I had the pleasure of road tripping through some of the most beautiful corners of the Southwest recently. Our trip included winding drives through evergreen mountaintops, sprawling deserts and fields full of wildflowers. At one point on the scenic cruise through the great American wilderness, I was a bit baffled and frustrated to see a lush alpine hill topped with a cell tower. A big, unsightly, garish pile of unadorned steel jutting out from the majestic treeline.

Something about the way this particular cell tower disenchanted such an otherwise picturesque woodland really ruffled my feathers. I see cell towers all the time, but this one, by contrast to the wild beauty of its surroundings, was an unbelievable eyesore. I was so irritated that I started thinking symbolically, if you can believe it.

Hilltops and mountains play a very significant symbolic role throughout the Bible. The Lord appears in a cloud to deliver the law to Moses atop Sinai, Noah and his family are delivered from the cataclysmic flood on Ararat, the Holy City and its temple reside atop Zion, Jesus is transfigured with the prophets by His side on a mountain, and later breathes His last from the top of Golgotha. Taken in the context of biblical cosmology, a mountain is a fixture of earth that reaches up and meets the firmament. It is a pinnacle where the heavens meet earth. It’s also significant that it is a natural feature of God’s creation, as opposed to a tower like the one at Babel. God frustrates the efforts of man to mimic His piling of earth to the clouds.

In ancient Israel’s history recounted in the Old Testament, hilltops become a staple of pagan activity. “The high places” becomes shorthand for the stations of idols and depravity. The Great Pyramids constructed by the Egyptians were once capped with gold, a fact I recall Jordan Peterson pointing out emblemizes the hierarchical structure of reality and our grasp on it. The pinnacle of the pyramid embodies the pinnacle of value. For the Egyptians, the pyramids were monuments to their royalty, the heads of their civilization, and the immortal afterlife after which they strove. For the Israelites, the high places and Asherah poles aimed at the sky were monuments to spirits of hedonism and horror. 

I’ve mentioned Jacob’s ladder before as a prime instantiation of this theme of ascent and descent. The spatial orientation along the axis of above and below stands in for the order of the cosmos and beyond. It is the Great Chain of Being in which all things are ordered according to stations of value and nature. Jacob’s ladder embodies the transcendence of the Creator who presides not at the top of the Chain, but over the entire structure. We might say that motif is echoed in the Eye of Providence, found on the back of the U.S. seal and every dollar bill, in which the watchful eye of God is not at the top of the pyramid but hovers above it. Just as God scatters the tongues of men at Babel, He renews them in fire at Pentecost. The God of Heaven reserves the sole power to send His Word down like rain on the earth and also to raise the Son up through the clouds. God transcends the Chain by moving along it as He pleases.

All this to say, vertical orientation in space with relation to the gravity of the earth mirrors the orientation of our values. That is, what we put at the top of the mountain represents what we give priority over our lives, what we worship, or what we value the most. Seeing that gray heap of metal stabbing out of the richness of God’s beautiful wilderness made me wonder at this. What could it mean to have a cell tower on top of a hill? Obviously, it is not there because it adds beauty, or because it is a monument to any god or spirit. A cell tower goes on top of a hill because that’s where it works best, no matter how drab, industrial, or disenchanting it is. 

And yet, I think that reflects a profound truth about our culture. We devote the high places to our lifestyle. The high places are harnessed for the most valuable thing in our modern world: information. The high places are consecrated to the spirit of the age, to materialism, to constant consumption, the invisible power radiating through the air that gives us all our desires right at our fingertips. Our premodern forebears, Christian or pagan, probably would have seen the hilltop as a better place to commune with the Heavenly or spiritual realm. We just see them as a better place for mankind to commune with itself.

