Mountain meditation: celebrating the diversity in all God has created
Several days ago, on a vacation retreat with friends outside Tennessee’s Smoky Mountains, we decided to drive to Newfound Gap. This mountain pass (elevation 5,048 feet) is the site of President Franklin Roosevelt’s opening ceremony for the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in 1934 and is regularly listed among must-visit sites in the park. Straddling the North Carolina-Tennessee border as well as the Appalachian Trail, it offers serene vistas (somewhat hampered by our cloudy, drizzly day), a scenic stop about halfway between Gatlinburg, Tennessee and Cherokee, North Carolina on Route 441.
We were determined to enjoy our visit in spite of chilly temperatures and sputtering rain. While some in our group followed the sign to the Appalachian Trail (I think they took six or eight steps on it), I snapped a picture of a metal poster mounted beside the parking lot. Titled “A Mountain Sanctuary,” it lauds this 522,427-acre national park as a refuge for plants and animals free to live and propagate there “with relatively little influence from humans.” And it points out the park’s role in providing clean water for humans and allowing nature’s diversity to flourish.
It concludes with a quote from a Tennessee native, naturalist Harvey Broome, who was instrumental in promoting the park’s protection. Read his words and see if you are as moved by them as I was:
Man has created some lovely dwellings—some soul-stirring literature. He has done much to alleviate physical pain. But he has not . . . created a substitute for a sunset, a grove of pines, the music of the winds, the dank smell of the deep forest, or the shy beauty of a wildflower.
A sanctuary for diversity
Surely anyone escaping Gatlinburg’s conglomeration of kitsch and commotion for just the first mile of green serenity inside the park’s border is glad this sanctuary was created. It’s hard to imagine what might have happened if the pile of pancake houses, overpriced attractions, and faux thrills hadn’t been stopped at its boundary. Granted, we’ve all seen some “lovely dwellings” created by humans. But I’m guessing Broome had little idea of the tacky edifices that would press against the park’s edge after his death.
The park’s diversity, celebrated in Broome’s quote, represents the remarkable variety of creation filling the whole earth. Any visitor to the savannas of Africa or the rain forests of South America comes back with pictures of flowers and animals most of us had never seen. And closer to home, even one day at an excellent zoo like ours in Cincinnati leaves the visitor with wonder at the assortment of colors, shapes, and sizes among creatures both strange and magnificent.
A penchant for variety
There seems to be no end to the surprising variety in creation. “The heavens,” as well as the mountains and riverbeds and ocean depths, “declare the glory of God.” He could have provided for our sustenance with maybe a couple of species and a repetitive rotation of the same few plants. But that’s not what we see. When we’re moved to awe by our planet, in spite of its pain and imperfection, our longing for “a new heaven and a new earth” begins to grow. We cannot imagine the eye-popping, uncompromised beauty that awaits us there.
God’s penchant for variety stands in stark contrast to the copycat efforts seen in so much of our popular culture. But if we fail at producing real diversity, surely we can celebrate what God has created. We can join or at least cooperate with the efforts of conservationists to protect it, and we can embrace or at least respect the differences among our neighbors. We can replace our fear with love for the person unlike us, a beautiful human created by a God who insists that everything need not be the same.
A taste of Heaven
Dean reminded us this week that when we get to Heaven, we’ll be surrounded by a diverse array of God’s followers. Will we be surprised that people we ignored or shunned or hated here on earth are welcomed to worship the God we’re glad saved us too?
Perhaps not, because our rejection of diversity will be gone there. Our comfort with and clamoring for sameness will be no more, along with all the death or sorrow or crying or pain they have caused here on earth. That thought challenges me to seek at least a little taste of Heaven here and now by welcoming the variety I see in what God has created all around me. Loving those who are different is one more way I can worship our God who likes to surprise us with diversity.
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