Get Thee Up Into a High Mountain
by Julia G. Blair

Introductory note from Margaret Young: In all of humankind, there is a sense of the sacred, and a yearning to connect with it. Even in places where governments have tried to channel religious longings into political paths, there are yet holy mountains, and pilgrims who will not be kept from climbing them.  Such ineradicable devotion testifies to our spiritual natures and our inborn desire to know God.  For this installment of “Household of Faith,” I have chosen to use an essay written by my mother, Julia Groberg Blair, which describes her 1980 visit to China’s holiest mountain, Mount Tai. 

We had been in China one month.  On October first we were told by our gracious hosts, ever concerned with our education, “Today we will take you to climb Tai Shan...Mount Tai.”

“Mt. Tai?”

“It is the Mt. Olympus of China, since ancient times our most sacred mountain.”

“And what are we to do on Mt. Tai?”

“Observe the sunrise! It is an ancient custom to make a pilgrimage to observe the sunrise from the top of Tai Shan.”

My husband and I were guests of the People’s Republic of China while teaching at Shandong University.  Others composed our agenda and filled it with experiences aimed at giving us a proper education about China.  So on “National Liberation Day” we were taken to join in the pilgrimage to Tai Shan, near Confucius’ birthplace.

Tai Shan boasts seven thousand stone steps ascending as if to heaven.  Sculpted dragons, fish, and birds made exquisite shrines in the foothills below the formidable peak.  I studied them briefly, then forced my gaze upward to the exalted mountain.  A groan issued from my throat, and I shrugged an apology to Li, our guide.  He smiled a broad, crinkled smile that pushed his glasses further up his nose.  “It’s a beautiful climb,” he said.  “You’ll see.” 

Though neither physically nor psychologically prepared, I was at least well enough accoutered.  My hiking boots were thickly padded.  As Chinese citizens on holiday began congregating around the monuments below Mt. Tai–over ten thousand made the climb that day–I realized that my boots were actually extravagant. Wizened old women wore thin fabric shoes on their tiny deformed feet, bound since childhood (a custom now mercifully done away with).  They too would make the long climb alongside young, barefoot boys with close-clipped hair and sunburned cheeks.  These eager hikers radiated a sense of excitement that even I could feel.

The Climb

We started the climb.  I diverted my thoughts from the inevitable leg strain by thinking of how many feet with how many purposes had negotiated these steps.

Two thousand years ago, when the mountain’s tradition of holiness was initiated, some spiritual leader like Moses on Sinai had doubtless climbed this leviathan peak and received enlightenment.  Then had come the temple builders with wood, stone, and ceramic roofing to build Buddhist shrines and Taoist monuments.  Worshipers had followed–emperors, slaves, laborers, priests–countless numbers of them seeking revelation and tranquility.

Then, after centuries of worship on Mt. Tai, had come the young hell-bent Red Guard, carrying implements much the same as those borne by the ancient temple builders.  But these would mutilate and destroy in the name of the revolution.  Angry feet would kick holy gargoyles until the temples were mutilated fragments of a world the young sought to bury forever in the past.

But in 1976 had come the rebuilders, believing that although religion was still the “opiate of the people” yet history had its own merit.  And surely there had been other solitary figures seeking reprieve or refuge from overwhelming changes in government and social structure.  Fresh flowers and food in reconstructed shrines attested to the fact that the religious tradition of Mt. Tai had transcended the “liberation” of China and endured the frightful ravages of the ten-year long “Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.”

As we climbed we saw four young men descending, bearing a grinning white-haired woman–probably their grandmother–on a wooden chair.  I took a moment to rest while I watched the happy group.  How many emperors and empresses had been borne in much the same way–surely in more elegance, but not with more joy.

A breeze scented with the smell of the surrounding pines cooled me as I rested.  Ming trees with twisted trunks and branches gave a distinctly Chinese look to the mountain, and tall, deciduous tress with leaves just rusting reminded me of autumn in Utah.  I inhaled deeply and began climbing again–just as a couple (actually holding hands!) passed me.  Li squinted at the public display of affection and assured me: “Shanghai people!”