What more is there for the civilization who has literally planted her flag on the moon itself? Staked a claim among the heavens? The modern world is one of distinct disenchantment. We have pierced the veil of the firmament at which our ancestors could only stare and marvel and wonder. In reaching beyond the sky, we have somehow also reached beyond its beauty. The scientific urge to explain, the idolizing of knowledge, propositions and facts has made the world purely a place of utility. The cell tower goes atop a hill purely for the sake of practicality even at the expense of beauty. Rather than reading the story of creation in order to understand its Author, we have become illiterate to it by focusing on how the pages it’s written on can better serve us, how its bindings can serve as fuel for the ceaselessly hungry engine of progress. 

I have frequently driven across the plains of San Agustin, named for a theological hero of western Christianity, and seen the massive monument to science and engineering known as the Very Large Array. What a startling contrast there is to see the cattle pacifically roaming the breathtaking fields of yellow flowers right next to a singularly imposing complex of scientific instrumentation. All the radio astronomy is impressive for what it is, but we seem to have collectively forgotten that science simply is what it is, not all there is. Scientific facts are not the only truths. Science is not the only angle from which the world makes sense, and treating it like it is has made the world on one hand more intelligible and on the other less meaningful. 

It is man’s role to tame the wilderness, as the prowling dogies on the San Agustin demonstrate, but what a curious thing to devote such a wondrous swathe of the Land of Enchantment herself to one big telescope. The VLA is, among its other uses, a part of the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence. It’s a shame that the namesake of that plain told us more about the intelligence beyond the sky than that telescope ever will in a society that has traded the former for the latter.

I don’t hate the VLA. It is an impressive testament to man’s intellect and curiosity, and in a wiser society could serve further as a testament to the God that made both man and the unfathomable universe we study. But I do hate that darn cell tower, that one I saw in the woods, more specifically and spitefully than any other. I’d knock it down if I could. Every day I’ll think of it when I see the mountaintop cell towers and scientific whatchamacallits atop the mountains of my home. At this rate, Pikes Peak, Mt. McKinley and Devil’s Tower will all someday have their silhouettes against the sunset marked by cell towers, observatories and the like. Because our age is one of the worship of man. We build high towers upon the high places to serve our ravenous consumption, our addiction to information, our faith in our own understanding. 

And this is not to discount any good that the information age has brought, but there is such a thing as too much of a good thing, and any good thing not devoted to God’s glory is robbed of its goodness. A mountain should be a place where heaven meets the earth, a place of repose, of glory, of awe, of wonder and enchantment. I’ll admit that as a modern person, I’m guilty of often keeping my cell phone on my person when I hike. But part of me always hopes to find that spot where I lose service, that I’ll have an excuse to be disconnected from the constant flow of consumption without having to justify all the goods I’m giving up by being so. The hilltops where the highway of information can’t reach, a kind where man’s desires are torn down rather than elevated — that’s the kind of hilltop where Abraham was ready to sacrifice his son, where Moses saw God in the burning bush, where Jesus bled for the forgiveness of sins. It’s the kind of hilltop unsullied by our age, where enchantment is still alive, whether during the day when the birds are singing or at night when the stars are shining. We may not feel it’s the safest hilltop, sure, but perhaps that’s what makes it a beautiful one.

It’s the kind of place where you don’t have to understand what’s what, or why things work the way they do, you just have to marvel at the fact of it all. It’s not that Isaac had to die, but that Abraham had to have faith. What are we unwilling to sacrifice on the hills? What are we unwilling to be cut off from? You don’t have to cut technology out of your life — but if you did have to, could you? Could I? That hill where everything else is given up is the kind of hill where faith is embodied, not vain knowledge or entertainment or constant information. But it’s not about the hill or the mountain, symbols aren’t about themselves. It’s about what they’re for, how we see them, and what they tell us about the One who made them.

The woman saith unto him, Sir, I perceive that thou art a prophet. Our fathers worshipped in this mountain; and ye say, that in Jerusalem is the place where men ought to worship. Jesus saith unto her, Woman, believe me, the hour cometh, when ye shall neither in this mountain, nor yet at Jerusalem, worship the Father. … God is a Spirit: and they that worship him must worship Him in spirit and in truth. — John 4:19-21, 24 (KJV)