Mountains

After an emotionally exhausting day I began watching the new documentary narrated by Willem Dafoe: Mountains. The film was scored by the Australian Chamber Orchestra. Watching this film I felt refreshed, and renewed. The terrifying heights, the majestic beauty, the awe inspiring grandeur of mountains. As someone afraid of heights, I still could not look away while watching this documentary. I would love to see it in IMAX. Even on my small screen at home the sights induced a sense of vertigo. As a sensory experience the film was fantastic. But not to be overlooked was the excellent narration script and paced careful narration.

Dafoe's raspy but calm and collected voice felt like a metaphor for white peaked, jagged summits. The content too, was thought provoking and philosophical. It discussed the human relationship with mountains, through history, emotion, and experiences. The one thing I find it gets wrong though is the philosophy. While many people (including this documentary) see mountains as indifferent forces of danger, that can tune and train our spirits to think and believe better things, watching this film brought me to a place of awe for a creator, that created this place for us, to put ourselves before the mirror of death, and to look at it carefully. 

For me mountains also evoke a feeling similar to how C.S. Lewis describes Aslan. They are a metaphor for the beauty, power, and goodness of God in his eternity, and character, but they also bring to mind that he is indeed dangerous. It is a paradox that, as the documentary notes, is part of what drives us to them, however Scripture reminds us that God transcends the mountains, and even they will tremble at His voice. This seems almost impossible to imagine. In one sense the mountains are there to explain part of God to us by metaphor, and in another by exalting God even above them. It is an appropriately dizzying thought. 

At the end of the documentary I felt there was a scripture verse that put these things in perspective. The final comments of Dafoe here reminded me of Exodus 33.

"Anyone who has been among mountains knows their indifference; has felt a brief blazing sense of the world's indifference in us. In small measures this feeling exhilarates. In full form it annihilates... and yet they shift the way we see ourselves. They weather our spirits, challenge our arrogance, restore our wonder. More than ever, we need their wildness." 

Exodus 33:

18 Then Moses said, “Please show me Your glory.”

19“I will cause all My goodness to pass in front of you,” the LORD replied, “and I will proclaim My name—the LORD—before you. I will have mercy on whom I have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I have compassion.”

20 And He added, “You cannot see My face, for no one can see Me and live.”

21 The LORD continued, “There is a place near Me where you are to stand upon a rock, 22 and when My glory passes by, I will put you in a cleft of the rock and cover you with My hand until I have passed by. 23 Then I will take My hand away, and you will see My back; but My face must not be seen.”

(NIV)

We live in a world that seeks to tame God, domesticate God, and in turn tame and domesticate everything that bears his image. This is a sad thought to me and I hope by thinking more about God's wild creation I can be more wild in the way God made me to be.