Recently, from another room at a friend’s house, I heard Leonard say, “I miss the mountains.”  I was immediately distracted from the conversation I was having and placed mentally somewhere “out West” in a National Park, hiking a trail, admiring nature, and talking loudly to ward off potential encounters with bears.   There is definitely something very mysterious about Mountains.  They are magnificent and consoling, as well as dangerous and peaceful.  There is as much vibrancy as there is stillness…almost an exciting serenity.  This paradoxical experience of the mountain landscape touches me very deeply, simultaneously with a constant yearning and a quiet satisfaction.  It’s an odd reunion of sorts!

We are in the mountains today in the Advent Scriptures (IS 25:6-10a).  Isaiah gives a beautiful description of both abundance and destruction,

 “On this mountain the LORD of hosts
  will provide for all peoples
  A feast of rich food and choice wines,
  juicy, rich food and pure, choice wines.
  On this mountain he will destroy
  the veil that veils all peoples,
  The web that is woven over all nations;
   he will destroy death forever.”

And the Gospel of Matthew (MT 15:29-37) recounts Jesus going up the mountain to both heal and feed the great hungry crowd that has been following him.

Hunger, yearning, abundance, destruction, crippling pain, and healing!  These are a fairly accurate description of our world, our experiences, and our lives.  And chances are, we will all have some experience of all of them eventually – eagerly anticipating some, while happy to postpone or even avoid (if we could) others.  Many times these experiences leave us speechless, stunned, mute, and even numb.

 From a mountaintop, there are great vistas, when the weather permits!  And, as you hike a mountain trail, it’s interesting that as you climb further and higher, the perspective changes, when you look out and down.  At the peak, there is sometimes a 360 degree panorama that seems to “place” all things in a new perspective that you would never have imagined, had you not made the journey.  Again it can be a very exhilarating experience inclusive of both extreme beauty and tentative fright.  If the trail you are hiking is a one-way, and you return the way you came, that experience itself is different, both because you are now going back down and because you have been to the top.  It can be a very transforming experience!

 Isaiah refers to this transforming experience on the mountain as the destruction of a “veil” that covers all people, a “web” that is woven over all nations.  It’s a picture of debilitation and blindness, lameness and muteness.  It’s the same picture in Matthew’s gospel, “great crowds came to him (Jesus), having with them the lame, the blind, the deformed, the mute, and many others.”

 And so we are in the “mountains” of Advent, hungry, yearning for the transformation.  Mute, stunned, and perhaps feeling paralyzed, in the midst of inexplicable violence, destruction, and war.  What are we waiting for?  Where is this “rich food” and “choice wines” going to come from –this food and wine that nourish, heal, and destroy the “veil” of blindness and the “web” of complacency and despair?   And then in the scramble of desperation, Matthew tells us that Jesus simply asks the disciples what “food” the crowd has brought with them.  Seven loaves and a few fish sound scarce, but it ends up not being so.   Once the communal sharing begins, all bets are off.  So much so that when everyone has eaten, there are abundant left-overs.  Talk about a Thanksgiving (Eucharistic) dinner! 

 So, what are we waiting for this Advent?  Everything seems to be already here.  We are the Body of Christ, abundantly in pain and abundantly graced with the gift of healing.  God’s promise to destroy death is now.  Every time we recognize Christ in each other and respond to that, the Body of Christ is reunited, multiplied, more abundant, with “left-overs” even!  The “food” and “wine” we need is all around us every day.  It’s never far off – the Eucharist, the Real Body of Christ!

 As the Scriptures today seems to hint, the mysterious majesty and terrible beauty of the mountains is precisely the healing reunion of the Body of Christ present in the world, awaiting acknowledgement, response and empowerment.  We are in the mountains, or perhaps we are the mountains of reunion, poised to heal and be healed, as painful as that may be. 

 “…love, by its acceptance of the pain of reunion, begins to heal all wounds!”  (Thomas Merton)

 Peace,

 Thomas