WILD AND HOLY
Photo from Unsplash.
Wilderness has been an essential part of my ordained ministry.
To encourage and deepen faith, I led various groups into California’s Sierra Nevada. For me, those hikes rivaled the audacity of preaching, and proved far more invigorating than the thousands of church committee meetings I survived.
On a few occasions, with a reverent nod to John the Baptizer or Moses, I sauntered alone into the wild places. My Jordan was the Tuolumne River, my Sinai had names like Silver Peak and Hell for Sure Pass. However, the most memorable sojourns included hiking companions. Young or not so young, eager or reluctant, a collection of strangers transformed into friends with each dusty step. “Sharing,” Anne Lamott wrote in Almost Everything, “is what makes us happy.” Amen to that!
John Muir’s oft-quoted “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe,” has influenced my faith. A backcountry trip, on the established paths or across unmarked ground, causes some hikers to feel insignificant in the midst of the grandeur. Not me. I always felt hitched to the endless summits and forest meadows, a contented—albeit temporary—occupant in Muir’s alpine Universe. I joined the rear of the line of the humbling tradition of prophets who sought to discover or lose themselves in places of splendor and danger.
Danger there is. Meandering creeks, elegant trees, and solemn granite can abruptly shift from visual beauty to a cruel landscape of terror.
On a weekend backpack with a youth group, I tumbled down a snowy slope and broke my left leg. What made me happy was replaced by grim pain in a shattered second. Though I got my first helicopter ride in the rescue effort, that tumble led to surgeries, three different casts on my leg, and months of recovery.
During another occasion, blissfully recalling a trip’s pleasures on the final day of a week-long adventure, I got lost in the woods. Just to heighten the embarrassment, I had been accomplishing my morning business. Gripping a trowel and toilet paper roll, I silently reminisced about where we had been in the last few days rather than staying alert to my here-and-now location. After too many wrong steps, I had no idea where the group was camped. A trowel is a lousy compass, toilet paper no substitute for a map. Though being lost didn’t even last two hours, I’ll never forget staring an unfamiliar football field-sized lake, helpless and stupid. Weren’t the trees along the shoreline cackling at pathetic me? I eventually reunited with my fellow hikers, but for long, awful moments, they seemed in another country.
Wilderness demands our complete attention. An idyllic canyon or windswept ridge can become a mortal threat in the blink of a distracted eye. Thunderstorms unleash fury. Lightning strikes shatter the air. Sharp-clawed predators prowl the night. Trails are blocked by fallen trees, as if the mountain gods had played pick-up-sticks and forgotten their toys. Forest fires sprint over ridges. Gentle, seasonal creeks become raging torrents. Muir, again, was correct. All things are “hitched,” even the scary, malevolent events.
And yet splendor flourishes.
Dawn light transforms an alpine tarn into a glistening jewel.
Stream water, birthed from snow, soothes a parched throat better than the finest of aged wines.
Boisterous laughter ‘round a campfire with fellow weary travelers warms a soul on a cold night getting colder.
Standing on a high mountain pass, you can imagine spotting the gates of heaven at the far edge of an endless horizon of jagged peaks under a cerulean sky.
Watching a teen, a kid more interested in the internet and girls and fast cars, rendered speechless and stunned as shooting stars crisscross the Milky Way.
In lake basins, I marveled as the alpenglow caused dull granite to shimmer with pinks, oranges, and purples. Surreal. Dynamic. Intimate. In the sky above, clouds mirrored the dazzling display, there and gone as casual and fierce as wolves loping across a clearing.
Jesus, the Gospels reveal, went out alone to pray, apart from others. Me, too, with a pack of essentials on my back. Those same Gospels depict him tramping from village to village, he and his disciples sharing the road. Me, too, trying to follow Jesus, sharing wild paths with a ragtag group of believers, a topo map in hand that beckons with that night’s next campsite.
Danger and splendor inform a living faith that is on the move.
What I recall next may not make any sense, regardless of the truth of the words and my abilities to craft a sentence. This is the tale of a handful of visions, of a holy dream unfurling while my eyes were wide open. It happened without warning and only a few times. That was sufficient.
End of day. Backpacks are off the shoulders, leaning against trees. The camp is set. By a creek. By a lake. Always there was water. There would come a time, whether the journey was with a couple of friends, or a lively church youth group, when I’d amble off by myself. I wandered toward the trail which had taken us to that evening’s resting spot. Maybe, after miles of sweat and weary muscles, I desired to be alone. Maybe, before darkness, practical me needed to survey the path we would continue on in the morning.
I would stop where the main trail went south one way, north the other. Or it was east and west. No matter. The rock-strewn, boot-trodden route curled beyond me over talus slopes and through U-shaped valleys. It was a slender thread circling trees, dodging glacial erratics the size of boxcars, paralleling lively streams or dry creek beds. Perhaps animals, eons before humans ventured into these mountains, were the first to trample this thin alpine soil. How many established trails were started by a seasonal parade of lumbering bears, coyotes on the hunt, or deer eager to forage at next verdant meadow?
This trail was simultaneously past and future; it was where we had come from and how we would move forward on the next day. I straddled the dirt, discerning in my bones and soul that this was a sacred way. For a breath or two, I was not merely a boy in the mountains, but was truly, truly a child of a Creator still creating. I did not live there, but I was alive in that here-and-now present. Enveloped in the tender silence of a fading sun and lengthening shadows, there seemed a holy lesson of belonging. Belonging to the spinning Earth, to the group settled nearby, to all of us hitched together on this fragile planet.
Soon, I would return to camp. I never told my fellow hikers about welcoming God and glory on our past and future path. How could I possibly describe a glimpse of grace, of that powerful, ephemeral sense of belonging? But when rejoining my companions, I could see they were each so beautiful. We are hitched, connected, linked; every single stubborn, hurting, wonderful person. We are hitched, connected, linked; every stone, tree, wetlands, ocean, desert.
As a now retired pastor, but also as an eager, still learning, still making mistakes old guy, I have sensed and celebrated the holy presence elsewhere. When a hospice chaplain, I clasped the hands of the dying as they neared their final precious breath. When a campus minister, I have prayed with students who honestly expressed their raw thoughts about depression or abuse and risked a first step toward healing. In front of a congregation, I have cradled a baby born dangerously premature—now thriving with its parents—while offering the liquid gift of baptism. In unexpected common and uncommon moments, as fleeting as a hawk vanishing between peaks, I have felt the hint or nudge or whisper of God’s mercies.
I know—I believe—by experiencing the mountains ablaze with divine colors, and because I have stood on holy dirt inviting sojourners to move forward into the new day, that my ministry has been nourished by and within God’s ongoing creation.
