Mountain of Skulls

Pastor’s Epistle—January 2026

Years ago, I read a Buddhist parable—as recounted in Lafcadio Hearn’s famous collection Kwaidan—wherein a Bodhisattva leads a young man up a mighty misty mountain, that he might have a vision of the sacred at the peak. The way is rough and rude, the vapors thick, such that he cannot see the ground beneath his feet. He treads upon round and rolling stones, which cause him to stumble, sometimes bursting underfoot.

Drawing near the summit as the dawn begins to break, with the fog now burning away, the young man realizes, to his horror, that the mountain upon which he stands is in fact an unfathomably vast heap of human skulls. “Do not fear,” the Bodhisattva cries, “for all of them are your own!” This grisly image understandably stuck with me. In context, it refers to the Buddhist belief in reincarnation, a nigh-endless series of lifetimes culminating at long last in Enlightenment. The young man has lived countless lives, that he might now glimpse a vision of divine eternal Truth.

Christians claim a different sort of soteriology. We embrace resurrection rather than reincarnation. But this parable has value for us as well. Do we not speak of Baptism as a daily lived reality—“walking wet,” as we sometimes like to say—dying to our sins every night, rising in the light of day, with the life of Christ within us? We too know what it is to die and to rise, over and again, until that day when we rise to fall no more.

I write this epistle upon the cusp of the New Year, ever a time for reflection and fresh resolution. As I near the half-century mark, I sympathize with those who feel they’ve already lived, and outlived, several lives. I think of who I was 10, 20, 30 years ago; am I still the same person? Heavens, I hope not. Please tell me that I’ve learned something, bettered myself over the previous year, the previous decade. Yet underlying these changes, some willful, some not, runs a thread of continuity, which ties them all together—rather like reincarnation, rather like resurrection.

I once read of a Sufi mystic who taught his disciples of reincarnation, despite this being a doctrine rejected by Islamic theologians. The culmination of his teaching was the revelation that each of these reincarnations in fact played out within a single lifetime for each and every one of us. We are all of us constantly dying, constantly reborn. This can but deepen the wonder, the mystery, the awe of life.

In Christ, God joins us in the cycle of death and rebirth, in order to free us from this world of everlasting decay; to give to us His own eternal life, His Spirit who lives beyond the ravages of space and time. I hope to remember this as we enter 2026. Death can hold no fear for us, for we’ve already died. We’ve stood atop Calvary, “the Place of the Skull,” and before the empty Tomb. Now we see the Risen Light, who enlivens all our sepulchres.

In Jesus. Amen.