Nature, Spirit, and Mount Shasta
Mount Shasta oil painting, by Harrie Cassie Best
A Mountaineer’s Hermeneutic
by Peter M. J. Hess
The gentle swish of snowflakes on tent fabric awoke me in the darkness before dawn. For a while, my son and I lay in our warm sleeping bags, listening to the snow turn to rain drops. It was late in August 2010, and we were planning an “alpine” (i.e., very early) start to our ascent of 14,179 foot Mount Shasta in Northern California. Michael had wanted to summit his first “fourteener” while still fourteen, so we were squeezing in a mad dash up the mountain before his first day of high school the following Monday.
At 3:30 a.m., we began moving up through jumbled boulder fields, stumbling in deepened shadows when clouds darkened the moon. In the blue-white pools of light cast by our headlamps, snowflakes settled gently onto our gloves. Fueled by youthful energy, Michael eagerly helped in our route-finding through the alternating bands of rock and snow below Helen Lake. As we toiled thousands of feet upward in Avalanche Gulch on 40-degree snow, a cold updraft relentlessly leaked through our fleece layers, chilling us and turning our bottled water to slush. We climbed for six hours before we reached a steep, narrow ice chute that would serve as our vertical route through the volcanic cliffs known as “Redbanks.”
The sun finally peeked around Thumb Rock, warming and cheering us, and we stopped for a rest break to eat and drink. Resuming our ascent, we slogged up the thousand feet of “Misery Hill,” negotiated its jagged snow field, and scaled the rocky outcrops of the summit pyramid.
As we climbed together onto the highest pinnacle that Sunday, I noted thankfully to myself that Michael had the mental resources, physical stamina, and emotional stability to make a formidable mountaineering partner. Moreover, providence seemed to smile upon us—we could not have asked for more perfect climbing conditions. Nor could we have anticipated the astonishing scene that soon broke upon us.
I sense no contradiction between accepting sunsets and moonlight as explainable by scientific principles indifferent to human needs, and at the same time believing that they participate in a mysterious intentionality emanating from the ineffable divine.
Peter and Michael Hess, summit Mt. Shasta, 22 August, 2010
Sitting thirteen thousand feet above the valley floor in warm sunlight, we watched clouds billowing up against the eastern flank of the mountain. Amazingly, snowflakes were pouring upward out of that sea of fleecy billows, magically drifting down on us and the summit rocks from the clear blue sky! The Pacific Ocean shimmered in the western distance, Oregon lay as a mottled green carpet to the north, and profound silence enwrapped us on the peak. Michael and I enjoyed the solitude together for half an hour, and then began our descent, down-climbing the steep ice chute and glissading 2,000 feet to Helen Lake in just a couple of minutes.
Climbing up and down through the varied landscapes of Mt. Shasta afforded me copious opportunity for reflection. As I labored through snow and ice and volcanic debris, I ruminated on how important to our understanding of both God and nature is the matter of hermeneutics, or the art and science of interpretation. Our understanding of the world around us is colored by the presuppositions we collect and sift through in life, and also by how we view the relationship between science and spirituality.
For example, let’s compare an evolutionary to a young earth creationist perspective on the world. One visitor to the Grand Canyon might see an ancient river channel carved through the high desert of the Colorado Plateau over millions of years. A different visitor might gaze at its vermillion walls and imagine a dramatic mile-deep canyon cut in a matter of weeks through unconsolidated mud flats left by the retreating waters of Noah’s Flood, only a few thousand years ago. The same set of geological facts permits two radically different interpretations, one of gradual evolution, the other of sudden special creation. Our scientific and theological assumptions mutually reinforce each other.
I was raised by a scientifically-trained father (Hamilton Hess) and a mother schooled in international relations (Margaret Barnwell Hess), and I spent my younger years traveling, camping, and backpacking in numerous wildernesses of the western United States. From my family and my reading, I learned about geological strata, mountain uplift, subduction zones, cascade volcanoes, hanging glacial valleys, and desert alluvial fans. I learned of the vast antiquity of planet Earth, of the genetic interrelatedness of all life on earth, of the origin of the solar system billions of years ago from an accretion disc, and of the primordial flaring forth of the Big Bang billions of years before that. In other words, I matured into the perspective that we inhabit a vast, ancient, dynamic and evolving universe.
Since my father is also a Roman Catholic theologian, I absorbed the view that this vast cosmos is not an accident, but rather is the product of an infinite and ineffable intelligence, whose inscrutable will it was to establish initial mathematical conditions conducive to the evolution of morally and spiritually responsive life, on this and perhaps an indeterminate number of other chemically suitable planets lying in the habitable zones of sun-like stars. I may be right or I may be wrong about this assumption, and no doubt I will never enjoy absolute certainty about the answers to questions of cosmic purpose. But I do believe that the ground of all being (whom some call “God”) is closer to us than we are to ourselves, and is intimately involved in the unfolding of the universe.
Because of this rather unique upbringing, I can attest that I was well on in grammar school before I ever met someone who expressed a sense of serious contradiction between religious belief and the practice of science. Of course, I had had my own “dinosaurs-in-the-Garden-of-Eden moment” as a young child, but my cognitive dissonance was soothed by my father’s exegetical astuteness. Until I was ten or twelve, it had not occurred to me that a Christian might insist upon a woodenly literal interpretation of the Genesis story of six-day creation, or might literally have believed that an historical character named Noah had once saved in his wooden ark two (or seven) pairs of every kind of animal (including dinosaurs) from a literal worldwide flood that stood deeper than the height of Mount Everest.
Little did I know then that “flood geologists” had clever explanations for all the apparent contradictions between science and a literal interpretation of the flood story, including the conundrum of how Noah and his progeny disposed of 5,600 pounds of manure generated daily by the elephants alone! It was really only when I became a teacher, myself, in an inner city San Francisco high school that I first encountered serious science denial, history denial, language denial, theology denial, and numerous other instances of failure to imagine reality.
Over millions of years, Homo sapiens has evolved aesthetic, moral, and spiritual awareness, and reads the world through those lenses.
The Sierra Club hut below the brooding Avalanche Gulch, the start of the climb
As I climbed Mt. Shasta with Michael two years ago, I thought about just how much these differences in hermeneutical perspective can color our experiences.
To a Young Earth Creationist, Mt. Shasta is no more than a few thousand years old, elevated by forces unleashed by Noah's Flood, and its glaciers are younger than that. To my view, Shasta is about 600,000 years old, part of the chain of eighteen Cascade volcanoes erupting from the Cascadia Subduction Zone stretching from northern California to British Columbia. Its current glaciers are tens of thousands of years old, remnants of the last ice age.
To a creationist, the sunset on our evening climb was made to please our human eyes, and the moonlight was supplied to guide our way in the wee hours of the morning (Genesis 1:16). Personally, I sense no contradiction between accepting sunsets and moonlight as explainable by scientific principles indifferent to human needs, and at the same time believing that they participate in a mysterious intentionality emanating from the ineffable divine.
Over millions of years, Homo sapiens has evolved aesthetic, moral, and spiritual awareness, and reads the world through those lenses. It is as a member of that species that I experience Mount Shasta and its environment, trying to understand naturalistically its geology, hydrology, and ecology. It is as a member of Homo sapiens that I integrate into this scientific understanding the values of goodness and beauty, of purpose and meaning.