BitterSweetLife

I have other things to say, but Glacier Park keeps dogging my thoughts. Smuggled home in my luggage were a number of nagging questions. Questions like How should one feel about mountains? Alive? Little? To paraphrase Einstein, Are the mountains friendly? …And why do I live in Missouri?

The last query seems completely baffling, but the first several can be played with.

To the person with a materialist perspective, Glacier Park’s peaks are a random conglomeration of rock and ice, and may be justifiably feared or simply avoided—or even rashly scaled to impress females. They may not, however, be the subject of giddy snapshots and they certainly may not inspire awe. Mountains don’t increase creature comfort or add job security and they don’t fall in the category of purchasable amenities. If they did, the materialist (or Darwinist or naturalistic thinker) would have a larger array of “correct” reactions at his disposal.



To the materialist, mountains are never friendly, except possibly for their caves, where one can hide from the elements unless bears get there first. Therefore, one may fear the mountains or feel small because they have greater mass. Indifference may also be justifiable. But nothing else.

So what’s with these feelings of awe? Why the songs and stories about mysterious peaks? And this nonsense about wanting to climb them? (Even stark materialists like Charles Frazier in Cold Mountain inexplicably smuggle these sentiments in…) This observable human-mountain reaction does not jive with a materialist world. And to chalk up mountain-awe to "chemical reactions in the brain," as if that answers the question, is to evade it entirely.



But suppose we change the frame. In the context of Creation, all my impulses to feel and to do in the mountains' shadow make perfect sense. Ought I to harbor wonder and awe? Yes. Feel small, and yet alive and significant? Indeed. Take numerous photos? Absolutely. Climb the mountain? Of course.

Really, it’s as Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians 1:

By taking a long and thoughtful look at what God has created, people have always been able to see what their eyes as such can't see: eternal power, for instance, and the mystery of his divine being. So nobody has a good excuse. (The Message translation)