A View from Pinnacle Overlook
(5/30/23)
[There are three criteria contributing to a contemplative natural setting: flowing water, mountainous terrain, and a long vista (Sanford Alwine [d. 2016]).]
O Lover,
It was a stunningly beautiful May day for Sharryl and me as our hosts—son Todd and daughter-in-law Dennette, Sanford’s daughter—spread out a picnic lunch for the four of us. We were at the Pinnacle Overlook most of an hour south of Lancaster, PA looking far upstream into the mighty Susquehanna nearly 600 feet below. It being a Monday, the promontory was largely empty of us uprights better allowing us to hear a cacophony of song birds and watch various raptors, including a Golden Eagle, effortlessly finessing the thermals above the gorge below. Hildegard’s viridítas (“greening”) was ubiquitously mouthing Your Voilà! of spring.
It had been in reading Belden Lane’s The Solace of Fierce Landscapes: Exploring Desert and Mountain Spirituality nearly twenty years earlier that a life-long curiosity about “sacred space” (a la Ex 3:5) had broken the surface of my consciousness. My Listening to the Silent Music (2009) thus included retrospective citations of such experiences, a project which repeatedly waxed aquatic: the Mediterranean off Gaza City (1972); the Pacific off Carmel, CA (1978); the Atlantic off Edisto Beach, SC (2004) and Ocean City, MD (2005); and, of course, the Chesapeake surrounding Smith Island, MD (1997-2006). (The dynamism of these tidal venues was also present in the flow of rivers, Michiana’s Saint Joseph in particular on the banks of which my family had lived in the 1980s.) Joining the luminous night sky and the understated beauty of the Chesapeake basin, I found myself during the Smith Island years resorting to terms like “pan-sacramentality” in musing about places which are spiritually dense.
Now, the four of us munching our wraps and fruit, I mused aloud that numerous Christian mystics gravitated toward images of You of the sort unscrolled before us. My unspoken list of marine images began with Ezekiel 47, John 4, and Apocalypse 22 in holy writ. There followed Catherine of Siena’s Mare Pacífica within which we, a la fish, are swimming; the image of You as vortical whirlpool which Jan van Ruusbroec probably “borrowed” from Hadewijch of Brabant; the image of rain falling into a river which in turn loses itself in the sea employed by Teresa de Jesús. Oh, and Thomas Keating’s metaphor for You as the coursing river amid which we live.
After our lunch, all of the above retaining my full attention, we approached the precipice silently gazing into the gorge below. For a moment I was Moshe on Mount Nebo (Deut 32:49) squinting across the Jordan River valley (Al Ghawr) into . . . the new heaven and a new earth (Apoc 22:1-5). O Lover, why was a place like this—this place!—so powerful, so numinous, so pregnant with You, so reverberating with Your silent music? Notwithstanding that seeking to address this question with words might undermine the very experience, I took the plunge with it. First, the severe scouring of the Susquehanna’s bed on the outside of the curve far below intimated of You as Depth/Abyss and of “deep calling to deep” (Ps 42:7). Furthermore, both the vastness of the antecedent watershed and the relentless power, volatile and far outside my control, of the Susquehanna’s flowage elicited inklings of You in whom all of us finites “live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28). Finally, in the face of “the long and winding [riparian] road” below, framed by the beauty of this jaw-dropping vista, I was unable to resist being swept into awareness of Your Story (heílsgeschichte) and of You who are Beauty Itself. In short, what was entering my senses there on the perch was soddened of You.
On Monday last You were laying in wait for me, O Ambusher! And once again being brought to ground as Your prey was most surprising and sweet!
