Submitting to the Mountain

My second exploration of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintainence is, perhaps, a little more in line with the book's intent. It is prompted by another of Phaedrus' experiences in India, a pilgrimage to Mount Kailas.

He never reached the mountain. After the third day he gave up, exhausted, and the pilgrimage went on without him. He said that he had the physical strength but that physical strength wasn't enough. He had the intellectual motivation but that wasn't enough either. He didn't think he had been arrogant but thought that he was undertaking the pilgrimage to broaden his experience, to gain understanding for himself. He was trying to use the mountain for his own purposes and the pilgrimage too. He regarded himself as the fixed entity, not the pilgrimage or the mountain, and thus wasn't ready for it. He speculated that the other pilgrims, the ones who reached the mountain, probably sensed the holiness of the mountain so intsenly that each footstep was an act of devotion, an act of submission to this holiness. The holiness of the mountain infused into their own spirits enabled them to endure far more than anything he, with greater physical strength, could take.

It seems to me that this thought has direct application to Christian, and even specifically Lutheran, spirituality and can perhaps provide a clue to a new understanding of justification by faith alone.

The problem with justification by works isn't the works, it's that I'm doing it for me. Any works done for God are, by definition, acts of faith. We still have the Lutheran insight that we can't really intend to do works for God because the very intention puts me at the center again. These acts of faith must flow from God.

So I have here an idea of life as a continual process of sensing God in the world around me and submitting to God's holiness rather than trying to assert anything for myself. I'm not quite sure what to do with this idea, but I'm pretty certain that if I keep it around it will prove edifying.