite a view, huh?” I remember little else of the conversation but soon I was alone and they’d returned to the cook-fire. But I couldn’t walk away. A curtain of heaven had been pulled back and I’d been given this glimpse. I lingered.
Eventually, I did leave, though. We ate lunch, cleaned up, headed on. Our trek kept the full view of the mountain, its skirt of trees, white coating of frost and looming mist in view for—I don’t know how long. Everybody else was talking and joking, and I joined in—but never forgetting the presence of the mountain. I cast a hundred glances and looks its way as we hiked on. After a while, the mists shrouded it and I’ve never seen it again. But it’s always close. As I write this account (too long for anyone but me, ashamed I can’t do it justice) it’s as if I’m standing before that placid lake again, my neck craning to glimpse the mountain’s hidden heights.
We catch glimpses. Though we live in the midst, in the continual presence of beauty, now and then something seizes us, and it’s as if we’ve been wearing blinders till then. Those who know me know I’m stony-hearted and usually inured to the wonders of nature. We're each inured in our own way, but it simply doesn't matter. Ignore them as we might, the world can barely contain all the beauties it holds; they burst forth all around us. I myself find beauty in the turn of a musical phrase—Vivaldi’s Magnificat and the Kyrie in Bach’s Mass in B Minor never fail to blur my vision with what in others would be tears; I used to coerce friends to take me to the Huntington Library in Los Angeles so I could look, over and over again, at a 15th century book of Cicero, each letter carefully written on vellum with unbelievable precision and beauty. Look at the familiar lines in the face of someone you love, the curl of a strand of a child’s hair, a cat drinking milk.
There is ugliness, too, and aplenty. Pain and fear and uncertainty more than abound. On the scales, I’m too ignorant to know which side tips deeper. In the century just passed, the most technologically advanced thus far, we’ve slaughtered more of each other than in all centuries past. None of us completes our course unscathed, and most of us pretty badly. But we catch glimpses.
Abba Evagrios, one of the Fathers of the Egyptian Desert sixteen hundred years ago, told his disciples, “Without temptations, no one will be saved.”
Temptations, trials, adversaries, troubles, pains, sorrows, griefs—they assail us, they hurt us, at times they seem to overwhelm us. The things that shake you may not shake me, but each of us gets profoundly shaken, and, on occasion, shaken to the core, where your secret despair and mine hides.
“Without temptations, no one will be saved.” In this fallen world, where evil in its many guises continually lurks, God hasn’t left us comfortless. He’s given us a world of Bach’s Kyrie and a child’s crooked smile, Cicero’s essays, the shimmering leaves of an aspen and a view of Mount Shuksan. These are glimpses, the ones on which we build our lives. We can carry the sorrow and despair, so easy to find and surrender to, or we can ferret out beauty, look for it, chase it and then cling to it and cherish it and build it into our lives with a rugged and graceful insistence. If we do, when the time comes to open your eyes after death closes them, the glimpses will have been just that—glimpses of a Vista that will draw you ever forward, into a Vision you can never exhaust.
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Here's one glimpse worth taking, courtesy of Aaron Copeland, Ansel Adams-and the Creator of Heaven and Earth:
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Now and again I get a whole batch of emails that tell me people are reading—and if not thinking about, at least responding to—my jottings. A couple of weeks back, my little essay “The Sting of Freedom,” sent 31 people to their keyboards to respond. Two complained I was a running-dog lackey of the Obamaite status quo and “weak on Islamo-fascism.” A few others chose to lecture me on the geography of the building site and the fact the building “isn’t a mosque.” The majority of those who wrote thought I was the smartest thing to come down the pike since Aristotle. That gives me more pause than anything else!
As I said in the blurb, I don’t know, or care, about the motivations of the builders of the building. I can’t, won’t presume, have no interest in judging their hearts (which I’m incompetent to do anyway), but I can pass judgment on their actions. Some think the “non-mosque” a grand gesture of religious tolerance (wouldn’t a mosque be an even better one, then, and right on the spot?), others think that, regardless of the builders' intentions, it’s insensitive and poorly thought out after the national trauma we endured that Day. Those who bothered to read beyond their preconceptions (even those who think I invented sliced bread) will see my essay was about one thing: Freedom. Freedom has costs and they're constant. It doesn’t matter whether it’s in good or bad taste to build the building. What does matter is that we see, “read, mark, learn and inwardly digest” this: freedom isn’t something anyone grants—it’s something we inherently possess because we're made in the image of God. For that freedom to "have" meaning, to carry it, it intrinsically bears the possibility that things that are sacred can be mocked, ridiculed and attacked. Is the building a slap in the face? To a great number of people it is. I don’t know the builders, or the intentions of their hearts—none of us do (regardless of whatever claims the builders make or intentions we choose to attribute to them). I think all of us could agree to this: the proposed building intends to send a message. Its placing is not a coincidence. Only time will tell what the message is. But the real import is this: we are free and freedom runs deep—whether we like where it leads or not.
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