Four Years
My husband, the Rev. Robert Clarke Smith, died four years ago today. All month I kept slipping up on the date. Checked the death certificate; could have sworn it said the 29th. No doubt because we were married on the 29th of August, and I almost always got that date wrong. It was a running joke. Universities would assign Black Ice for summer reading and invite me to campus for discussions. I’d accept, and then cringe when I gave him the date. Bob would look at me with the same “I-cannot-believe-you-forgot-again” facial expression: “Really, Cary?”
I had my own expressions in response: chagrin, defensiveness, abashed amusement. “Well, we needed the money…”
And we’d laugh and decide which late August day to press into service to celebrate another year together. Did we grow with grace or grimace, or grumbling or gratitude? Was it at least better than the first year we went to our marriage counselor? Jesus, it had to be better than that year.
So, I’ve felt as if this death-date prevaricating has been a sneaky, behavioral allusion to the marriage itself. What’s sneaky is how the heart clings, despite the pamphlets and gospel readings and Buddhist sayings that try like hell to loosen its grip. At the beginning of January’s season of Epiphany, I wrote and had printed yet another set of thank yous for more people who sent us condolence cards four years ago. But all month, I failed to address the envelopes. Failed even to hire the dear high school neighbor to do it for me as she did before.
Bob loved Epiphany. By the Wolf Moon, this English-prof-turned-magazine editor-turned Episcopal-priest would begin to quote Shelley, whimsically, to me, to himself; and he’d take note of every barely perceptible minute and a half of sunshine at the top and bottom of another cold, dark day. (“…If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?”)
At the end Epiphany, just before the season of Lent, the Anglican Church marks the observance of Transfiguration Sunday, which made Bob meditate happily on mountains he loved, from the Himalayas to our own, worn Appalachians. Bob loved to hike to the top of anywhere, even a Valley Forge hillside with the children, and turn his face to soak in the glorious light.
Because several people have told me recently that they’ve been fed by re-reading Bob’s last sermon, the one he’d prepared, but never gave at St. Luke and the Epiphany, I’ll close with another. This is his last Transfiguration sermon, one that he revisited and rewrote over years, beginning with his time as a seminarian at Christ Church. Each year, we bring new needs to the same feasts and fasts. This year I can’t be the only one who needs Bob’s meditation.
Mountain Light
Today’s readings both take place on mountains, in the presence of God. People of all cultures, in all times, have seen mountains and the divine in the same light. The word for it is numinous, meaning experiences — most of you have had them — that let you know that God is present: God as light, God in beauty or comfort or terror. They have such a hold on us that they can be on our minds even when we’re far away from them.
That has always been true for me. I’ve never forgotten my own first mountaintop, which was Mt. Evans, in Colorado. I was a high school kid on my first trip West, from the horizon-to-horizon unbroken skies of Iowa. My friend and I drove up a winding highway 14,000 feet — it’s still the highest paved road in North America. When we reached an overlook near the summit, I piled out of the car, zipped up my jacket, amazed at how cold it was in July, and stared in wonder at what seemed to be the whole earth laid out beneath us. It was what psychologists call a unitary experience — yes, a peak experience. Although I didn’t know the word, it was numinous. My reaction at seventeen was to write a poem on the only writing surface I could find — the back of a ripped-open carton of Newports. I felt the reality of what the priest and poet Gerard Manley Hopkins caught in his famous phrase, “The whole world is charged with the grandeur of God.” Unfortunately, my poem was very bad.
Since then, I have lived most of my life in the flatlands of the Midwest and the coastal plains of the East. But I have had unforgettable times in the Sierras with my son, Geoff; in the Wyoming’s Wind River Range; and — as a journalist covering snow leopard research — in the Himalayas in Ladakh, part of the territory that India and Pakistan have contested since the British partitioned that land; and more recently, a family vacation in the French and Italian Alps.
