Mountains, Mountains, Everywhere Mountains

It's been a while since I did a blog so I thought that I would just put out some thoughts on the Frye chapter that my group did their presentation on. Anyways, I remember all the times that Moses went onto a mountain or later Jesus. In fact, most of the profits would go to the top of a mountain to communicate with God. The further into the bible I got, the more it seemed that people had to ascend a mountain in order to talk to God.

In the beginning of Genesis, God walked with man in the garden of Eden or with some of his most trusted servants, but as time went on God seemed to withdraw from the world as if he had grown tired of us or something. He would appear to Jacob and Joseph in dreams but other than that he remained silent, watching. Only after Moses came onto the scene did God once again appear to man, but this time he would descend only so far as the top of a mountain. Mountains, then, became sacred places of communication with God. Eventually, he would descend to the temple, but at the same time there is an almost lesser sense of the God that can press himself into a building rather than the one that at most can be communed with at the top of the mountain.

For several centuries, God is said to be in the temple of the Jews and it is only after Jesus begins to preach that we see another prophet that goes to the top of a mountain and attempts to truly speak to the vastness that is an all-powerful God. It is as if he is attempting to return his fellow people to the basis of what they were before they got caught up in the statutes and laws that had been around for generations. Laws, as Jesus seems to see them, are a man made construction much like the Tower of Babel that man attempted to use to reach God. This, Jesus would argue, is wrong. We do not attempt to work our way to God, but allow Him to come to us.

In fact, as I think about it, I begin to make a connection between the power of fasting and a connection with God. Fasting would seem to be the ultimate attempt at waiting for God, to the point that one forgoes even the basic necessities of life in order that they might be approached by God. Instead of trying to force him to see us through our actions we are supposed to pray, the use of the word in all its power, in order to allow for that final step of the ascension.