"Memorable moments of heightened awareness, 'mountaintop moments', cannot be manufactured. They break in upon us, surprise us, usually leave us feeling shaken and vulnerable. In such times we see that life holds more potential, more mystery than our rational minds comprehend. Mountaintop moments are awesome reminders of God's reality, but are they where our own reality gets lived day by day? To climb up the mountain is not to escape reality, not to seek something lofty beyond us, but to see what is before us, right in front of us now. The mountain is not a pinnacle but a passage, leading us back into the daily work of God's dream, that beautiful indescribable vision. We carry it with us, hold it before us, ponder it and journey on." Kayla McClurg , From the Lectionary, Transfiguration Sunday, February 7,2016, Luke 9:28-43.
I have alluded to the fact that, for whatever reason, I have experienced more than my share of "mountaintop experiences." As McClurg has so eloquently stated, it is the nature of a "mountaintop experience" that it "breaks in" to an ordinary day in an extraordinary way. It leaves you shaken and changed. McClurg no doubt is writing from personal experience.
Whereas most of my mystical experiences did not happen on a mountain, a few of them actually did. One was on a mountainside near Talledega, Alabama in the spring of 1973. Another was on Lookout Mountain, Georgia around 1982. In 1973 in Alabama an eagle found me in a most extraordinary way. It was a literal, physical, beautiful and majestic bird of prey sent by God as an answer to a specific prayer, a prayer I had prayed less than a hour prior to the experience. In 1982 I made a dangerous and potentially deadly decision to drive up Lookout mountain into the teeth of a developing lightning storm. At that time I was under the illusion that a half inch of rubber somehow insulated me from a lightning strike. After what happened, I'm glad I didn't know any better; I'm glad that I drove into harm's way. Something extraordinary happened. And I was there.
I love what McClurg reminds us that you don't climb the mountain to escape reality, what happens is as real as anything that ever happens. At the time this mystery feels more real than anything that has ever happened. But "the mountain is not a pinnacle but a passage" she says.
pas.sage (noun)--The act or process of moving through, under, over or past something on the way from one place to another.
We all learned in elementary school that a noun is "a person, place or thing." Given those choices I would think that a passage is a "place". But don't we think of a passage as less of a place that exists for itself and more of a thing that exists as a conduit to somewhere else? A passage is a means to an end--from one end to another, to be more specific. Passage, the place, creates an image of something moving through it. Those "persons" or "things" moving through it seem to be the objects we notice more than the passage itself. Or are those places that exist on either side of the passage what we think about?
What happened on Lookout Mountain actually happened. At least it happened for me. It was an event in space and time. But as Hugh Prestwood wrote and Trisha Yearwood sang "It was like a lighted match had been tossed into my soul." As I drove back home in the middle of the night through Chattanooga Valley on Highway 193, the blinding brilliance and deafening thunder already existed only in my recent memory. Monday morning at work things were just as I had left them the past week. Nobody knew I had been on Lookout Mountain and nobody cared. But I cared. I cared more deeply. I saw things more clearly. As McClurg states the mountain "leads us back into the daily work." The daily work hadn't changed, But I had changed.
So where is that experience now? Does it even exist? "We carry it with us, hold it before us, ponder it and journey on."
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