Shasta

The Cascades and Sierras are blanketed in snow. Shasta, this June, is the most beautiful I’ve ever seen it. It transcends the green-gold hills—white, blisteringly white. I feel like some primeval being looking down upon it. For the first time, I understand why the Native Americans worshipped it as a god. The Mountain is godlike, like Achilles, but beautiful as no demigod could ever be. Achilles, ever stained with his foe’s blood, killing and killed by the sword, was nothing against the Mountain.

No wonder they worshipped Shasta.

Yet here I am, above the Mountain. Its volcanic fires and fumes have died; they cannot harm me here. Man has conquered the Mountain. But not the wind or rain. The sky—no longer the earth or sea—is the domain I fear. Zeus’ domain.

Who is Zeus: a demon affrighted by the Holy Spirit; a figment of man’s collective consciousness; or the fellow subordinate of Jehovah? Who is Jehovah: not a mountain-god or sky-god or galaxy-god, but a Beyond-God? God beyond God, Light beyond light, Being beyond being…and, incidentally, non-being?

I am—quite literally—in the sky; by natural forces, human ingenuity, and God’s mercy, I am suspended between earth and Space, between finitude and Infinity, between nothing and Everything. Between earth and Space, in the air, Zeus’ principality, whom must I fear but Prince Zeus?

Except that as man has conquered Shasta, Jehovah has conquered Zeus. Jehovah brought His Everything, His Being, His Infinity into my awkward two-by-three cranny in an airplane representing under one hundred souls, teetering on Tartarus’ edge, just west of the Sierra Nevada’s spring snow.

Christ is the Prince of the Air. May the name of YHWH be praised.