“First There Is a Mountain…”
by Reverend Charles Blustein Ortman
July 29, 2007
READINGS:
The ancient reading this morning is from the book of Corinthians:
Love never ends. But as for prophecies, they will come to an end; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will come to an end. For we know only in part, and we prophesy only in part; but when the complete comes, the partial will come to an end. When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways. For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known. And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.
Our modern, second reading is from the verse, Little Gidding, No. 4 of the Four Quartets, by T.S. Eliot:
What we call a beginning is often the end,
and to make an end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from.
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.
SERMON:
I trust a number of you remember and are familiar with the words to the Donovan Leach song, “There is a Mountain,” from a few years back. The lyrics begin:
The lock upon my garden gate’s a snail,
That’s what it is.
The lock upon my garden gate’s a snail,
That’s what it is.
First there is a mountain,
Then there is no mountain,
Then there is.
First there is a mountain,
Then there is no mountain,
Then there is.
And that’s pretty much how the lyrics continue, as those words are repeated several times throughout the song with an occasional: “Caterpillar sheds his skin to find a butterfly within.” Or, “Oh, Juanita, Oh Juanita, Oh, Juanita, I call your name.”
I’ve always enjoyed the song and its repetitive, mantra-like character. It was years after first hearing it that I learned it was based on a Buddhist koan. A koan is a kind of riddle that Buddhist masters pose to their students. Outwardly, the conundrum seems to be sort of meaningless. Inwardly though, and found through deep contemplation, there are potential revelations, which can lead the novitiate to larger understandings of Truth. Maybe you’ve heard other koans: One was made popular in J.D. Salinger’s, Catcher in the Rye, “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” Another popular one is, “If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.”
There are many koans, and there are gazillions of interpretations of what they mean. So this morning we look at “First there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is.” I’ve read quite a few interpretations of this one. Some of them make sense; some are pretty unconventional; some of them are weird, and none of them are terribly similar to my own. We’ll see what you think.
I don’t think I could have ever appreciated the koan quite as much as I do if I’d only sat with it in meditation. Because it was a popular song though (and I should warn you that you might not be able to get it out of your head once it’s lodged there), I found myself humming it on a road trip, several years ago, to the Rocky Mountains. It came to life for me.
When you’re driving across the Midwestern prairies and then its flatlands, as you approach the Nebraska border, nearly to Colorado, you can begin to see the crested, snow-capped ridges of the Rockies in the far off distance. Continuing west, across eastern Colorado, the mountains become clearer in shape, and you begin to see them in the shortening distance in all their magnificent glory – first there is a mountain.
Then, you arrive at the foot hills and enter the mountains themselves. Whether you’re driving or hiking – although hiking is a much more sensate and full experience – you take in the ruggedness of the terrain: the texture of the color; the dry, crisp air; the sounds of an occasional bird, rustling Aspen leaves or the babbling of a rill; the warmth of the sun; the challenge of the trail. You experience ruggedness, texture, color, crispness, sound, sun and challenge. You experience immediacy and the need to pay attention to what is right in front of your nose – then there is no mountain.
It takes considerable effort but eventually, you climb your way to the top. That’s where immediacy gives way to distance; particularity gives way to perspective. You know more now. You have more experience. You can see the mountain once again and stand in awe and appreciation of its grandeur. And this time, you can now know something significant of its composition; this time you can now know something deeply of both its beauty and its hardships. The naïveté of your first impressions have given way to familiarity, have given way to your greater relationship with it – and then there is. Once again there is a mountain.
First there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is. I’ve got to guess that this pattern occurs over and over in our lives, as we experience aspects of ourselves, each other, our relationships, most anything of note. First, we see it and name it from a distance. Then we find ourselves in the middle of it – and it sure doesn’t look like what we thought we were getting into. Then we get to a place along the way that provides us some perspective, and we see that it was so much more than what we initially thought, so much more than any of its particularities, so much more real than we could have imagined or perhaps even hoped, until we had come to know it more fully. And then, as though we are in a labyrinth, the journey moves on, and we cycle back through, again and again.
I’m reminded of a conversation that I tend to have annually when I meet with our Coming of Age youth. I always ask them (at age 14) to name something that they believed in when they were half their current age, something which they no longer believe in now. In nearly every group, at least one person comes up with an answer that’s commonly shared by many of the teens. I’ll bet it’s familiar to many of us in this room as well.
“Santa Claus,” they’ll say. “I believed in Santa Claus then, and I don’t anymore.” And then I’ll ask about why they had believed in Santa in the first place. They list their parents, classmates, TV shows, movies and all kinds of sources. Then I’ll ask why they’d stopped believing, and most often it’s pretty much because of greater information they’d received from the same sources, and because of experiences of even being invited, on occasion, to stand in for Santa. “There’s no Santa,” they’ll say. “It’s really your parents or other people who give you all that stuff.”
“Tell me about the spirit of Christmas,” I’ll ask. And they’ll go on about generosity and the spirit of sharing and caring for others. “If you were to put a face on that spirit,” I ask, “What face, whose face would it be?”
“Santa’s, I suppose,” they usually answer.
“So, is Santa real?” I ask again.
“As a symbol, sure,” they always agree.
“Exactly,” I say.
First there is a Santa, then there is no Santa, then there is. And the final Santa is far deeper of a concept. This real Santa is capable of achieving much more, of promoting generosity instead of greed, and incapable of seeing you when you’re sleeping. The final version of Santa is a far greater concept than their original ideas of the fat man in the red suit.
I suspect that many of us have gone through similar processes with this very same character. I expect that we’ve also gone through it, as it has related to other issues like college, marriage or life partnerships, having children, careers, you name it. It’s a process of coming to see things clearly; it’s a process of coming to terms with things.