Ladakh, like neighboring Tibet, whose Buddhist culture it shares, is a land of unfolding vistas far above the timber line and brilliant mountain light. We visited Buddhist monasteries built precariously on peaks and saw the dozens of prayer flags flapping in the stiff breezes. And below them, set up along paths, were prayer wheels for passersby to spin. The idea is to send out into the world the prayers engraved on the wheels, just as the wind spread the prayers written on the flags. (It’s very like our own practice of burning incense with smoke carrying our prayers heavenward.)
However impressive mountains are to us, they were surely much more so to earlier people centuries ago. Now we have our ways to travel thousands of miles in a few hours to reach them, and the internet brings back images of them so that almost everyone has seen a summit and its vistas in one way or another. But imagine the awe felt by ancients, who never dreamed of flying far above the earth, as we routinely do; who never saw a photograph and couldn’t read books about distant places, let alone take in an Imax theater experience of Everest. To visit the top of a mountain, to look at a huge expanse of the Earth spread out before them — this was, in every sense of the word, the height of experience. I would guess that looking out at the world from a mountaintop would be duplicated in our time only by our glimpse of the Earth as a fragile, cloud-wrapped blue ball in that famous first photograph taken from space.
But ancient people naturally enough found divinity on high, where there was overwhelming beauty — and in some weathers overwhelming fear as well. They also knew mountain light, which is different from the light anywhere else. They identified the claustrophobic darkness of the underground world as the opposite of mountaintops, the realm of the grave, the home of evil and death. Mountains also seem to be the realm of the timeless, the unchanging. They were here before us and will be after we are gone.
It is also true that when you are high on a mountain, beauty and death are right there in plain sight, side by side, almost all the time, as they are in our lives here at sea level in Philadelphia, but more clearly.
Now any determined and well-financed person can buy the ultimate “mountaintop experience.” For $40,000 or as much as $130,000 you can now be part of an expedition to ascend Mt. Everest. On the most dangerous upper reaches, today’s climbers walk by the corpses of some of those who have died on the mountain, their bodies in warmer seasons lying visible on the slopes below, their final resting places being where it is too dangerous to recover their remains.
A mountain is half heaven and half earth, the place, whether it’s Everest or Olympus or Sinai, where on rare occasions divine and human, death and timelessness, seem to live together in a place of beauty and fear.
Every reader of the Bible has felt it: the power of Mt. Ararat and Mt. Sinai. Again and again God and Noah, God and Abraham, God and Moses encounter each other on or near mountains. In today’s reading Moses’ face shines when he comes down from talking to God on the mountain.
Today’s Gospel lesson is Jesus’ journey up the mountain where the human and divine meet in Jesus himself — the Transfiguration. The gospel is full of details that connect Jesus to the Old Testament prophets: he has come to fulfill, and he is God. His garments, the Greek text says, became as “white as light.” The disciples heard a voice claiming to be God, although you notice that the text does not say it is God speaking. All the remarkable events, the appearance of Moses and Elijah, and of God, are described from the disciples’ point of view. So we readers see and hear it with them, there on the mountain.
Moses with his shining face and Jesus transfigured and then returned to his human visage both come down from the mountain to face their greatest challenges. Moses brings the news and conditions of God’s law and steadfast love to his endlessly ungrateful and complaining Israelites. Jesus returns to his work of preaching and healing, knowing full well that every step he takes brings him closer to betrayal and death, including the desertion of all his disciples.
I suggest that if we step out of ourselves the way we do when we are on top of a mountain, and look at what Jesus actually proposes for us to do, that we will, spiritually speaking, be bathed in the brightest light of the world. We don’t banish death on the mountain. In fact, the reality of it and the prospect of it is probably more vivid when we see the beauty of the world that we temporarily inhabit with such clarity.
Death lives there. It lives here below. It is faith that makes us know that love is as strong as death. We know it through the journey of Christ to the cross and beyond, and we have come this far by faith — so far, perhaps, that we get closer to death in order to accept the mystery of our victory over it. Then we see another meaning of some of the oldest words in the church’s liturgy: Glory be to God on high. Glory to God in the highest.
— The Rev. Robert C. Smith