on the sublime (another post about mountains)

I was new in town, trying not to use my GPS, and not sure where I would end up. Just wandering.

I took in fields, barns, and windy roads while I sang along with Bethany Dillon, “our God is faithful!” Then out of what seemed like nowhere I saw a shiny lake sitting at the feet of mountains. I rolled down the windows and stuck my hand into the warm August air. I wanted to touch them. I pulled over at the lakeside recreational area and stood beside my car for what seemed like an hour, although it was probably five minutes, munching on some fruit snacks and smiling. I slipped my shoes off and felt the grass between my toes -- the warm, tickly, mountain grass. The families enjoying picnics must have thought I was a loon. I didn’t care. I wanted to wrap my arms around the mountains and hold them forever.
A few summers ago I spent two months in North Georgia, and I remember thinking on my first day, “I wonder if this ever gets old?” Two months later, I watched the hilltops disappear in the rearview mirror and promised I’d be back.

It’s been over a year since the day I bumped into the Smokies, and I still surprise myself when we meet again. I turn my car southward to go on some errand, maybe to visit friends in the next town or to spend a day at the National Park, and my heart swells as the mountains rise up in front of me. I may look down to adjust the radio, and when I look up I always catch my breath. Perhaps I’m exaggerating or being too dramatic, but believe me when I say that every encounter only makes me more in love with this landscape. I never understood people who formed attachments with places and sights, but I was mistaken. If the greatest works of art (the “sublime”) are only echoes of the great souls which create them,* then these mountains can only be shadows of the One who spoke them into being, the One whose hands formed you and me. Somehow just being in the presence of natural beauty seems to make me feel that I, too, am beautiful.

“Observe how the lilies of the field grow,”** or perhaps the mountain laurels, and see that they are clothed in splendor at none of their own expense. In front of me a spindly tree supports a large nest, no doubt from last Spring, that will perhaps be waiting in a few months to serve the next family. “Look at the birds of the air,”*** how they build homes from the scraps of nature, fly together in the shape of Africa, and rise every morning to find that our heavenly Father has again fed them sweet manna of the earthworm variety. When I look up through the naked branches, glance down at the lumpy ground, drive alongside the river dancing through rocks and trees -- I can only think of how attentive, how creative, how aesthetic is our Creator. How sublime is His creation.

What do the mountains have that can still grab my attention? How can they, as many times as I’ve seen and even climbed them, still stop me in my tracks? Often I stare at the mountains, so skillfully formed and clothed with life, and I want to be that kind of captivating. I want when I am old to have someone look at me and say, after all these years, that I am still breathtaking. In that moment I consider the lilies, the mountain laurels, the birds of the air and even the pesky mosquito buzzing in my ear. I consider the calico leaves and the sometimes grey-blue skies, and I know that the God of provision and practical beauty has crafted every detail of creation for this moment -- to draw my eyes toward Himself. He longs to make Himself known, not to the mountains, but to the little boy or girl who gawks at them. Of all the wonders on earth, and beyond the earth, He has crafted humanity alone to know Him.

In our very existence, having been wonderfully made in the image of our invisible Creator, we are even more than the mountains “the signature of divine.”****

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*Pseudo-Longinus, On the Sublime, IX
**Matthew 6:28, NASB
***Matthew 6:26, NASB
****NEEDTOBREATH, “Signature of Divine [Yahweh],” on The Heat