In his book, An Anthropologist on Mars, neurologist Oliver Sacks tells about Virgil, a man who had been blind from early childhood. When he was 50, Virgil underwent surgery and for the first time in his life was able to see. But as he and Dr. Sacks found out, having the physical gift of sight is not the same as seeing.
Virgil’s first experiences with sight were confusing. He was able to make out colors and movements, but arranging them into a coherent picture was more difficult. Over time he learned to identify various objects, but for an even longer time his habits and behaviors were still those of a blind man. Dr. Sacks asserts, “One must die as a blind person [in order] to be born again as a seeing person. It is the interim, the limbo…that is so terrible.”
In the middle space, the one in between, where there is no mountain, one might often feel as though they are on slippery ground, or that they’ve been duped or betrayed. People often feel angry; they may not want to continue the journey and sometimes they choose not to. I’ve got to guess that when we do choose not to continue, more often than not, it’s an unfortunate choice. I think it’s often, though not always, like choosing not to develop, not to evolve. An obvious exception to this would be an abusive situation of some sort. If we find ourselves in an abusive and dangerous relationship, that’s something we need to protect ourselves from. That’s not what we’re talking about, here. We’re talking about developing our potential as human beings, about growing our characters, our souls.
When I was a child, I spoke like a child; I acted like a child. I thought and I reasoned like a child. When I became an adult, it was time to put away childish things, to see things more clearly. This is the gist of the message from Corinthians.
Dr. James W. Fowler, Professor of Theology and Human Development at Emory University, was director of both the Center for Research on Faith and Moral Development and the Center for Ethics until he retired in 2005. Dr. Fowler has done considerable work in the area of stages of faith development. He sites that in every life there is an experience in the late teen years or in early adulthood, which he refers to as, “…the shipwreck.” It is the shattering of a naively held sense of reality and the loss of the expectations that accompanied that reality. To progress, the individual must learn to survive and then to thrive, pretty much by taking the very same journey to and through the mountains that we’ve been talking about here this morning. If we are going to mature towards our fullness, we have to find our way through the pain, in order to learn what is not, in order to determine what is.
I think that for many of us, our theological journeys have and do take the same course. One of the big theological questions is one of cosmology. By whom or what or how is the universe designed in such a way as to be held in being – promoting and supporting life, no less? In the world of theology, this is the $64,000 question.
For many of us this journey began with – first there is a God. From a distance, say from the distance of childhood, God looked a lot like an adult – a super human adult. He sees you when you’re sleeping, knows when you’re awake. He is omni-present, omniscient, manipulative, sometimes loving, sometimes angry, and most typically a parental adult. We are assured of this God’s presence by all kinds of sources.
And then we grow up. Life happens. The world happens. There’s pain and beauty. There is context that the old picture of God just doesn’t fit in with. There are wars and storms, illnesses, deaths and divorces and all kinds of things that could not be so, if that monolithic, distant, superhero God were real. And before you know it, then there is no God.
But somehow we get though the wars and the storms. We get through the sicknesses or we learn to live with them. We get through the divorces and the deaths, and we learn to live again. That’s how we’re still here – we’ve learned to live again. And if we’re fortunate, we find ourselves – at least from time to time – at some high point along the way with an ample vista. And from that vista, perhaps we are able to find that our naïveté has given way to familiarity and relationships with all that is our life… with all that is.
We know that we did not give life to ourselves, but that we are responsible for what we do with our life. We know that we do not cause love to happen, but that we are able to participate in it, add to it, nurture it, share it and help it to grow.
Where does life come from? Where does love come from? What is the source of all other sources? We can’t know. It really is a mystery. When we see our being as clearly as we might, with all its wonder and its pain, with all its myriad connections linking life to love and love to life, it speaks to us of an unknowable largeness that we are a part of.
Some folks may be able to see this largeness by what our recent intern, Wendy Pantoja, refers to as, “…the set of rules that govern the universe, most of which are beyond the knowledge of and comprehension by humans…” or, she says, some may experience, “…the idea of God as the sacred essence of all life, of all interrelationships, of that which holds and binds the universe together.” I say, call the mystery what you will: God, not God, Goddess, Nature, Spirit of Life or Love, any of the rest. Whatever you call it, it is far grander than any child’s imaginings, far more engaging than any of life’s day to day routines. Whatever you call it… then, there is! First there is a God, then there is no God… and then there is…All-That-Is.
“What’s the point?” you may wonder. I believe the point is yours to make. We live in a culture that encourages us to see ourselves as isolated beings, competing for limited resources, seeking to be number one. That seems like a course that’s stuck in the then there is no mountain phase of development. It seems like a course that is bent on producing a self-fulfilled prophecy of doom, in which isolation is the predominant experience, in which resources indeed become even more limited, and in which being number one means being the last survivor on a sinking ship.
The point is yours to make. But as you go about making that point, I would ask you to consider what might be the impact of seeing a larger picture than the one of your own day to day world? What might be the impact on your life and on the world around you, if your vision moved beyond the immediate terrain, to the larger world, overflowing with a sense of the connections that bind you in loving relationship with all that you have experienced, with all that you have seen and have come to know, with all that you have hoped and aspired to?
The point is yours to make. And if we are going to mature towards our fullness, if we are going to grow our souls, we’ll need to find our way through the pain or whatever else we might experience. We’ll need to learn to let go of what is not, in order to do our part in finding and creating what is. It is a journey, a labyrinth that we are on. Round and round we go, moving along, always moving along.
What we call a beginning is often the end,
and to make an end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from.
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.
To what end? Perhaps that life, itself, might be more fulfilling. To what beginning? Perhaps that we might be more loving and capable agents in the process of transformation – a greater source of healing in a weary world.
First there is a mountain,
Then there is no mountain,
Then there is.
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