The Parable of the Mountain

I have been moved over the years by the writing of John S. Dunne, a theologian at the University of Notre Dame. In his many books (perhaps most richly in The Way of All the Earth), Dunne has been engaged in what he has called "passing over" and "coming back," passing over into the lives, the spiritual stories and traditions, of others, and then coming back again, with new insight, into one's own. The spirit of such journeying is that of pilgrimage, and, less obviously, that of Sabbath. For it is in the natural rhythms of movement and rest, speech and silence, action and contemplation, that one finds (and gives) the greatest nourishment. Dunne writes of "the homing spirit," of his own pilgrimage: "I realized I had to find a point of rest in myself where I could rest in God, where God dwells in me, and let that be my point of origin and of return. I had to pass over to God in others and come back again to God in myself."

In the following parable, Dunne is contemplating a related pair of journeys, ours toward God and God's toward us. In doing so, he helps us to understand the inescapability and the holiness of the mundane world.

Man, let us say, is climbing a mountain. At the top of the mountain, he thinks, is God. Down in the valley are the cares and concerns of human life, all the troubles of love and war. By climbing the mountain and reaching the top, man hopes to escape from all these miseries. God, on the other hand, is coming down the mountain, let us say, his desire being to plunge himself into the very things that man wishes to escape. Man's desire is to be God, God's is to be man. God and man pass one another going in opposite directions. When man reaches the top of the mountain he is going to find nothing. God is not there. Let us suppose that man does reach the top and does make this discovery. Or suppose that that he passes God on the way, or finds God's tracks leading downwards, or hears a rumor that God is descending the mountain. One way or another, man learns that climbing was a mistake and that what he seeks is to be found only by going down into the valley. He turns around, therefore, and starts going down the mountain. He sets his face towards love and war, where before he had turned his back upon them.

Martin Buber, in a small gem of a book called The Way of Man, writes in a complementary vein of the teachings of the Baal-Shem Tov, legendary founder of the 18th century Hasidic movement in Eastern European Jewry. The Baal-Shem Tov taught about "the cares and concerns of human life" that

...no encounter with a being or a thing in the course of our life lacks a hidden significance. The people we live with or meet with, the animals that help us with our farmwork, the soil we till, the materials we shape, the tools we use, they all contain a mysterious spiritual substance which depends on us for helping it towards its pure form, its perfection. If we neglect this spiritual substance sent across our path, if we think only in terms of momentary purposes, without developing a genuine relationship to the beings and things in whose life we ought to take part, as they in ours, then we shall ourselves be debarred from true, fulfilled existence. It is my conviction that this doctrine is essentially true. The highest culture of the soul remains basically arid and barren unless, day by day, waters of life pour forth into the soul from those little encounters to which we give their due; the most formidable power is intrinsically powerlessness until it maintains a secret covenant with these contacts, both humble and helpful, with strange, yet near, being.

Comments

[Mike]

I appreciate the insights you shared here. I was a student of Father Dunne at Notre Dame, and his Death and Rebirth class was one of my favorites. I learned more enduring and valuable life lessons from that class than any of the others I took in my four years there.

[Elizabeth Scupham]

I happened onto your weblog today -- a frustrating day, things falling through business wise, fighting some depression. Google brought me here via an Annie Dillard search, and I stayed to read the poetry and theology.

Then I looked at your bio -- hmmm. My son is currently a student at Hampshire College. So, just wanted to say, thank you for your work at the beginning -- this college has been the right next "womb" for my kid, and he went there on scholarship.

And your theology/aesthetic is intimating a way, a path that feels akin to my own. Some of the work I do is spiritual formation and direction, but I am not aligned specifically to the church or Church. There is a local group of third order franciscans who have kind of taken me in, but I'm not a franciscan.

It's the poetry, the metaphor. The stories. My youngest son said he doesn't pray by himself, because it seems stupid. He said the only way it makes sense to him is to pray in living.

Thanks for this beautiful blog. It has truly lifted my spirits.
I'll visit again I'm sure.

Blessings...