Bret Marfut Lane's description of Mount Rainier reading

In his book Landscapes of the Sacred, Belden Lane gives a vivid description of the majesty of Mount Rainier. I had already heard in class that this mountain was called “The Mountain that was God” by the Indians. I never quite understood that, how someone could believe that a huge rock was God, but reading this description made me try to put the idea into perspective. Mount Rainier, in it’s own way, is alive. The constant movement of the glaciers had been continuing for thousands of years, and the actual terrain of the mountain has been changing on a much longer timeline even than that. As far as the mountain itself, it actually has some characteristics that can easily be compared to God. In addition to it’s incredible duration, just the simple mass of the mountain is something that is extremely difficult to comprehend. Both in size and time on this earth, any individual is absolutely insignificant to this huge piece of earth. The mountain is something immune to the troubles of people. No war, law, or depression has ever changed the mountains size, or the ever-present flow of the mountains gigantic glaciers. When I stop to think about it, even in a basic physical level, the mountain has many attributes that I would apply to God. Regardless of what exactly was meant by “The Mountain that was God,” Mount Rainier is certainly a place of incredible spiritual power.