The people of Israel are in the process of being transformed from Egyptian slaves into God’s chosen servant people. In the midst of that process, Moses spends some time up on a mountain, where he encounters the awesome and overwhelming presence of God. Peter, James and John are in the process of being transformed from fishermen into God’s chosen fishers of souls. In the midst of that process, Jesus takes them up on a mountain, where they encounter the awesome and overwhelming presence of God. Two stories, separated in time by hundreds of years, sharing one common theme. Mountaintop experiences have an almost universal quality. Standing like landmarks on our personal and collective journeys, such experiences represent watershed moments when the meaning of our existence is clarified and we become transformed in the process.

It was about 25 years ago. Sitting next to a friend in the balcony of Court Street Christian Church in Salem, Oregon, I had no idea that my life was about to change in some very dramatic and fundamental ways. I was home from college for the week-end, minding my own business. My friend asked me a casual question -- “Are you going to become a minister?” It was not a particularly strange question. Lots of kids in that church went into the ministry. She was just curious if I was going to be one of them. And my reply was equally casual, coming as a familiar and comfortable response -- “No.” I wasn’t sure what I was going to do, but I knew it wasn’t going to be ministry. It was at that moment when the world changed. A voice inside my head (the one and only time I have ever heard such a voice) said, “That’s not the right answer!” That’s it. Five words. And my life would never be the same again. The experience lasted a fraction of a second. The residual effects continue even to this very moment. It was a mountaintop experience for me (do balconies count as mountaintops?) -- giving shape and purpose and direction to the rest of my living.

Such experiences are not always so dramatic and far reaching in their effects. But they are no less meaningful nonetheless. Several years ago I spent a week at Holden Village up above Lake Chelan in the Cascade Mountains. It was winter and there was easily ten feet of snow on the ground. One afternoon I went out cross-country skiing. It was snowing lightly and the air was crisp. The trail led me to the edge of an open field, with a beautiful mountain rising up behind it. The air was filled with huge snowflakes and I became suddenly aware that I was in the presence of God. All I could do was stand there in silence, filled with awe and wonder. It was a mountaintop experience which continues to serve as a reminder that the world is a beautiful place and God’s presence is all around me all of the time.

Frederick Beuchner describes a similar experience in his novel “The Final Beast.” A young minister named Nicolet finds himself behind his father’s barn, hoping to have an encounter with Jesus which will rejuvenate his ministry and help him see everything more clearly. He is lying in the grass, his heart pounding, palms up, waiting for the air to part and the splendor of Christ to get through. “ ‘It must happen now,’ he thought. . . Now, now, no longer daring not to dare, but opening his eyes to, suddenly the most superbly humdrum stand of neglected trees. . .” to a shoe lying in some high grass, and piles of leaves left over from last year. “Please,” he whispered. “Please come. Jesus.” He listens and waits, and then this happens:

“Two apple branches struck against each other with the limber clack of wood on wood. That was all -- a tick-tock rattle of branches, but then he felt a fierce lurch of excitement at the beauty of daybreak, and was overwhelmed by the smells of summer coming, and then, starting back for home he was overcome by a kind of crazy gladness and beauty. ‘Oh Jesus,’ he thought, with a great lump in his throat and a crazy grin. ‘Just clack-clack, but praise him,’ he thought. Praise him. Maybe all his journeying had been only to bring him here to hear two branches hit each other twice like that, to see nothing cross the threshold but to see the threshold, to hear the dry clack-clack of the world’s tongue at the approach of the approach perhaps of splendor.”

In attempting to describe it to his friend a few moments later, Nicolet says this -- “Whatever this is we move around through...” He raked his hand slowly back and forth through the air. “Reality...the air we breathe...this emptiness..If you could get hold of it by the corner somewhere, just slip your fingernail underneath and peel it back enough to find what’s there behind it, I think you’d be...I think the dance that must go on back there, way down deep at the heart of space, where being comes from...There’s dancing there. My kids have dreamed it. Emptiness is dancing there. The angels are dancing. And their feet scatter new worlds like dust. If we saw any more of that dance than we do, it would kill us for sure. The glory of it. Clack-clack is all a man can bear.”

Mountaintop experiences can happen in the most mundane of places. The point is not where they take place, or even the specific details of what occurs. What makes them significant, and gives them their power, is that the presence of the divine breaks through into our awareness in extraordinary ways. We cannot sustain such experiences. Ultimately we must always come down off the mountain and return to our ordinary existence. Except that even the ordinary is transformed by our encounter with the holy. Such experiences are the exception which gives meaning to the rest of life. They help us see more clearly what is always true -- that God is in our midst.

They are neither predictable nor controllable. We cannot plan for them. We can only be open to them. Moses responds to what he perceives is the voice of God calling him up the mountain. But once he is there he must wait for six days before something “happens.” The inner circle of Jesus’ disciples followed where Jesus led them, but they were certainly not prepared for what they found when they got there. Even afterwards they would have to wait for it all to sink in and begin to make sense. Jesus’ instructions to tell no one about their experience seems to be a way of saying, “You aren’t ready to share this yet.” Such is the nature of mountaintop experiences. They are elusive. They are mysterious. They are unpredictable. And they are profoundly moving -- even if we can’t quite put our fingers on what difference they have made. They alter the way we look at the world and thus they alter who we are in the world.

It was the last full day of high school camp. Everything came together in that moment. My small group had coalesced into a tight-knit community. We were fully present for each other. And God was fully present in our midst. As we walked across the field, I could not contain myself. I was dancing and leaping and shouting and laughing. The youth in my group thought I had lost my mind. And maybe they were right. But what I found in that moment was my soul, and the capacity to rejoice in the communion I was sharing with the divine creator of all that is. I don’t always remember that lesson in every moment of my living. But it is a lesson which has served me well in the years since then -- reminding me that light and love and laughter are all around me and within me. All I have to do is notice. I don’t live on the mountaintop, but I try very hard to carry the mountaintop experiences with me even as I’m walking through the valleys. Watch for them in your life. They are worth waiting for.