Today’s find: Moraine

It’s best to approach a glacier with a deep sense of humility, I’ve decided.

So easy to get caught up in a glacier’s beauty, it is: brilliant hues, dramatically jagged edges, nearly-imperceptible movement. Few spectacles in nature more adamantly demand a photo opp. And yet few are more deceptively dangerous. Hidden crevasses here…slippery moulins (drain holes) there. Atop a glacier, even sunlight becomes a threat—so bright is the light, you literally gotta wear shades.

I was therefore glad to limit most of my glacial encounters to “distant viewing” during our recent trip to Alaska. Our cruise ship got us plenty close to appreciate the beauty of several major ice-rivers, without suffering any major threat from ice-chunk calving (or their resultant rogue waves).

Even from afar, a glacier can humble in unexpected ways. You certainly lose perspective. From a miles-away vantage point, it’s hard to comprehend just how tall and wide the terminus of that glacier is. I’m told that the Hubbard (one of Alaska’s most studied ice-stars) is almost 2,000 feet thick (1,300 feet of which is underwater) when it slides into Yakutat Bay. Its 9-mile-wide face routinely calves off icebergs the size of a ten-story building. Hubbard’s immensity tends to underscore one’s own puniness.

The same is true of other “named” glaciers you visit a bit further south, in Glacier Bay National Park: Beauty so stunning, so vast, so robust that it’s difficult not to be overwhelmed by God’s goodness in crafting with such a magnificent palette.

Even the moraine bespeaks a certain rugged splendor: seeing erstwhile “eternal” granite reduced to rubble by patient floe. It brought to mind the words a prayer I’ve held close to my heart for many years:

For the life that was in the beginning,

and is now, thanks be to You, O God…

In this great river of life

that flows behind me and before me,

let me know that I am carried by You.

In this great river of life

that flows around me and through me

let me know that I carry You

and can reverence You in all that has life.

• Sounds of the Eternal / A Celtic Psalter

Next to the spectacular beauty of a glacier-carved valley, I can’t pretend to be much more than life’s moraine: carried along by God, while also invited at times to carry God along. Amazingly, the Holy One provided a subtle and gentle reminder of this invitation while I stood on the top deck of the Grand Princess, gazing at Hubbard.

There, standing next to me, was a perfect stranger…wearing an ACTS Retreat cap. Soon enough, this stranger and I were chatting as brothers-in-Christ…telling the ACTS stories that had been unfolding in our lives for the past 20-plus years, his in the Phoenix area…mine, some 1,500 miles away in St. Louis.

We parted with a hug – strangers no more, but rather brothers mutually awed by the moraine we had uncovered in each other’s life, rubble-turned-to-grace through the persistent eroding action of Christ.

Let us pause now…to recall that we are in the presence of the Holy & Merciful One.

IHS