At one point I doubted that Internet or modern technologies could ever bring me any meaningful spiritual inspiration. But having encountered the VolcanoCam, I know that the old power shines through the new media. A friend of mine gave me the address for the Italian Institute of Vulcanology's live-feed camera trained at Mount Etna in Sicily. This camera, when it's working, gives a new image of the volcano every 30 seconds, sent to the Net for people all over the world to see. Mount Etna is a volcano which has been more or less continually active for 3000 years. It is often mentioned by ancient Greek and Roman philosophers and poets, and appears ever after in literature and science. Now it's on the Internet.
In 1962, when my parents and I lived in Italy, we took a tour of Sicily in late February or early March. We visited antiquities, beautiful cities and villages, and rugged countryside, and we also stayed in Taormina, a resort town which has a clear and glorious view of Mount Etna. Across a brilliant abyss of Mediterranean air, I was able to see the flames at the summit of the 10,000-foot mountain from a safe distance of many miles away. I have never forgotten this sight, and now, thirty-six years later, I can see it again via the electric abyss of the Internet.
I have always been a volcano fan. But I have never thought to see a volcano through the eyes of faith. The epiphany of God at Mount Sinai, as many Bible commentators have said, resembles a volcanic eruption: a pillar of smoke by day, a pillar of fire by night, the devouring fire on the mountain top. And my fellow Michaeline Shelagh Gorringe, a geologist, has brought to my attention another Biblical volcanic eruption, in Psalm 18:7-14: "...The earth quivered and quaked...from his nostrils a smoke ascended, and from his mouth a fire that consumed (live embers were kindled at it)....."
As many of you have often heard from me, I am not that gifted religious type who can see God in human beings. I am more likely to see God in the non-human, even the inorganic world. My God is a God less of Love or Compassion, more of Light and Power. I want a dazzling God who emits showers of sparks.
I look at Mount Etna and I see something which is not like the other emotionally moving centers of religious attention in our world. Mount Etna is not endangered - in fact, it's more likely to endanger us. It is not frail, vulnerable, weak, or sad. We don't have to feel sorry for it or hug it. It doesn't care about humans and their affairs. It doesn't want anything from us - either sacrifice or love or compassion....the best one can give it is respect. It doesn't even have to be a symbol for anything. It just burns and puffs its way through the millennia.
Yet it has inspired Greek philosophers, ancient natural scientists, and alchemists. It has indeed entered into the symbolic life of humanity, sitting in the heart of the wine-dark Mediterranean, the mixing-bowl of the Western world. My spirituality is formed not by the misty Celtic or Nordic world of Northern Europe and the British Isles, but by the sun-washed world of the Mediterranean and Middle East, with its brilliant light, sharp distinctions, and geological instability. For me, Etna is another Sinai, a place where a Law of heat and light and energy continues to be received by wondering thinkers, a Torah written in Greek fire.
Hannah M.G.Shapero
9/21/98