Paradise Harbor

I have seen beautiful places before.

Mountains.
Oceans.
Forests.
Cities illuminated at night.
Sunsets that seemed to set the entire sky on fire.

But I had never seen anything quite like Paradise Harbour.

I had travelled almost to the end of the world, to a place that seemed as though it could only have been made by the hands of God.

The landscape was almost devoid of color, and yet I had never seen anything more beautiful.

White snow.
Dark water.
Charcoal rock.
Gray sky.
And the luminous blue of ancient ice.

Perhaps that was what made the place so arresting. Nothing competed for attention.

No flowers.
No green trees.
No brightly painted buildings.
No architecture demanding admiration.

Almost nothing we normally depend upon to call something beautiful.

And still, I stood in awe.

The mountains rose directly from the sea, their dark faces disappearing beneath snow. Icebergs drifted across water so still that their reflections sometimes seemed as substantial as the landscape itself.

There were penguins, seals, and orcas—life appearing in places where life seemed almost impossible.

And then there was the silence.

Not an empty silence, but a silence so immense that it seemed almost tangible. Occasionally the wind rushed across the water, but when it passed, the stillness returned.

I could hear myself breathe.

Standing there, surrounded by such scale, I became acutely aware of how small I was.

And strangely, that realization did not diminish me.

It properly placed me.

Creation did not revolve around me.

It never had.

Before me was a world that had existed long before my arrival and would continue long after I was gone. Mountains, oceans, glaciers, wind, and ice carried on without any knowledge of my ambitions, achievements, worries, or plans.

And confronted by such scale, silence, beauty, and mystery, the possibility that all of this existed without meaning seemed harder for me to believe than the possibility that it pointed beyond itself.

Toward a Creator.

Toward an intelligence greater than my own.

Toward something before which the most appropriate human response was not explanation, but awe.

And yes, it was cold.

Bitterly cold.

I understood something of the science before me—the movement of glaciers, the formation of ice, the forces that had shaped those mountains over unimaginable stretches of time.

But knowledge did not diminish my awe.

It deepened it.

Perhaps understanding creation should never lessen our sense of wonder.

Perhaps it should enlarge it.

Perhaps it should enlarge our faith.

Paradise Harbour seemed to have been created largely by subtraction.

Rock.
Water.
Ice.
Light.
Silence.

Nothing unnecessary.

Nothing competing.

Nothing trying to impress.

Perhaps beauty does not always require abundance.

Perhaps it requires clarity.

Perhaps the soul is no different.

Far from the noise of cities, the cruelty of the world, the pressures we manufacture for ourselves, and the endless insistence that we must become more, achieve more, possess more, I experienced something I had not realized I needed.

Stillness.

For a little while, ambition gave way to wonder.

Noise gave way to silence.

Achievement gave way to gratitude.

And somewhere between the dark mountains and the blue ice, between the bitter cold and the impossible stillness of the sea, I felt the grace and mercy of God descend upon me.

Before beauty of that magnitude, I did not become smaller.

I became more truthful.

I remembered where I belonged.

Not at the center of creation.

But gratefully within it.

And standing there at the end of the world, surrounded by rock, water, ice, light, and silence, there seemed only one thing left to say:

How marvelous is the work of Thy hands.

What a wondrous world God created.

Simply O.