How to Move a Mountain

Many people dream of living on a mountain, others of climbing it, while a few dream of moving a mountain. Because of their mystical appeal, sheer size and grandeur, mountains represent the highest, the best and most enduring of human ideals. But why would people want to move mountains?

Unlike people who climb a mountain for the mere challenge or, as the cliché goes, “because it is there”, others aim to move mountains for more specific or meaningful reasons.

First, moving a mountain is a natural process. The Earth’s natural dynamics caused the folding of the continental and oceanic plates. Although we seldom see or feel this movement, Plate Tectonics have uplifted and continue to raise peaks to greater heights (as much as 4 mm yearly for Everest). Integrated in this geologic phenomenon is the process of mass movement. No matter how high a mountain is, it submits itself to the cycle of water and to gravitation. Hence, no ocean bed came into being without having been laid out there by materials coming from the mountains. And no mountain ever reached such height without having been once a part of the valley or the abyss. This cycle of nature whose by-product is soil has made it possible for life to survive on the face of our planet. The Japanese reforestation motto accurately expresses it: The ocean yearns for the mountain.

The proverbial story of the mustard seed having enough faith to move a mountain is a simple illustration of how nature effects change in the environment. A tiny crack in a gigantic boulder eventually grows to cause a major rock or land slide that will alter a mountain’s entire character and thus affect the land, the biodiversity and the people living around it.

Hence, moving a mountain does not simply mean moving rocks and soil; it means changing the environment and the life on it. So it is with one person who believes in the power of change. One focused and meaningful life can also cause an indelible mark on society.

Secondly, moving a mountain can also be a human-induced process. More precisely, people aim to conquer a mountain primarily for economic reasons. Miners scour, scrape and strip mountains to reach to the diamonds, the gold and the minerals required for progress and pleasure. Urban planners cut down forests, level mountains and decimate wild life to put up living communities. Such a practice we are only learning to reconfigure in order to save the ecosystem and ourselves.

While nature had been doing it for ages, we have only been at it for a short time. We certainly owe much of our modern progress from this human activity. Still we have much to learn. But where do we turn to at this crucial stage in human history? After having neglected nature for so long, do we think we will change now?

This brings us to the third and final principle: Moving a mountain through prayer. Or in short, we say that moving a mountain is essentially a divine process. The God Who designed the Universe and its indefatigable servant, Nature, allowed everything to work for the benefit of humans. His principles thus apply in nature as much as they do – or should -- in our lives as His workmanship. We are His heavenly heirs.

We think of mountains as the symbol of all that we can be as humans. God says we can attain it through prayer, and that means, through faith in Him. Mt. Zion pictures the glory of Jerusalem and its Architect and Builder who is God. In the Bible, we are told that the New Jerusalem – the spiritual City of God -- will one day be raised up to heaven. This is obviously a divine task and one requiring a certain amount of belief for any person to accept it as truth.

Everything that illustrates faith – the mustard seed, a mighty tree, the moving mountain – brings out the principle that not only applies and works effectively in nature and in human society but more so in the spiritual kingdom of God. A poet sees the Universe in a grain of sand or the mountain in a shiny pebble because humans have the capacity to see the oneness of nature. Cause and effect. Source and product. Creator and creation.

However, we do not always see the Hand that rocks the mountain. We fail to recognize the power given to us to allow that Hand to move for our own good. We refuse to accept the higher purposes that we physical beings and things were meant to achieve.

Not a few mountain climbers express awe and worship of God when they reach the mountain tops. Even astronomers who have observed the farthest reaches of space eventually find God. But in the silence of prayer, one can inescapably feel the touch of that Hand that shaped the mountains, the stars and the planets.

It takes single atoms and the electromagnetic forces they produce to form the elements and minerals that shape the mountains. It takes individual human spirits and the fervent faith they possess to form the kingdom of God on Earth. How that kingdom eventually becomes uplifted to heaven is determined by how the individuals participate in the process.

We don’t simply go to heaven by doing good. We become part of a kingdom that is ruled in and is destined for heaven. How one responds to the King now determines how one travels from the shore to the mountain, from Earth to Heaven and from now to eternity.