The Holy Wild

A few years ago a grizzly attacked a hiker not far from our home and mauled him badly. The hiker had heard of the wonder and beauty of the mountains of Montana and drove across the country from North Carolina to experience them for himself. Interviewed from his hospital bed, he said, “I’m never coming back to this place!” He didn’t know that wonder and beauty can also be dangerous. 

A week after that grizzly mauling, Jan and I along with our son and his wife, plus another friend with her two-year-old son, were hiking on that same trail. At the trailhead a notice was posted: “Danger: Grizzly activity on this trail. Hike at your own risk.” None of the others knew of the previous week’s mauling and I didn’t say anything. I relished the spurt of adrenaline. The danger to life heightens the sense of life. The beauty and the wonder in which we were immersed, the love and affection that we shared, were not our secure possessions. 

A couple of hours later we reached our destination, a gem-like, glacier-fed lake. We stood at the lakeshore admiring the five waterfalls cascading off the mountain face, listened to and watched a couple of varied thrushes sing and eat bugs. Holy ground. And then I noticed a movement a hundred or so yards up the lakeshore. I took aim with my binoculars: a grizzly and her cub, playfully splashing in the water. I passed the binoculars around; we all had a good look. And then Amy, our daughter-in-law, who was five months pregnant and therefore especially aware of the fragility and preciousness of life, said, “I want to get out of here.” And we did get out. 

Holy ground, but dangerous ground. Holiness is the most attractive quality, the most intense experience, we ever get out of sheer life — authentic, undiluted, firsthand living, not life looked at and enjoyed from a distance. We find ourselves in on the operations of God himself, not talking about them, not reading about them. But at the very moment that we find ourselves in on more than ourselves, we realize we also might very well lose ourselves. 

We cannot domesticate The Holy. Moses in Midian didn’t take a photograph of the burning bush and show his wife Zipporah and children Gershom and Eliezer. Isaiah’s singing seraphim were not accompanied by a Handel oratorio that he captured on a CD for later listening at his leisure. John of Patmos didn’t reduce his vision of Jesus into charts and use them to entertain religious consumers with sensationalized views on the future.

“Our God is a consuming fire” (Heb. 12:29), not fire to be played with. Holy, Holy, Holy is not Christian needlepoint.