The phrase “A mountain top experience” describes reaching a spiritual peak, the top of one’s emotions. Something is conveyed in this short phrase that implies receiving wisdom, clarity, or peace once you’ve traveled to unfamiliar places.

We see mountain tops in the stories of our faith. The place where the Temple was built in Jerusalem was called Mt. Zion. Moses meets God in the clouds that surround Mt. Sinai from whence he brings God’s wisdom down to the people in the Ten Commandments. Our Lord even ventures to the Mt of Olives to seek God the Father in prayer on the night he was betrayed.

Remoteness from what’s familiar seems to bring our hearts to the foreground. Our souls can sing out and we believe we can hear God differently on a mountain top. These experiences are fully embodied and at the same time seem to take us out of our bodies. In them, we can leave behind our burdens and cares. After them, those same burdens can feel lighter, if we even feel them at all.

This past weekend I went to visit my wife who is spending a month on a mountain working for a classical music festival. What few hours she was free from obligations we spent in conversation or sharing meals like we would at home. It made me deeply happy to be with her and it was also not a mountain top experience.

Being with Carissa on that mountain was a return to normalcy. My whole goal in going was to be near to and support her as a husband while she devotes herself to making the mirage of live classical music into a reality again. Her work is hard, the hours are long, and there is a sense of urgency knowing how much of the performing arts world will not recover after being fallow for so long.

When I went to the mountain I did find some time to reflect and listen for God’s voice. There was also a deep sense of rightness in being reconnected to such an important part of my life. This got me thinking about our church family and how being apart for so long might have felt for us.

As we spend more Sunday’s together gathered as the body of Christ, we may wish for a mountain top experience. A feeling to reassure us, bring peace, and lighten our load. What we may find instead may be a return to our right place in the relationship we have to God.

It’s important to remember that our God came down from the mountain and walked among us incarnate as Jesus. He carried God’s love from those rarified places into our homes, our churches, our relationships. Every corner of our lives is touched by it.

I ask that you join me in prayer this week in asking God to move our hearts with mountain top love in the midst of our daily lives.

In Peace,

Fr. Chip