ROCKS

Hiking northward across the open ridge of the northern Presidentials in New Hampshire, I marvel at the odd arrangement of giant boulders lying all around this beautiful and forbidding place. Huge rocks, some the size of houses, lie scattered everywhere with some resting precariously at the edge of deep ravines. This vast, improbable stone-strewn landscape beckons me to ask myself the inevitable “how” questions: How did all of this come about? How did these rocks get here? It all seems so unlikely when it has taken me a huge amount of energy to just get myself up to and across this barren miles-long ridge.

Of course, I know the popular geological answers to these and other questions, but that is not the point. Up here, away from the cacophony of everyday knowledge and discourse, I am prompted to ask some of the more basic questions that go to the heart of why I am here observing all of this in the first place. For up here, surrounded by rocks and boulders, I am confronted with the improbability of it all. This disharmonious arrangement of granite reminds me that I am seemingly just as strangely situated on this revolving planet that whirls on its own journey through the universe. Here in the mountains, it is hard to avoid the deeper questions of my existence and the purpose behind it all. For to me, the rocks and ravines spell mystery and my mind naturally searches for solutions to the puzzle of life itself.

Philip Yancey describes G.K.Chesterton’s view of the world we live in “as a sort of cosmic shipwreck. A person’s search for meaning resembles a sailor who awakens from a deep sleep and discovers treasure strewn about, relics from a civilization he can barely remember. One by one he picks up the relics-gold coins, a compass, fine clothing-and tries to discern their meaning.” Yancey goes on to say that we, like the sailor, have only hints of a world that existed in the deep past: “Moments of pleasure are the remnants washed ashore from a shipwreck, bits of Paradise extended through time.”

For the next several weeks I want invite you to walk with me as I journey through this rocky landscape. Imagine, if you will, that we are companions and that we have abandoned the usual superficialities to engage in an exploration of the meaning of the “bits of Paradise” that have scattered themselves all around us. Can we find a way of fitting these fragments together? It promises to be a worthwhile journey, for we will ask the same questions posed thousands of years ago: “When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is man that you are mindful of him, the son of man that you care for him?” (Psalm 8:3-4) What is man, indeed? The next time we get together, we will begin to pick through some of the fragments.