Taking the Mountaintop with You
A Sermon offered by Matthew McHale, Intern Minister
Sunday, January 5, 2014
SERMON - PART I
On the Mountaintop
Somewhere around mile 90, I
stopped thinking about all of the things
awaiting me back at home; the packing, the
parting sermon I had yet to write, the
friends and family I would soon be leaving
behind as I left for seminary, all of it slipped
away as I fell into a now familiar rhythm,
thud thud thud thud, boots hitting the dirt,
one foot in front of the other.
The sunrise that morning had been
beautiful, the sun lighting up the not-sodistant peaks, their reflections lightly
rippling on the placid lake we had camped
by. It was the day seven of my sixteen-day
backpacking trip with my dad on the John
Muir Trail. Starting in Yosemite Valley and,
211 miles later, ending on top of Mt.
Whitney—at over 14,500 ft., Whitney is the
tallest U.S. Mountain outside of Alaska.
It seems like a hard a place to find
serenity, hiking roughly 14 miles per day,
with a 45-50 pound pack on your back,
almost all of it above 10,000 feet, plagued
by unseasonably large swarms of
mosquitos, eating freeze-dried meals, sore
feet, bruised hips, and aching shoulders.
But by that seventh day, my body
was getting used to the physical exertion.
Reality brushing up against my ideals, the
mosquitos were now being held at bay by
liberal amounts of DEET. And the beauty—
oh, the beauty! The High Sierra is filled with
breathtaking vista after breathtaking vista.
Strings of pristine lakes, beautiful
waterfalls, meadows filled with wildflowers,
rugged and majestic peaks.
For me, it was on the trail, not at the
top of Mt. Whitney, that I had my
mountaintop moment (or moments).
Amidst the stunning beauty of the natural
world, with the concerns of my daily life
hundreds of miles away, I was able to be
deeply, peacefully present in the moment.
To just be.
For someone who tends to have a
packed schedule, and whose head is often
swirling with thoughts, to drop out of the
stress of doing, doing, doing, and just be,
was a wonderful experience.
Rob Bell, the evangelical almostUniversalist pastor, talks about a similar
experience of being on the mountain. God
tells Moses to go to the mountaintop, and
Moses goes. Now on top of the mountain,
God commands Moses to “be on the
Mountain.” So Moses is probably thinking,
“yeah, I heard you the first time.” But
Moses didn’t get the point, God didn’t want
him to go to the mountain and do
something, he just wants Moses to be on
the mountaintop and enjoy the moment.
We could all use that sort of
reminder in our daily lives, to be present, to
just relax and enjoy ourselves, without
worrying about paying bills or whether we
forgot to turn off the light, or what the best
way back down the mountain is. Just live in
the moment. That’s one type of
mountaintop moment.
But mountaintop moments come in
different shapes and sizes. As Ralph Waldo
Emerson writes, “it comes as insight, it
comes as serenity and grandeur.” One of
the most common and profound is an
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experience of unity with all of creation or
God.
Emerson describes these moments
as a direct connection between the soul and
the divine; there is no barrier between the
two—in fact there is no two—and we are
filled by the divine. What Emerson is
describing is a transcendent or mystical
experience. One can find mysticism in most
major religions, the Kabbalah in Judaism,
Sufism in Islam, from Thomas Aquinas and
Thomas Merton in Christianity, to the
mystical experiences of Guru Nanak, the
founder of the Sikh religion.
While such moments often have
religious components, transcendent or
mystical experiences can happen to anyone,
regardless of religious training or
inclination. They often occur unexpectedly
and without preparation, and can happen at
any time, and they might not be understood
as religious experiences at all. It might be an
artist experiencing a deep feeling of
interconnectedness, or a loss of self. A
scientist who has a spontaneous ecstatic
inspiration, or it might be dismissed as
psychological disturbances in modern
times.
I’m not sure that my experience on
the John Muir trail was mystical, in that I
felt the presence of the divine. But I did feel
something that I didn’t find in my daily life.
In the scheme of things this was smaller
mountaintop moment, or rather a series of
them spread over the course of a few days.
Yet I have had other moments that
were more intense, where I truly felt a
sense of interconnectedness with all of
creation—a feeling that however fleeting,
continues to ground my faith.
