There once was a man who wished to be a mountain. He asked it of the stranger who gave such gifts away and soon he rose above the city, his great stone head looking over the clouds where he could “listen and observe” and only “think of things immortal.” So goes the fairy tale “Faldum,” as told by Hermann Hesse.
To long to think on things immortal is not so strange a wish, but often we are not satisfied at this and want the immortality for ourselves. It is a decidedly human desire that troubles neither angels nor creatures — the one because they are celestial beings without the tethers of time themselves, the other because they live most fully in the present. But we humans, we ponder the length of our days, and it is this distinction that ultimately draws us closest to God and one another.
In Job the question is posed to God: “What are human beings, that you make so much of them, that you set your mind on them, visit them every morning?” The psalmist proclaims us to be only “a little lower than God.” We even share in Jesus’ humanity, who himself “for a little while was made lower than the angels.” God created us in this way, I believe, so that we might know something of Godself.
Engrafted into this holy community of God in Christ, we are made aware of our otherness, our frailty, our mortality and this awareness realizes itself in the form of human community, enabling us to treat one another with compassion and justice. This, too, is how we are made in the image of God — as people of community. As humans, we know what it means to need one another, and we have learned in Christ what it means to seek another’s well-being, even to sacrifice ourselves.
To squander our awareness of mortality is to sin, for in so doing we may reject those we are given in community to nurture, protect and encourage, or we may seek to serve ourselves alone even to the detriment of others. It is our recognition that we are needful, sinful, mortal beings that quickens us. Our mortality becomes a gift, for it is through our mortal state that we come to truly know God’s mercy, grace and love.
At the end of Hesse’s tale, when ages had passed, the mountain’s thoughts returned to things mortal and he begins to lament: “Hadn’t he had community, a love that glowed for him at one time? Hadn’t a mother sung to him at one time at the beginning of the world?” Granted a final wish, his great stone body collapses, for even mountains can die. But death is not a cause for sorrow. Pity those who, in life, do not know how to show compassion, to pursue justice, to gather, to laugh, to mourn together. Pity even the angels in their glory, for they do not understand the grace of God in the way of mortals or breathe the love that seeks community from the moment of creation.
NADINE ELLSWORTH-MORAN is associate pastor at Reid Memorial Presbyterian Church in Augusta, Georgia.
