Loving It and Looking Past It

The question came from a man on a bus and it was not meant unkindly.

They had been talking for twenty minutes, the way you do, and he had said where he was from and the man had said something about the mountain, and he had said, without thinking, that he had never lived anywhere he could not see it.

And the man said: do you worship it, then?

Genuinely curious. Not a trap and not a sneer. A visitor who had noticed how people talked about it and did not know how to place it.

And he heard himself say: no, no, of course not. And then nothing else, for the rest of the journey, while something worked away underneath.

Because here is what is true and what he did not say.

He goes out and looks at it in the mornings. He has done since he was small. He knows the four states it has in an ordinary week and he can tell what the day is going to do from how the top of it is behaving.

His grandmother is buried where you can see it from the stone.

And when he is away, in a city, on the fourth or fifth day, something in his chest starts to be wrong and it does not go away until the drive back when it comes into view about eleven miles out.

That is not worship. He is completely clear about that and he was clear about it on the bus.

But he was clear in the way you are clear when you are defending something, and he has not liked how that felt for about three weeks.

The psalm lifts its eyes and then says where the help comes from

Let me deal with the bus first, because the question was fair and your answer was true and you still came away feeling strange, and that is worth understanding.

You said no, of course not, and it was accurate. What was missing was the rest of the sentence. You had a denial and nothing to put beside it, so you were left holding a negative in front of a stranger and defending something you have never once had to explain to anybody at home.

Now hear this, and take it as settled rather than as comfort: loving a place and looking past it are not in competition, and the whole thing is settled in two lines of a psalm. That is not my kind reading of an awkward bus journey, it is what stands written in the hundred and twenty-first, and the same Holy Spirit who inspired it has been with you at the window every morning since you were small.

Read both lines together, because almost everybody quotes the first and stops.

I lift up my eyes to the mountains, where does my help come from? My help comes from the Lord, the Maker of heaven and earth.Psalm 121:1-2

The eyes go up to the hills. That is the first movement and the psalm does not apologize for it or call it a lower instinct.

And then, immediately, the question: where does my help come from? The psalmist asks it of himself while he is looking, and answers it in the same breath, and the answer is not the hills.

That is your entire situation, written three thousand years ago by somebody who clearly also lived in sight of high ground.

So this is yours right now rather than pending a better answer for the next stranger: the direction is right and it always was, because the written word lifts its own eyes to the mountains and then names the Maker in the next line, and the Spirit of God is the one who has been at the far end of that line since you were a boy at a window.

Now let me say the thing about eleven miles out, because it is the honest center of this and you left it off the bus.

What happens in your chest when it comes into view is not the mountain doing something to you. It is you arriving where you are known, and the mountain is the first visible piece of that, and it is doing exactly what a landmark does: it is telling you where you are.

Land does that. It is one of the things it was made for. What is written says the earth is the Lord's and everything in it, which puts the mountain firmly on the created side of the line, and the Holy Spirit is not troubled by a man who is glad to see a hill.

And the guard, because this is where the category earns its keep: through, not at. The mountain is not a power and it is not an agent and it does not know you are looking. It is the Creator's work, and it stands there being enormous, and everything that goes up that line goes past it to Him.