Akron, OH is blessed
with a wonderful array of metropolitan parks and as a boy I loved the
opportunity to visit them and hike their rugged trails. My favorite park, far and away, is called
Hampton Hills, which encompasses land above the Cuyahoga River valley and the hillside
terrain, which falls down to the river’s level.
The five-mile hiking trail forms one big loop. The first section follows a meandering
stream, which it crisscrosses several times using wooden log bridges that would
make Indiana Jones squeamish. From here,
the path makes its way up a steep ravine and across a lush meadow before following
a circuitous route back to the parking lot.
On summer afternoons my
mother drove me, a friend, and our Irish Setter to Hampton Hills and we never
came back half as clean and dry as when we went – especially the dog! I was fascinated by the park, and still
am. Tree trunks fallen across ravines
waited like a tightrope to be walked.
Steep banks of dirt carved out by flash floods begged to be scaled. A variety of critters scurrying about longed
not to be spotted.
But it was the stream I
loved the most. It was alive. It’s gentle current carried a small twig from
here to there and as I watched I imagined myself small and piloting it as my
vessel. Water spiders darted about. Guppies swam to and fro. There was a turtle or tadpole or frog every
few steps. And all of it worked to make Hampton Hills a magical
place for me when I was growing up.
One day I had a thought,
the kind of thought only an eight-year-old boy can imagine: Why not bring a
part of Hampton Hills home with me. I
begged my mother to let me capture some guppies and, after much badgering, she
gave in. Little Keith, armed with an
empty coffee can and all the skill of a deep-sea fisherman, splashed and
thrashed up and down the stream and managed to catch (as I recall it) four
guppies!
I remember the ride home
holding on my lap a precious tin can filled with all the wonder of Hampton
Hills. When we got home I emptied its
contents into a goldfish bowl and watched my tiny friends swim back and forth
in their new home. I remember realizing
just how dirty stream water is. I
reasoned, as only a child with no knowledge of environmental impact studies can
reason, the fish would be much happier swimming in some nice clean water from
our kitchen faucet. To this day I don’t
know which got to the guppies first; either the fluoride treated water or the
boring environment of the glass bowl, but my fish survived only a day or two. Even if they had lived, I realized my guppies
swimming in grungy water paled to the thrill of going to the stream
itself.
There may be nothing
more human than attempting to capture something wonderful and mysterious, but
it the process only creating something describable, manageable, and certain.
I think about my
experience of Hampton Hills whenever I read the story of the Transfiguration. Jesus takes three of his disciples up a
mountain to pray. At some point, he is
transfigured before their eyes and the disciples observe him in his undimmed,
heavenly glory. Suddenly two figures
from long, long ago stand with Jesus: Moses (the giver of the law) and Elijah
(the founder of the prophetic movement).
One of Webster’s definitions of ‘mystery’ is “something incomprehensible
and awe-inspiring.” The Transfiguration
is true mystery in this sense. It is
completely different from anything else in experience. It is wonderful and glorious. It is beyond words.
In his classic 1917 book
The Idea of the Holy, Rudolph Otto
analyzes various accounts of people’s deep experience of God in order to
discern some common threads. He discovers
no matter who the person and no matter what the experience, every encounter
with God is marked by “tremendous and fascinating mystery.” It is an experience of a Reality that is
“wholly other”, beyond human fabrication, conceptual control, and measurability. The experience evokes in the person utter
astonishment and fear; not fear as in terror, but rather fear as compelling
reverence. Otto calls it Holy Awe. People who experience this Reality sense how finite
they are in the presence of God’s majesty.
It is not unusual for a person simultaneously to be repelled from God
while at the same time being drawn close, entranced and captivated by the
mystery. This, according to Otto, is how
people react to an encounter with God.
Robert Frost said all
religions start with a lump in the throat – a burning bush or a descending dove,
an encounter with mystery. Frederick
Buechner writes “through some moment of beauty or pain, some sudden turning of
their lives, most people have caught glimmers at least of what the saints are
blinded by.” I have not had a blinding
experience of God’s glory, as the saints and subjects of Otto’s research have,
but I have had moments where I have caught a glimmer of it. I imagine the same is true for most of us
here this morning. Buechner says, “we
are all more mystics than we choose to let on, even to ourselves.”
At the Transfiguration,
Peter is the first to speak in the presence of mystery. “It is good for us to be here,” he says. “If you wish, we can make three booths to
capture this momentous occasion.” Now a
booth is a kind of tabernacle or shrine and Peter suggests the wonder, the
glory, and the mystery of what he perceives can be contained so it can be
preserved.
Well, nothing can
contain the glory of God, but this will not stop us from trying. How many people in organized religion hold
their particular angle on the Mystery is more important than the Mystery
itself? In reality, every system of
ethics, every institution, every dogma, every ritual, every scripture, and
every program of social action can become little more than a fishbowl of
guppies if a person tries to say it is the Mystery and treats it as such.
I knew my fishbowl was
not the stream and I would never attempt to convince anyone it was. For me, its value rested in the way it
pointed back to its source. A person who
has never been to Hampton Hills could never look at my fishbowl and sense the
wonder of its origin. You have to
experience the stream for yourself in order to appreciate the dim glimmer of
glory in the bowl. You cannot force
tabernacles on a person and expect miracles.
Each of us has to experience God’s mystery for ourselves.
To those of us who would
try to erect a tabernacle to the Mystery, the cloud comes to overshadow us, as
it did Peter. God’s voice is heard, “This
is my son. Listen to him.” And as they leave the mountain Jesus says to
Peter, “Don’t tell anyone about what you have seen until after I have been
raised from the dead.” In other words,
don’t try to speak of the mystery of God.
You can’t. Live with it for a
while. Hasty words will not capture it
anymore than erecting a booth.
Peter never did get to
build his tabernacle. Just as well. After all of his ups and downs something more
wonderful happens. He himself becomes a tabernacle
to God. It comes as a result of living with
Christ and following Christ. Meister
Eckhart, a medieval German mystic, describes it this way:
The
bodily food we take in is changed into us, but the spiritual food we receive
changes us into itself; therefore divine love is not taken into us… but divine
love takes us into itself, and we are made one with it.
My prayer for each of us is that as God
takes us into God’s mystery we will not attempt to make the Mystery one with
us, but rather we will allow ourselves to become one with it. I pray that
your life will become a tabernacle of God’s love always pointing others back to
its source.
