Hi Everyone!
When I first arrived at Hollins in 2009, I had to be corrected when I referred to the lovely surrounding elevatory attractions as “hills.”
No! I was informed. These are not hills! These are Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains! Noted. I now make a point to compliment the mountains regularly whenever I go back. Savannah freely admitted to its distinctly level environment. It was well known that the city’s biggest elevation gain was one of the freeway onramps, a fact which got long distance runners in trouble when they repeatedly tried to use it to train for races occurring in more hilly locations. Savannah itself is full of gorgeous old buildings and giant live oaks dangling Spanish Moss everywhere, but once you get a few miles outside of downtown, you get a better sense of the surrounding marshy landscape:
no one is claiming to have any mountains there.
All that to say, one of my favorite things about living in the Northwest again is the mountains. The real, no-doubts-about-it, high-up-in-the-sky mountains. When you drive across Washington, you get to pass through scenes like this:
and in college, one of my dorm bedrooms looked out onto Mount Rainier:
(although this view is from Seattle, not Tacoma).
Portland is further south than Seattle and Tacoma, and therefore has a different view of the Cascades. On my drive to work, I sometimes see Mount St. Helen’s:
(most famous for its dramatic eruption in 1980, which explains its now modest peak) and Mt. Hood:
I say I “sometimes” see these mountains because many days, I can’t see them at all. There’s not even a trace of them. I hear all of you who live in this area saying, “Well, yeah! What’s your point?” But I hear some objections from others of you who have not lived in areas featuring both geological behemoths such as these and, shall we say, an array of forecast options. “What are you talking about?” You are saying. “How can a mountain be there one day and just vanish the next? You, Sarah Jackson, have read too many children’s books.” First of all, you can never read too many children’s books. Let’s get that out of the way. Second of all, it’s true! There is often so much rain and fog and cloud cover that the mountains just disappear.
My parents recently stayed in a hotel on Mount Hood and didn’t see the mountain the whole time! It’s not uncommon to go weeks without seeing the mountains, but this makes it all the more striking when the sun returns and we suddenly see what’s been there all along.
This summer, I got to go on a retreat with the Krista Foundation, a group that encourages service as a way of life for young adults. One of the workshops I attended was about our “inner landscapes,” the terrain that characterizes our emotional, relational, spiritual life. I realized that for me, being able to see out over a great distance, especially from a great height, is one of the most exhilarating and comforting experiences I know. I’m a big picture person, and I love having a sense of the big picture around me. But at that point in the year, I did not feel like I had been on a mountain in a long, long time. I hadn’t even seen one recently. I was beginning to wonder if they were even there behind the fog and the clouds.
Since then, I have changed positions. I have settled into Portland, which seems to be a good fit for me right now, and I am starting to find a community there, and activities to keep me engaged in life. One of these activities, which fulfills a dream I’ve had for the last few years, is joining a gospel choir. One of the songs we’ve been singing for the holidays is “Go Tell It On the Mountain,” which I’ve always loved, but which took me an embarrassingly long time to realize was a Christmas song. (You’d think lines like “Down in a lowly manger, the humble Christ was born” would give it away, but I was distracted by what I imagined to be a bunch of people from the Ricola commercials announcing good news to each other from mountain to mountain through giant alphorns. When I later learned that this song is an African American spiritual, I ended up with a very confusing concoction of mental images for a while.)
But now it’s obvious to me that this is a Christmas song, for this is a season all about good news. There may be days or months or even years when we can’t seem to find any good news or a mountain from which to shout out it. However, this song is a song of varying heights. It mentions not only mountains, but also the “humble Christ” in a “lowly manger.” When the God of the universe decided to enter our world, most people didn’t notice. Much of the time, we miss it now, too. How could we ignore such an obvious connection between heaven and earth? How could we be blind to such a massive, gorgeous, startling presence of sheer reality? Part of it is that God came in a characteristically nonsensical way, obvious only to those who aren’t obvious. Another part of it, though, is that there is an awful lot of rain and cloud in our lives. But if I’ve learned anything this year, it’s that it’s during the foggiest times that we most need to know that there is something other than fog. For our own sakes and for everyone else’s, we need to go and tell our good news — whatever it may be — on the mountain, even if we can’t see the mountain we’re on.
To those who celebrate it, have a Merry Christmas. To everyone, have a joyful week, filled with good news of one kind or another.
Sarah/Mouse