Nodding and chuckling to myself, I continued, stopping only to visit the reconditioned, dull orange temples at shaded way-stations on the path, where tea and trinkets were sold. 

Everyone stopped at times to rest, even the wiry coolies, each carrying up to 130 lbs of food on long poles balanced on their shoulders.  Live chicken, chunks of pork, eggs, vegetables, noodles, rice...the human mules were the only means of transporting food to the mountaintop restaurant.  A brief conversation with one of them, a fifteen-year-old boy, revealed that some make as many as five trips a day to the top and back, earning only a few cents each trip.  Many of them are in their teens, and their earnings, meager though they may be by our standards, make such work attractive.

A Beacon of Hope

The restaurant which awaits their burden is the most ornate ex-temple of all on the mountain top.  It is a welcome beacon of hope when finally visible from below, a warm, pungent haven of rest when entered at last, totally exhausted.  My panted breaths merged to a soul-felt sigh of relief as I staggered in.

After dinner we went below the restaurant to the bunk-house where as privileged guests we were furnished with beds and heavy army coats to take off the chill.  I didn’t realize at the time that the thousands of “ordinary” Chinese would have to spend the night without the comfort of a bed or warm coat.  Though crowded like sardines, they were in high spirits as they awaited the spectacle of the sunrise–still hours away.  I crawled gratefully into the straw bed and slept, despite the unceasing rumbling and jostling upstairs.

In the morning we went outside to fulfill the meaning of the ritual climb to the top of Mt. Tai.  The sky was the glittering turquoise of just before dawn when we joined the thousands of Chinese who had come to watch the event.  In the chilly, dark morning we waited for the moment, catching the excitement of the people.  At last a single voice from a Chinese youth perched precariously on a tower exclaimed aloud to the sun “Hello!”  All eyes were focused on the horizon. Then we saw a sliver of orange appear.  The masses breathed a collective sigh as it grew to a great, red-orange ball–a promise of the future, a stunning answer to faith.  Standing there with thousands of Chinese witnessing the simple dawning of a new day, I felt I had never seen anything so momentous, so magnificent.

Had I never seen the sun before?  What was so thrilling about dawn on Mt. Tai?

On the good and on the wicked, on the wealthy and on the starving, on the soldier and on his distant sweetheart, the sun gives light and warmth throughout all time.  And those who have walked the seven thousand steps of Tai Shan have witnessed to its glory.

Realizing that witnessing that dawn on Tai Shan was a distinctly Chinese experience and that the great mountain had truly been sanctified by time and tragedy and by the devotion of innumerable Chinese, I was wonderstruck.  Still, it was not until the end of my year in China that I fully appreciated our pilgrimage to the top of the sacred mountain.  By then I had talked to a Chinese girl who confided that she at last knew her boyfriend was serious about her, for he had suggested they climb Mt. Tai–not together, but on the same day.  Another student excitedly but cautiously asked if I would help translate a wonderful new story from a new Chinese magazine, written by a young , unknown writer.  “We all appreciate this writer, because he knows how we really feel,” the student said.  We worked for some time together on the translation, but then learned that this writer was being “criticized,” so our translation project was dropped.  The story, though, was remarkable for modern China.  Its protagonists (a couple whose love had been thwarted by the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution) meet at last on Mt. Tai where the girl says: “The time for our love to blossom has passed, but I have found meaning in life.  I have found God.” Reflecting on his past years as a leader of the Red Guard, her wondering lover says secretly: “I want to know the good, the beautiful, and the true.  Why not God?”

Mt. Tai finally became for me a symbol of the search for meaning, be that meaning in love, strength, or religious faith.  It is history, with its ruined temples-turned-restaurants, and it is the future, supporting hundreds of people who simply await the dawn.

As I came to know and love my students, many of whom had been members of the Red Guard, and saw their individual strivings, their private battles and secret longings, I understood the old woman’s smile and the happy, anxious faces of the poorly-clad foot-bound grandmothers who climbed the mountain to sigh with the crowd, to remember, to hope and to feel very privately the warmth and light of the dawning sun tying together the present, the past, and the future.

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