Summer Beauty in the Mountains

This memory goes back to a mid-summer day in July.
I still hear the words:
“Dad, when I die I want to be buried here.”

She startled me out of my reverie that summer day, high up in the Cascades.
I turned to her and saw a vigorous, vital youngster full of the spice of life.
But her thoughtful face expressed a peace and wisdom far beyond her nine years.

Our family had hiked up a mountain trail.
We had come as strangers,
our ears tuned to the sounds of cars and commerce,
our eyes trained to spot traffic signs.
But nature slowly embraced and re-educated us.
As we moved away from the din of highways, we began to listen to the sounds of birds calling to birds,
of woodpeckers drumming on dead trees,
of water sometimes trickling and flowing down like lace,
sometimes rushing and leaping out boldly into space,
shattering upon rocks below in a rainbow spray.
We began to note the variegated shades of barks and ferns,
the spirea growing in the underwood,
the occasional canopies of devil’s club and clusters of columbine.
We began to smell the forest scents of stately firs and decaying plant life.
And we began to walk more softly through a hushed cathedral of evergreens,
to speak more softly,
till at last we were quiet altogether,
yielding to the peace and silence all around us.

When we reached the edge of trees and ferns, we saw before us at some distance the snowfields rising to a flattened dome.
Though we were surely not mountain climbers,
there, above the shadows of forests and sounds of tumbling streams,
face to face with a mountain,
we felt something of the mountaineer’s wordless exhilaration.

Another trail invited us to climb higher, and soon we came upon a scene that took our breath away:
we had reached the alpine meadows,
a gentle slope ablaze with colorful drifts of wild flowers and heather,
dotted with patches of lingering snow.
We stood in the presence of great beauty,
inside a garden of our Father’s world,
where we felt the awesome mystery and majesty of God Himself.

There in the mountain meadows,
a place of tranquility among rugged mountain peaks and hanging glaciers,
a profound silence wrapped around our souls.
And in that silence, the voice of God spoke:
of the foolishness of pride,
of the insensitivity to the invisible relationship between self and nature,
of the propensity to let the world be too much with us and within us.
And, at the foot of a mighty mountain,
it spoke to us of time and the frailty and transience of human life.
But the voice induced no fear, only conviction and serenity.

The thought of death, too, held no terror.
Perhaps death terrifies most when we feel most distant from the essence of life,
when we are most preoccupied with the trivial,
when we are most alienated from the mystery and majesty of God,
when we are most inattentive to the creative forces that make mountains and wild flowers,
when we are most resistant to God’s Spirit which, in Christ, would make us new.

But here we experienced the voice of Him who says:
“Be still and know that I am God.”
And that voice filled us with peace and awe.

My daughter and I looked at each other.
Then she looked away, at nature’s profusion around us, and she said again,
“I’d like to be buried here when I die.”

And I knew what she meant.

Unbroken

I grew up in WW II, the enemy and its readiness to kill in view nearly every day.

Maybe that explains my life-long interest in war literature and film, each well-crafted tale reinforcing and deepening my revulsion to war.
War, I’m convinced, must have all the devils dancing in hell with glee, confident that it will turn many a warrior into a devil too.
 
No book has brought that home to me as painfully and unforgettably as did Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption by Laura Hillenbrand.

Were it fiction, it would still have been a memorable read, though I would’ve dismissed some characters and events as simply too incredible.  But it is fact, and fact, we know, is sometimes stranger than fiction. In this case, it took me into the heart of darkness so relentlessly and graphically that I could hardly disentangle myself from its terrors between readings.

 
Yes, war is about death-defying acts of courage.  About giving one’s life for another. But also about taking a life from another. About danger and fear so unremitting and intense that it can inflict life-long psychic damage. About demonic acts of cruelty that destroy one’s dignity and break the human spirit.  

More than anything, of course, war is about people. Like Louis Zamperini, an Olympic long-distance runner, becoming a long-distance bombardier in the war against Japan.  If it’s possible for one to die many deaths, Louie does: on bombing missions, crashing into the vast Pacific, drifting in a leaky raft for nearly fifty days, falling into the brutal hands of Japanese prison guards who inflicted daily beatings and torture and near starvation.

But somehow Louie survives, in a badly damaged body, and with a plague of horrific memories that unravel his spirit.  His descent into the depths of inhumanity has been too steep and prolonged. Neither the adulation of the nation, nor the love of family, nor the love of a beautiful wife can put Louis Zamperini together again. 

Only the love of God can – and does.  Profound and inexplicable. And unforgettable. As it always is when grace makes its amazing entry.

At the end, this reader, too, felt blessed.