This past Thursday I visited the Matanuska Glacier with my family. The glacier is fully alive. You can hear its movement and life. Our tour guide wound us around chasms and in and out of the beautiful ever-changing sculptures.
A view of the pressure ridges created by the glacier.
My son carefully walking into one of the crevasses.
A sculpture created by running water through one of the glacier caves.
Nature’s power was fully on display. That power can be awe inspiring and fear provoking. There are spaces on this earth that awaken an unshakable awareness of the beyond. Mountains and glaciers certainly demonstrate this beauty. They inspire the greatest of poets. After viewing the glaciers at Mont Blanc, Coleridge wrote:
Ye ice-falls! ye that from the mountain’s brow
Adown enormous ravines slope amain-
Torrents, methinks, that heard a mighty voice,
And stopped at once amid their maddest plunge!
Motionless torrents! silent cataracts!
Who made you glorious as the gates of Heaven!
Beneath the keen full moon? Who bade the sun
Clothe you with rainbows? Who, with living flowers
Of loveliest blue, spread garlands at your feet?-
God! let the torrents, like a shout to the nations,
Answer! and let the ice-plains echo, God!
God! sing ye meadow-streams with gladsome voice!
Ye pine-groves, with your soft and soul-like sounds!
And they too have a voice, yon piles of snow,
And in their perilous fall shall thunder, God! (49-63)
This sort of performance by nature not only reminds us of God’s power but also of our smallness and vulnerability. It is natural to ask, how can a being who created all this care about a creature as small as me? It is natural to feel swept away by the largeness and complexity of nature.
And yet, as Christians we believe that God knows our heart. We believe that this same powerful God came to meet us face to face in Christ. This Sunday, those following the Catholic liturgy will read of water. We read of Moses bringing water to the people through a rock. “And he called the name of the place Massah and Meribah”; “proof” and “contention” (Ex. 17:7). This is a strange pairing of words, but perhaps fitting the natural human reaction to the power of God. How many bear witness to grandeur of creation that is beyond accident and yet allow themselves to be unmoved? Is it for fear rooted in pride or blindness rooted in fear? Turning ones eye to that omnipotent source requires acknowledging ones smallness. Perhaps it is this awareness many try to avoid.
Christ draws us out of this place of fear. The psalms remind us, “harden not your hearts, as at Meribah on the day at Massah in the wilderness” (PS. 95:8). The Word asks us to go even further than acknowledging a grand creator. We must acknowledge that He became man. What is more we must acknowledge he knows our heart.
In the gospel Christ encounters a woman. He speaks of living water. He tells her, “whoever drinks of the water that I shall give him will never thirst; the water that I shall give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life” (John 4:14). He then tells the Samaritan woman all that she had done. There is a reason this passage is visited again and again. It reminds us that the same God that carved the glorious glacial caverns knows our hearts. That each person is significant. Each person is capable of a life we cannot see, a life transformed by Christ, a life eternal.
The world is a bit scary right now. The infrastructure we have built for security is being stretched. There are understandable groans of fear all around. And yet, there is living water here too. I lift my eyes to the mountains and see God there. I turn my mind to his Word and know God there. And where God is, His son is. Where Christ is, fear leaves. Where Christ is, love and peace reign.
Thou too again, stupendous Mountain! thou
That as I raise my head, awhile bowed low
In adoration, upward from thy base
Slow travelling with dim eyes suffused with tears,
Solemnly seemest, like a vapoury cloud,
To rise before me-Rise, O ever rise,
Rise like a cloud of incense, from the Earth!
Thou kingly Spirit throned among the hills,
Thou dread ambassador from Earth to Heaven,
Great hierarch! tell thou the silent sky,
And tell the stars, and tell yon rising sun,
Earth, with her thousand voices, praises God. (Coleridge, 74-85)
Work Cited
Coleridge, S. T. “Hymn: Before Sun-Rise, In the Vale of Chamouni.” The Oxford Authors Samuel Taylor
Coleridge: A Critical Edition of the Major Works edited by H. J. Jackson, Oxford University Press, 1985, pp. 119-120.
