Whether I am driving to work at mornings or I am in some part of the countryside, I always get ‘a high’ from the breath-taking beauty and the awesome majesty of the mountains of St. Kitts.
Yesterday, as I left The Grange Nursing Home in the Ottleys-Lodge Project area, and began my journey back to Basseterre, it happened yet again.
The sun was out in all of its glory, and the lush, green mountains stretching from Greenhill all the way up to Saddlers looked absolutely stunning and magnificent.
And as my eyes and my soul feasted on it all, I imagined myself up there looking around and beyond the island, as far as the eye could see.
I felt euphoric. And ever so thankful to God.
These mountains play a critical role in sustaining our ecosystems and our island, and in providing us with food and water. And they also nourish us aesthetically.
But there is also something very spiritual about them.
And, as I drove back to Basseterre, I began to reflect on that spirituality.
I thought of Tibet, where Buddhism is practised, and its Mount Kailash, that country’s most important place where people go to receive enlightenment.
And just next door to Tibet in Nepal where people risk death in order to nestle up under God on top of the world’s tallest mountain, Mount Everest, and other peaks in the Himalayas.
Every person who has reached the peak of Everest, standing some 29,000 feet in the heavens, has described it as a life-changing, and a deeply spiritual, experience.
‘Ever’ and ‘rest’. Everest. As if, once you’ve reached there, your soul finds a place of rest.
Muslims will tell you that the most important event in the history of Islam was the revelation of God’s word to Muhammad in the early 7th century.
That event took place on Mount Hirat, near Mecca, in Saudi Arabia.
And both the Old and the New Testaments of the Holy Bible report massively important events which took place, yes, on mountains.
Mostly, the reports are about spiritual leaders who went up to the mountain.
That’s where they would go to bond with God, to seek truth and true freedom, to get a real sense of the relationship between the material and the ethereal and in the process to get their priorities right, to commit and recommit themselves to Him, to receive His inspiration and guidance, and to carry His word to mankind.
It was on the mountain, perhaps more than any other place, that they would learn the two most important lessons of life, namely, to love God with all of their hearts and to love other human beings as they loved themselves.
Learning those two lessons would drain them of their lust for earthly trappings, and of their greed, arrogance, avarice, anger, and hatred, and turn them into better servants of God and shepherds of God’s flock.
The visit to the mountain for prayer and meditation was, therefore, a rite of passage of the spiritual leaders. It was from that vantage point that they could develop the vision, or see, and pursue, the big picture, the Promised Land (as Moses did).
The same Moses who took Aaron, Nabab, Abihu and seventy elders to Mount Sinai, where they had a vision of God.
And the same Moses who came down from the mountain with the Ten Commandments.
Later on, of course, Jesus himself made many visits to the mountains.
And those of his disciples whom he saw as leaders of a higher order, he took them higher up the mountain than he did the others.
That means something.
The mountain is the place where earthly leaders can become great leaders. It is where Earth ‘meets’ Heaven, where God, who is, after all, the Way, the Truth and the Light, brings them (away from the crowd) to see the Way, the Truth and the Light. And it is the place where true freedom is achieved, where vision is born, and where humility and integrity are embedded.
I speak of a leadership of earthly things and of people that is built upon the acceptance of God’s guidance, as against leadership that is based on earthly cravings.
I speak of a leadership built upon ‘the message of the mountain’, a leadership model in which there is no place for confused, corrupt, avaricious, arrogant and demagogic leaders and would-be leaders playing God.
I speak of leadership in which Bible and land are in harmony, and where the Bible (or any other tome or ‘ism’) is not used to plunder and oppress people in the name of God.
On this side point, the following comment by South Africa’s Archbishop Desmond Tutu is particularly poignant:
“When the Europeans came, they brought the Bible with them. They had the Bible and we had the land. They told us to close our eyes and to praise the Lord with them. And we did. But when we opened our eyes, we had the Bible in our hands and they had the land”.
That kind of leadership, My Friends, is not the type that is learned ‘on the mountain’. But that is all too often the type of leadership which we see in the world, in both the clerical and the secular fields.
The spiritual power and the symbolism of the mountain were also well appreciated by Dr. Martin Luther King.
In his famous ‘I Have A Dream’ speech at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. on August 28th, 1963, Dr. King referred to mountains many times.
He said:
“……And so let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire. Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania. Let freedom ring from the snow-capped Rockies of Colorado. Let freedom ring from the curvaceous slopes of California. Let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia. Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee. Let freedom ring from every hill and molehill of Mississippi. From every mountainside, let freedom ring…..”
It was the leadership which flows from ‘the message of the mountain’ that Dr. King advocated, and died for. He knew that such leadership would make for a better society.
That is the leadership that I am talking about also.
And as I looked at those mountains yesterday, I wondered about our leaders, both clerical and secular.
How many of them know and live ‘the message of the mountain’? How many of them have had that spiritual experience and revelation?
Can their hearts and minds be opened so that they would yield to ‘the message of the mountain’ and so give themselves a chance to become great leaders?
Too many people in this country are fed up with the church. They see some pastors and some churches in the same light as they see politicians generally.
The pastors and the church need to do something about that perception.
As do the politicians.
People are fed up with, and feel deeply insulted by, the politics as usual, and the politics of sleight of hand, of self promotion, of power grabbing, of manipulation and of grandstanding. People are fed up with the politics of smug and convenient talk, moral spinelessness and ethical torpor.
People are turned off by what they are seeing and hearing on both sides.
Some are tired with the present Government, while others want to support Labour but see the Prime Minister give way to another Labour leader because they are more trusting of Labour and what it has done for the small man and woman in the country.
Meanwhile, many people are mortally afraid of PAM and its leaders who are seen to have done little to inspire and convince independent thinkers looking for leadership that is built on ‘the message of the mountain’.
People are afraid of PAM’s motives and modus operandi. People are afraid that PAM offers no change for the better.
And what people need most of all is not necessarily a change of party, but a change of attitude, a change of political culture, a change towards ’the message of the mountain’.
Yet, as elections draw nigh, it seems to be politics as usual on the platforms, in the newspapers, on the radio talk shows, on the internet, and on the street.
Not the politics imbued with ‘the message of the mountain’, but the politics of the gutter.
This is an insult to the people of this nation, who will be cajoled and hyped up to run all over the place wearing this, shouting that, and cussing each other in the name of a cause which is not even their own.
All so abusive, disrespectful, uninspired and Godless.
And right here in our midst are these magnificent, majestic, heavenly mountains looking down over us each and every day without fail, calling us to get their message, calling us to enlightenment, and calling us to our own salvation as a people and a nation.
Father, guide us. We need to make that pilgrimage, whether literally or otherwise. We are on the precipice, and there by our own hearts and hands.
The writer is a former Minister of the ruling St. Kitts-Nevis Labour Party and the current Parliamentary Representative of Constituency Number Two.
