On the day after my fifty-ninth birthday, I did something stupid. I went backpacking. It didn’t need to be stupid, but the feeling of getting older with more creaking joints, more physical limitations, more feelings of being on the downward slide in life, probably pushed me to do it in a stupid way. I set out to defy my old age. There was a time when I backpacked a lot; climbing many, many four thousand foot mountains here in the northeast and covering much of the Appalachian Trail, but that time was a long time ago.
I borrowed some equipment from my daughter Molly. I studied the maps of the White Mountains that she gave me for my birthday. And I decided to set out on a little three day trip. Molly had suggested a short loop of trails that she and her husband had walked recently; a relatively flat hike to a lovely lake. But I thought, “what’s the use of hiking in the mountains if you’re not going to climb a mountain.” So I picked out a slightly more challenging route. The guidebook, in fact, called it “strenuous.” It seemed perfect for a fifty-nine year old man trying to prove to himself that he was still young and vigorous. Of course, I’m not just an older man, I’m also overweight and out of shape and still breaking in a new hip. I walk most days, sometimes four or five miles, but that didn’t begin to prepare me for this trek.
Maureen thought I probably shouldn’t do it. My daughter thought that I probably shouldn’t do it. Somewhere in the back of my mind, my own better judgment was saying that I probably shouldn’t do it. But some other need prevailed and I arrived at the trailhead on a hot summer day just before noon, hoisted my thirty-five pound pack onto my back and set out alone into the mountains.
The trail started out uphill and continued uphill every step for five miles. Sometimes the trail was so steep that it was hand over hand climbing. I was out of breath in two minutes. I was covered in sweat in five minutes. I was in despair in ten minutes.
While taking my overweight and out of shape body up the mountains of Connemara a few years ago, I discovered something: you can always walk another twenty feet. My modus operandi there, when I thought the climb was too much, was to go as far as I could, stop, rest, catch my breath, wait for my legs to stop aching, and then go another twenty feet. In such fits and starts one can climb a hill that seems too big to climb (not a bad lesson, by the way, for life in general when one takes on any enormous and daunting task: don’t worry about the whole job, just do the next thing—take it one day at a time or one minute at a time). And so that’s what I did. I got exhausted, didn’t think I could go on, thought over and over about turning back, but just willed myself to go another twenty feet up the trail. I didn’t set any speed records, but low and behold, I did that all afternoon until I got to the top of that mountain.
The view, of course, was wonderful. Mount Washington and the rest of the Presidential range were just to the west. To the south stretched mountains and lakes as far as I could see. But I had hoped to feel some real exhilaration being up there. Instead, I was just too spent to really enjoy it as much as I should. And I still had the task of hauling my aching body down to the tree line and finding a place to camp for the night. So after fifteen lovely minutes on the summit, I headed down. Two hours later, I pitched my little tent in an alpine blueberry patch, a couple hundred feet off the trail, just below the tree line. After getting things set up, I started to get cramps in my legs. There was little else I could do but to lie down flat in the tent and try to rest them enough to stop the cramping. I don’t know how I managed it, lying in the most particularly uncomfortable spot in the entire mountain range, but somehow I fell asleep.
I awoke at about eight-thirty in the evening. I left the tent in nothing but my boxer shorts and walked to the top of the ridge. There it was like I had stepped into another reality. The sun was setting in absolute splendor over Mount Washington. Every treetop for fifty miles was bathed in golden light. The lakes to the south were glistening in gold. Just over the sunset, Venus had come out as brightly as I have ever seen her. And then, just rising over the mountain I had just climbed to the east, was a full moon, huge in blazing orange. I could see hawks soaring along the mountainside hundreds of feet below me and I was looking down on wispy clouds scuttering along the hills. If there has ever been a lovelier moment of pure beauty in my life, I cannot remember it. My eyes filled with tears. My heart ached with the grandeur of it. It was not just that I was seeing it, but, standing there on that mountainside, I was a part of it. The beauty was not just around me, but in me and of me.
I didn’t have to utter a prayer; every fiber of my being was stretched into a “thank you.” I just stood there for forty minutes or so until it was almost too dark to find my way back to the tent. I didn’t feel tired any more. The aches and pains were gone. I had no worries about the next hard day to come. In fact, in that forty minutes, I had no worries about anything at all. I was alone in the world; alone in the moment; and yet, so full of the presence of everything that I was tingling with it.
This, of course, was a sacred moment for me; a sacred place, a sacred time, and now, a sacred memory. In the late stages of a rather underwhelming sabbatical leave, finally this comes—a charge of spiritual energy and renewal beyond any expectation. So what is it that creates a time like that? What happens? Why does such a scene of grandeur light us up on the inside? What is it in us that responds with such wonder to beauty?
Most of the time, of course, we live in the metaphorical valleys of life. That’s where everyday life happens. We tread our way through the well-worn ruts of habits and routines. We focus on duties and labors and responsibilities. We follow familiar patterns. That’s all necessary. We can’t live everyday on mountaintops. We’d never get anything done. The wind is too strong. But our life in the valleys leaves us hungering and longing for some kind of transcendence. We do need to climb above the tree-line of our days to see and feel the bigger reality. We need to feel connected to something beyond ourselves and the small relationships in our lives. We need to feel significant; like we have some place in the “big picture.”
Of course, I’m not just talking about something “out there,” but far more importantly about what’s inside us. We respond to beauty out there because it echoes inside of us. We too are “intricately and wonderfully made.” We are a part of the grandeur and the beauty. Most of the time we don’t see it or notice it, but it is always there. There is some spirit in us that is of the same substance and the same reality as the grandeur out there that we can feel rising up within us and coming newly alive in those mountaintop moments. This is what feeds our souls (whatever they are). Without the occasional transcendent moment we starve to death on the inside. We become smaller, narrower, sadder.
Spirituality is about finding ways to cross the boundaries between our private worlds to experience the power of our inherent connection to each other and all that is. We need ways pull back the veil that hides our deepest nature from ourselves. We are part of the whole (whether we call it God or the world soul or the collective unconscious or the ground of being). We are not just separate entities living private little lives. We are transcendent. Every once in a while, God beaks through our barriers and reminds us of that and those moments fuel the real depth of our lives.
So look for those moments. Find the sacred spaces in your life that can stimulate them. Open yourself to the world around you in any way you can. Go to extremes if it allows you to cross the boundaries, inside and out, and find your connection to the whole.
I probably could have killed myself going so overboard on my ridiculous little climb. I probably won’t do it again any time soon. But, was it worth it? My God, all the pain, all the effort, all the sweat faded into nothing in that first moment of glory. It was worth any price.
