Angela Center

Integrating: spirituality, psychology, social responsibility and the arts

What's New

Reflection for February 26, 2006

Calendar

Psychotherapy /      Counseling Services

Conference Facilities

Registration

Contact our Staff

News

AC Press

HOME

Jesus Went Up a Mountain and Began to Teach

As long as I had lived in the Sonoma Valley, I had yet to climb to the top of Hood Mountain overlooking Kenwood. I approached it several times but never came close to its summit. The reason? I never simply made up my mind to climb it. I used to look wistfully at its rocky pinnacles; ascended some of its lower trails, but only to rationalize myself downhill with "Well, that's enough exercise for today." But I never jumped out of bed of a sunny day and said: "This is it! My number one priority today is Hood Mountain. I'm determined to reach the top and take in the view!"

The same may be said of my commitment to climb St. Matthew's Mount of the Beatitudes. Now there's a summit of far more astounding vistas than one will ever see from Hood Mountain. And St. Matthew's mountain has been standing there upon the horizon of my soul my whole life through. But I've yet to defy gravity's hold upon me to that degree, to expand my heart, to breathe in and out that summit's atmosphere of heroic largesse, to participate that climactically in Jesus' larger vision of life and people and human destiny. Maybe it's about time I did so.

There's a novel by Thomas Mann called The Magic Mountain which tells of a lad named Hans, a engineering school graduate employed in his family's steamship business. He was urbane, self-indulgent, as shallow in his interests as the landscape around the bourgeois port of Hamburg. Upon receiving news that his cousin Joachim had been admitted to a tuberculosis sanatorium in the Alps, he set aside two weeks to pay him a visit. He took a train up from the flat seacoast of Germany and over gentle hills and dales until he reached Switzerland. Here he had to change to a narrow gauge track - and here began "the thrilling part of the journey, a steep and steady climb that never seemed to come to an end as the wild and rocky route (pushed) grimly onward into the Alps themselves."

Here he found the air thinner, himself underdressed for the chill of the afternoon. "This being carried upward into regions where he had never before drawn breath began to work upon him, to fill him with a certain concern . . . Perhaps it had been ill-advised of him, born as he was a few feet above sea-level, to come immediately to these great heights, without stopping at least a day or so at some point in between. The train wound in curves along the narrow pass . . . Water roared in the abysses; dark fir-trees aspired toward a stone-grey sky. A magnificent succession of vistas opened before the awed eye of the phanatasmagorical world of towering peaks, . . .vistas that appeared and disappeared with each new winding of the path."

By now it should be clear that Hans was not simply ascending the Alps. Unwittingly he had begun a spiritual ascent which, upon his arriving at his cousin's sanatorium, would last not two weeks but seven years! Seven years spent in those higher regions where he would grow out of his egocentric mediocrity, gain exposure to human pain and human frailty (indeed he spent his first night in a room and bed vacated by a woman who died there the night before!) and find in convinced compassion the secret to fullness of life and a sense of solidarity with the whole of humanity.

By now it should also be clear that in all such storybook ascents we shall find the pattern of God's own summons to you and me to follow Christ up his own Mount of the Beatitudes - to acquire his broader, deeper way of seeing and behaving. There, too, we like Hans may finally come to understand that "it is love, not reason, that is stronger than death" and that "for the sake of goodness man must never allow death to gain sovereignty over his thoughts".

Revised reprint 1997.

-- Geoff Wood