Kilimanjaro, part II

I opened my eyes again when I began to feel the tips of my shoulders starting to burn. This was a bad day to forget sunblock, I thought. As if on telepathic cue, Andrew hopped up and grabbed some sunblock from his backpack. The only trouble is, you could pour SPF 1200 on your shoulders and you would still fry. Makes you wonder how reptiles do it, sitting on the rocks all day long. Despite the burning heat we continued to sun ourselves on the rocks, releasing our inner-lizard and talking about God. Andrew and I had arrived within a day of each other, and Monica had come from the States only a month before. Monica was the last to share.

“You know how there are always clouds over Kilimanjaro?” she asked as a question. I nodded. Although we live right at the foot of the mountain, so many clouds crowd the snowy rooftop throughout the day that it is hardly visible except for the occasional evening. “Well, I was thinking about how you can never see the top and was talking to God about why there are so many clouds over it all the time,” she went on. “I mean, there’s this great, majestic mountain always there but, because of the clouds, you could live here for days and never see the mountain or even know it’s there!” I immediately agreed. In fact, it seemed odd to me right then that the one midday we were sitting somewhere on the eastern slopes of Kilimanjaro, we weren’t being sheltered by clouds or covered in rain.

Monica continued, “...As I was thinking this, I began to wonder why God puts those clouds there and how come we can’t just move them out of the way. We want to see the mountain behind them, not just know that it is there.” Monica’s words started sounding a lot like a very basic definition of faith. Living with clouds concealing the glory of something we know is there, but believing by belief and not proof. I could take a thousand pictures of Mt. Kilimanjaro but if there was a cloud in the sky, you’d see nothing but some green hills that are really the toenails of the mountain. You may be geographically, ecologically and environmentally sure that Kilimanjaro stands before you and yet because of the clouds, you’d never see a fraction of its glory. This is the shadow of the mystery that I live in, the footbend of a great enigma that, for all its immovable glory, is all too easily concealed by mere droplets of condensed H20 called clouds. And sitting beneath this mountain of secrets, you begin to wonder if it is the mountain or the secret that God made for our benefit.

Monica shared more about how this revelation really touched her heart in an area where she had expectations that were being adjusted by God’s hand, but I was caught back at the clouds and the mountain’s shroud. There is a lesson in the veil.

If you’ve been taught much Christian theology, it would tell you that God could move the clouds and God could move the mountain. Monica’s lesson was that cloud cover or not, the mountain is there. It's fixed. Ain't no mountain wimpy enough that an army of water droplets is going to move it even a fraction of an inch. And yet with enough time, with enough pressure, anyone would start to doubt that.

It’s a timeless truth that in any enduring ache, or waiting, or uncertainty--any taste of suffering--it always seems like the clouds are more real than the mountain behind them. In fact, because of the clouds you would never know there is a mountain in their midst, waiting only for the sun’s first rays or the twilight’s last kiss to reveal its imposing glory. But I am interested in a little more than a ‘how.’ I am interested in the ‘why.’ In my own moment beneath mountain after we had come down from its slopes, I poked God’s big side wanting to know 'why.' Why all of it?

He answered a question with a question. What are you really asking? Okay…truthfully? What is with the clouds in the first place?

It's a fair question, one often at the core of hundreds upon hundreds of books that have been written about agnosticism, atheism, religion. It's a question that goes with living. What is with the clouds?

--Because sometimes when you move the clouds, people still don’t see you. Most people aren't really looking for the mountain. They're looking for their Eden. You could do everything to change their circumstances and situation and take every cloud away, but if they felt out of Eden, they still wouldn't see the mountain.

Monica's observation was basic, concise, and penetrating. Freakishly simple, in a way. The idea and question of faith is just the opposite--complex, long-winded, and over-my-head in so many ways that I can't help but admit that I'm never going to "get" faith, never going to master the enigmatic underbelly of the mountain. But the constant cloud cover dissolving Africa's largest mountain in a pool of vaporized droplets, I get that. And having made my bed beneath its slopes for several weeks now, I get that the mountain doesn't fade in and out of the world when draped in white bundles of cotton or stripped to its bare naked face.

That I get. Perhaps there is more to every mountain than its face.