A Mountain of Meaning
When I walk my dog Kona, we go up to the roads above our cabin that intersect with the main road. I always stop at the same spot to take a picture of the West Peak, one of the two “Spanish Peaks” in southeastern Colorado.
Astonishing how the view is never exactly the same. I love when clouds fill the sky. On this day, from where I stood to take this picture, shadows in the foreground emphasize the majesty of this 13,631 feet mountain. Both peaks are higher than any peaks farther east in the U.S.
Providence or coincidence? A book about the Psalms I read this week leads me to pause my stories and share with you this excerpt.
Memory is the mysterious capacity we have for gathering the fragments of experience into a large context that is comprehensive and coherent. A life of mere impressions has no coherence––it is merely a sequence of stimulus-response occurrences. Prayerless, we repeat a dreary round of pious, or not so pious, emotions. Nothing “adds up” in such a life. No meaning accumulates. Prayer develops our memory with God:
[and here, the author quotes Eudora Welty [1], incorporating her thoughts into the midst of his text]
“Connections slowly emerge. Like distant landmarks you are approaching, cause and effect align themselves, draw closer together. Experiences too indefinite of outline in themselves to be recognized connect and are identified as a larger shape. And suddenly a light is thrown back––as when your train makes a curve, showing there has been a mountain of meaning rising behind you on the way you’ve come, is rising there still, proven now through retrospect.”
Memory is not nostalgia. Memory is not an orientation to the past; it is vigorously present tense, selecting out of the storehouse of the past, retrieving and arranging images and insights, then hammering them together for use in the present. . . . Prayer is an act of memory. [2]
Your Story and Your Memories
Previously, I posted that by sharing some of my stories I hope you will think about your story.
“Instructions for living a life:
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.”
For each one of us, a mountain of meaning rises behind us, helping to integrate our experiences, to appreciate and remind us to “Bless the LORD, O my soul, and forget not all His benefits” (Psalm 103).
West Peak from Cordova Pass hiking trail.
[1] Quoted from a favorite Southern author, Eudora Welty’a One Writer’s Beginnings. I visited her home in Jackson, MS a few years ago. She won the Pulitzer in 1973.
[2] Eugene Peterson. Answering God: The Psalms as Tools for Prayer.