Now although they seem to happen
often on mountaintops, I have felt a
profound sense of interconnectedness
while sitting in a valley watching the plants
and animals, and while working in my
garden. As John Muir makes clear, so many
of our mystics have had profound mystical
experiences in Nature’s workshops. But
they don’t have to happen in nature at all.
A few months ago, Rev. Kathleen
shared the story of the Catholic mystic
Thomas Merton’s mystical experience in the
center of a busy shopping district in
Louisville, of being “suddenly overwhelmed
with the realization that I loved all those
people, that they were mine and I theirs,
that we could not be alien to one another
even though we were total strangers.”
I’ve been moved by the spirit in
sanctuaries like this one, and while singing
along with thousands of strangers at a
Radiohead concert; I’ve had life changing
insights in quiet contemplation and in the
midst of deep conversation, and in ecstatic
experiences of ego dissolution where I felt
at one with the universe. I’ve also had a
mountaintop moment at what could have
been a low-point in my life. Maybe it’s
stretching the term, but it was one of those
transformative moments in my life.
When I was 16, my friends and I
were wandering around the park after
midnight. Not only were we in the park
after it closed and violating curfew, but we
were also doing things that could have
gotten us into significantly more trouble. So
when headlights started weaving their way
through the park, we started to get
nervous; and when a black and white car
stopped about 20 feet from us, I think my
heart stopped too. We, three nerdy looking
white guys turned and started walking out
of the park. The police officer did not get
out of his car, he did not roll down his
window to ask us what we were doing, or
even wait until we had left the park before
he drove off. My heart still racing from the
adrenaline, a profound revelation came to
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me. No, not the fact that we we’re both
incredibly foolish and incredibly lucky,
although that one was pretty clear. It was
that had we been Black or Latino or
Cambodian it was almost guaranteed we
would have been stopped, had our motives
questioned, or harassed, and it probably
would have ended with us in a squad car. As
if seeing from a mountaintop, I was able to
see with a clarity—a viscerally painful
clarity—I had never experienced before, the
privilege of being white. It certainly wasn’t a
high point, but it was a life changing
revelation.
Yes, mountaintop moment come in
different shapes and sizes. While they can
happen anywhere, mountaintop moments
or mystical experience are by no means
common. We cannot create them or bring
them about. Although some people make
conscious attempts to have them, only
those rare, fully actualized beings can
actually tap into that on a regular basis. And
I’m pretty sure that doesn’t apply to anyone
in this room, otherwise, I should probably
sit down and let you speak.
Nor are they something that we can
easily grasp or recall. Margaret Fuller,
Emerson’s contemporary and a leading
transcendentalist, writes: “To one who has
enjoyed the full life of any scene, of any
hour, what thoughts can be recorded about
it, seem like the commas and semicolons in
the paragraph, mere stops.” And if we
cannot fully recall the moment, they are
often all but impossible to describe to
someone else. This is the challenge of
delivering a sermon about mountaintop
moments or mystical experiences—any
description cannot even come close to
describing the actual experience. Sure I can
recount the details of the John Muir Hike or
my close call with the law, but I can’t truly
remember how I felt, much less
communicate it to you. All I can really do is
describe the outcome, the commitment to
Anti-racism work that arose from my
experience of white privilege. The way that
my experiences of interconnectedness have
inspired me to the work of environmental
justice, and served as the foundation of my
spiritual beliefs.
To varying degrees, all of my
mountaintop moments have had an impact
on my life, changing my outlook on life, or
the way I show up in the world.
The impact of these mountaintop
moments can last a lifetime, they reshape
where you are headed and who you are.
And yet, they are, by definition, fleeting
moments.
Like the instant between before
dawn and dawn, which George Kimmich
Beech writes of, “In between is the
awakening.” And that is the new beginning,
the point at which everything changes.
And yet, transformative though they
might be, these moments remain fleeting,
and the changes they inspire are often
incomplete or halting.
It’s hard to recall that peaceful
feeling when your kids are screaming at the
top of their lungs and dinner is burning, or
you’re already running late and you can’t
find your keys. It’s hard to tap into that
feeling of interconnectedness when some
jerk cuts you off in traffic, or there’s a thick
line of ants swarming across your kitchen
floor for the third time in as many days.
