As I was meditating on this gospel reading about mountains and valleys, I was reminded of a game we used to play as children. I grew up in the mountains of Virginia, and we would play “king of the mountain.” Whether from the top of a stack of hay, a snowbank, or a small hill, we would simply climb to the top and see who could stay up there. That meant pushing each other off. I’ve always been this size, so I was pretty good at it. I remember a particular mountainside that my brother and cousins loved to play on. It was because I was so big that it was hard for me to get up the side, giving them an advantage. In between two rocky cliffs was a sandy embankment. You had to climb the sand to get up to the top. Every time I’d try, the sand would give way, and I’d just slide back down. I never could get up there on my own; someone always had to help me.
I wanted to talk about this because I think sometimes we think of holiness like a bank that’s hard to climb. We look at the word Saint, and we see that as this mountain that every time we try to climb it, we just slide back down. Our footing keeps falling out from under us, and we tumble down to where we started or even fell into a valley or groove lower than before. So there we sit with the mountain we’ve made out of Sainthood still looming over us.
Saint Luke writes that “Every valley shall be filled and every mountain and hill shall be made low. The winding roads shall be made straight, and the rough ways made smooth.” The mountain isn’t holiness… holiness is the straight and even road that Jesus revealed to us through His church. The mountain is trying to do it on our own, trying to reach the path of holiness in our own way with our sins still in our lives. No matter how hard we grab and claw our way up the side, the sand of sin under our feet simply falls away. And the valleys? The ravines? Those are the wounds and scars of our own flawed character. They are the habits and disordered attachments that continually make us want to be stuck in this rut. The things that make us feel we are too low, too far below Sainthood to even bother.
So here we are in Advent. We are supposed to be “preparing the way of the Lord.” Making straight His paths into our hearts. Pay close attention to the way it is worded, though. “Every valley shall be filled. Every mountain laid low.” That’s not our doing. We are simply preparing our hearts. God is leveling the path. It’s when we start thinking, “I’ve got this, I can do this,” that we begin to slip and slide. When we instead simply turn our lives over to Jesus through the Sacraments, walking the path prescribed by His Church, taking the same sure and steady steps that our Blessed Mother, the Apostles, and all the Saints before us took; God reveals that holiness isn’t the mountain in our way, but the straight and narrow path that in the end brings joy and peace to our heart.
Eventually, after fighting my way up the hillside, while my friends and brothers laughed at the big sweaty guy who just couldn’t make it to the top, one of them would reach down a hand and pull me up. We’d sit on top of this cliff and just stare out at the lake and the forest around us. Laughing and telling jokes. What a beautiful moment we shared. Aren’t you tired of fighting to get up that hill? Tired of the fear and the doubt? The anxiety and the stress? Jesus is reaching down, asking to be born more fully in our hearts. Take His hand in the Sacraments. Let Him level those mountains! But that beautiful moment my friends and I shared on top of that little cliff in the Appalachian mountains? It’s nothing compared to this singular promise of what happens when Jesus lifts us up: “The winding roads shall be made straight, and the rough ways made smooth, and all flesh shall see the salvation of God.”
A reflection on the readings for the Second Sunday in Advent: December 5th, 2021