"On Great Lone Hills"
“On Great Lone Hills”
The Mormon Tabernacle Choir burned this into my heart when a boy. Now it burned my heart considering all the death I had dealt, and helped to deal from above. It’s a patriotic song, and shows a longing for Peace, but Peace gained at the expense of Truth will never last. In two world wars, German soldiers stormed into war wearing belt buckles emblazoned with the words, “Gott Mit Uns” – God With Us. Since the supposed end of WW2 the US has made the world sick with its own colonial version of God With US, even when slaughtering in the mountains of Central America and elsewhere. I stood on those hills and slaughtered for every American and their God.
View Central America today and you will see what the American God has wrought, Corruption. The American God truly “walks abroad in garments of might”, but there is no “path of splendor” or “crowning of light” – only death, power, and corruption. Granted, these words were written in defiance of the Nazis, but they are words that every American, including land thieves and slavers, have known and felt incessantly from the founding of the republic:
On great, lone hills, where tempests brood and gather,
Primeval Earth, against primeval sky,
We, faring forth, possessed by fervent longing,
Have found a throne, eternal and high,
Have knelt at last in wordless adoration,
Till fire and whirlwind have both gone by.
With ardent song we greet the golden morning.By faith upborne, remember not the night.
The whole wide world, triumphant hails the dawning.
God walks abroad in garments of might,
The hills, behold, are now a path of splendor,
Transfigured all, and all crowned with light.
Hymn from Finlandia – Jean Sibelius
Words by Veikko Antero Koskenniemi
Traditional translation
Performed by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir
From the book: X Rubicon