And as the days and weeks and
years pass by, the memory becomes
dimmer and enters into your thoughts less
frequently.
So the challenge for us is not really
having the mountaintop moment, they are
few and fleeting; the big question is, how
you can take the mountaintop with you?
But before we get to that, let’s have some
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music: a song about coming down off the
mountaintop.
SERMON - PART II
Taking the
Mountaintop With You
So you’ve had a beautiful day, an
amazing experience up on the
mountaintop. And you’re coming down off
the mountain slope; the amazing
experience that you found turns back to the
ground, just like before.
As life returns to normal it becomes
harder to hold onto that mountaintop
experience, you still know it was an amazing
day, but the feeling is fading along with
light.
But the real challenge doesn’t come
until life throws you a curveball, putting up
obstacles and barriers, when you head into
the undergrowth, alone on a twisty road,
and your steps become uncertain. It’s in
those moments that feeling that spirit is
most important and also the most difficult.
And we all struggle with it.
In the gospel of Matthew, Jesus goes
up on a high mountaintop with three of his
disciples and “there he was transfigured
before them. His face shone like the sun,
and his clothes became as white as the
light.” And then Moses and Elijah appear
and start talking with Jesus. And as if that’s
not enough “a bright cloud covered them,
and a voice from the cloud said, “This is my
Son, whom I love; with him I am well
pleased. Listen to him!” Sounds pretty
amazing right?
After that Jesus comes back to down
to be with the people and is asked to cast a
demon out of a young boy, which his
disciples couldn’t cast out. And then Jesus
starts yelling at his disciples, “you
unbelieving and perverse generation, how
long shall I stay with you? How long shall I
put up with you?” He exorcises the demon
and then he chastises his apostles and tells
them they couldn’t cast out the demons
because they didn’t have enough faith.
So Jesus has this amazing
mountaintop experience where he is
literally transfigured, and then as soon as he
gets back to regular life, he completely
loses his composure. Not even Jesus can do
it! So how can we be expected to!?
So how can we capture that spirit,
that energy, that feeling, even if it is only
bears a dull resemblance to the original?
I know when I go back into nature,
even if it’s only for an hour-long hike, that
I’m going to experience some sense of that
peace, of just being. If I work in the garden
I’m going to feel part of that interconnected
web. I know that if I do yoga, I’m going to
feel more grounded, centered and
energized, even if my day is a busy one.
Ok, but what if I can’t just slip some
hiking boots on and head for the nearest
trail when I hear the mountains calling?
What if the garden is covered in a foot of
snow? What if I can’t just drop everything
and roll out my yoga mat?
I find that there are other practices I
find I can do almost anywhere at anytime. If
I am having a bad day, or I am in a bad
mood, I find that if I reflect on what I am
grateful for, it almost always makes me feel
at least a little bit better. If I am stressed
out or overwhelmed, finding a quiet spot to
just sit and breathe for a few minutes, helps
calm and focus me.
Yet some things are not so easy to
take with us, while I felt a pervasive sense
of interconnectedness with that first
mountaintop moment, my initial insight
about racism and white privilege was more
like the opening of a single doorway; a
doorway, which led to more doorways,
which lead to ever more doorways of
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revelations. And I have had to continue
opening those doors and walking through
them.
Of course, one has to remember to
do these things, I have to remind myself
over and over of the experiences I had, of
my new intentions, before they will stick. So
the last thing I will share with you is this.
Many of you may have noticed the
piece of yarn which has been tied around
my wrist since late October. Well I got the
piece of yarn at PowerShift, which was a
gathering of about 6,000 youth and young
adult climate and environmental justice
activists from around the country. And
everyone who was there, received one and
tied it around their wrist as a reminder of
their commitment to the environment, and
also as a reminder that 6,000 other people
were doing the same thing, so when I get
overwhelmed by scope of the problems we
are facing, that piece of yarn is powerful
reminder of the energy and excitement of
being part of that gathering, and it is also a
reminder that there are thousands (no,
millions) of people who are actively working
toward creating a just and livable future.
So I want to give you the opportunity to
have your own tangible reminder. The
ushers are going to pass out some pieces of
string, which I’m going to ask you to tie
around your wrist as a reminder of an
intention you want to keep or perhaps a
New Year’s Resolution. And every time you
look at it you can be reminded of that
intention.
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