It probably breaches the banks of foolishness to articulate thoughts on a geological feature upon which more ink, paint, verbage, descriptive force, film, and eloquence have likely been spilt and offered than upon any other such feature in the United States. But fools rush in where angels fear to tread, especially when fools get to see something likely as beautiful as what angels normally see. That’s hyperbole, of course, but not by much.
Last week my wife and I spent a few days at the south rim of the Grand Canyon in northern Arizona. We remarked to one another, upon paying the entry fee at the gates to the national park, that we were both positively nervous and jittery about finally getting to see that which all Americans have heard of and many Americans have beheld. But neither of us had seen it.
So it was with bated breath that we drove into the park straining here and there to finally catch a glimpse of something that only hyper-anticipation could render elusive in those maddening moments when one is near but not quite there.
We finally saw it (or, more properly, that little bit of it that one can see at any given moment) when approaching the Bright Angel trailhead. There it was, stretched out before us, a staggeringly beautiful and suddenly breathtaking Canyon of such imminent and terrifying grandeur that it quite literally stops one in one’s tracks.
The Irish Christians spoke of “thin places,” places in which the barrier between this world and the next seems so thin as to be almost transparent. I know not what the acceptable parameters for “thin places” are, but, if the Grand Canyon’s sheer size disqualifies it then we’ll simply have to come up with a new phrase.
Indeed, the barrier between this world and the next did feel transparent here. We were both amazed at the amazingly level geological strata transparent in the canyon, the imposing formidability of the sheer rock walls, the kaleidoscopic and undulating terrain, marked here and there by gorches, gulches, valleys, crevices, and chasms through the canyon floor, and the nearly palpable sense of enormity that overwhelmed us when standing on the edge.
It is an emotional and spiritual experience, and the frustration of trying to capture that sense in words is very real indeed. I felt, when standing there, and as we began our descent, a kind of convulsive collision between my own insignificance and the canyon’s own grandeur. I am not thinking here of theological correctness, only of the impulse of the moment. One feels small at the canyon, even when one knows that such was given to man by God.
There is a yawning, gaping, primal energy at the Grand Canyon, as if the earth itself has strained wide it’s terrestial Goliath mouth in preparation of swallowing the sky. And we ant-like mortals do what our more preservationist bones whisper to us not to do: we walk into this abyss.
You descend into the canyon on snaking, tendrilesque trails of white earth which turn burnt-orange a mile or so in. The top-most trails are vertigo-inducing strings of path that hug the rock wall on the left and drop to certain death in chasmic void to the right. It really is quite disorienting at first, and the safety of the rock wall does not offer much solace in the face of the attractive pull of the canyon itself.
It is bewilderingly intoxicating in that the feel and sound and smell and, above all, the sight of the canyon surrounds you and compels you as you move down. It is a deliciously dangerous feeling though, of course, the trail is wide enough not to be truly so.
Down, down, down you go around this bend and the next. Odd little squirrels with funny, patchy coats of fur scamper by you, oblivious of your existence, searching for another patch of cool shadow on which they cool their bellies, legs and arms splayed out on the cooler earth, hiding from the sun.
Even downhill is tiring in its way, not least of all because of the jamming of the toes into the front of your shoes (some websites encourage you to cut your toenails very short before attempting the descent), but moreso because of the strange surreality of the surrounding environment and the ever-present conscientous effort not to get to close to the edge. But it is a glorious exhaustion. Roni and I both, I think, felt a wonderful since of privilege at being able to walk into this ancient dream world of colors, sights, and sounds.
The ascent back to the top is gruelling because it is so unrelentingly steep. The change in weather becomes noticeable as well: hotter the lower you go, cooler the higher. Of course, near the top, the trail seems more imposing because you become more aware of its height.
We finally made it out of the Grand Canyon with a delightful and tired sense of joyful defeat. It had won. It cannot be grasped, conquered, taken in or taken over. It is grand in a way that defies any sense of human mastery over it. It is, quite simply, astounding.
The IMAX film we watched at the National Geographic visitor’s center the night before we entered the park informed us that one might sense a vague and distant feeling of the divine at the Grand Canyon. I expect nothing less, of course, from National Geographic (an organization wondrously more adept at natural observation than theological observation), but let me protest nontheless.
What I felt at the Grand Canyon was not a vague and distant sense of the divine, but an overwhelmingly clear impression of the grandeur of the Father of Jesus Christ. I could hear the words of God to Job at the end of that great book, challenging Job to say whether or not he, Job, could grasp the majesty of the created order in the way that God not only grasps it but subdues it, being its Creator. I could hear Paul’s words in the beginning of Romans speaking of the capacity and ability of nature to at least express the truth of God’s power and might to all who would look and see.
The Grand Canyon is “grand” precisely because it speaks of a grand and glorious God. That which we gawked at in dumbstruck amazement was nothing more than a mere deliberate scratch in the sand of His own creation by the smallest finger of our great God.
The canyon is not grand to God, but insofar as it draws men’s hearts Godward by the sheer reflective power of its own borrowed beauty, it does deserve the title.
