This Way Up

About ten years ago I started climbing mountains. Not serious, scary, life-threatening mountains like Everest or Kilimanjaro, but smaller mountains in the Eastern and Pacific Northwestern regions of this continent.

I have occasionally toyed with the idea of doing more ambitious climbing, but three obstacles always come to mind: (1) a set of lungs weakened by childhood asthma; (2) a compromised inner ear that results in periodic bouts of vertigo; and (3) a wife who would respond to such an idea by handcuffing me to the water heater. Still, I have no complaints because I have found more than enough challenge in the little hills I have tackled.

I started climbing because there is a strong and longstanding association between the tops of mountains and spiritual revelation. Abraham offered to sacrifice Isaac on top of a mountain. That’s where God appeared to Moses in the flame of a burning bush, sealed the covenant with Israel, and spoke the Ten Commandments. Jesus gave us the centerpiece of his teachings, including the Beatitudes and the Lord’s Prayer, on top of a mountain.

A quick review of a concordance shows about five-hundred references to mountains in the Bible. In a typical Bible, that averages about one reference every two pages. And the symbolism of high peaks figures prominently in other faiths, including the Buddhist and Native American religions.

So I went to the mountains in search of enlightenment. I think I got some. And I’m willing to share it and save you some scraped shins, blistered hands, and sore knees.

One of my moments of enlightenment came a few years ago when I hiked up a mountain in the Northeast. I prepared carefully. I joined the Appalachian Mountain Club and purchased several of their excellent guidebooks.

I bought a fancy new backpack, high-tech hiking clothing, and indestructible boots suitable for strolling on the moon. These days all this stuff comes in colors normally reserved for comic books, so I looked sort of like a plastic middle-aged action figure, Captain America on ibuprofen.

I drove to the park and stopped at the check-in booth. A young man in a ranger uniform looked through the car window at all my equipment, smiled admiringly, took my money, and waved me on.

I leaned out the window and told him I had never climbed this mountain before and asked if he had any recommendations. He thought for a moment and then said, “Yeah, you’ll want to follow the ‘red dot’ trail.” I thanked him, pulled into the parking lot, found the trailhead, and began to climb.

The “red dot trail” did not seem like anything I had read about in any of the books. As far I could tell it went straight up the mountain. I spent a lot of time on all fours, crawling over boulders, pulling myself up to get footholds, and walking at angles so severe they made my calves ache. Finally, after hours of very hard climbing, I neared the summit.

The last hundred feet or so seemed impossibly steep, and I breathed a sigh of relief when I finally lifted myself up over the topmost ledge. And there, there before me, there at the apex of the mountain, there at the limit of my endurance … was the moon-shaped face of a six-year-old child.

The boy was on his knees, looking over the edge of the mountain to see the source of the racket coming up the side. He made a gleeful noise, jumped to his feet, and then scooted off to rejoin his little brother and sister, who were also running around the top of the mountain, laughing and playing, as their mother and father watched a few feet away.

It didn’t take me long to figure out what had happened. The nice young ranger, seeing my expensive equipment and assuming a corresponding level of expertise, thought I would get the greatest pleasure from the toughest trail. So he dutifully sent me up the “red dot trail,” which I later learned to be the hardest route by far. In contrast, he pointed the family with little children to the “red triangle trail,” a nice, gradual, lazy series of switchbacks that meandered effortlessly to the summit.

Now, as I say, this experience brought me a flash of enlightenment, and here it is: always, always ask if there’s an easy trail up the mountain.

Of course, when it comes to spirituality there are no easy paths. All the trails are “red dot” trails. They all lead through rough terrain. They all have places where we stumble, slide backward, wander off the path, or get lost. In spiritual matters we travel the path with compasses we can’t always read and maps we don’t always understand—and, sometimes, we pick the wrong trailhead and make the hike up a lot harder on ourselves than it has to be.

To me, our youth is a lot like the foothills of the mountain, when we start the ascent. We have energy and excitement to burn. We wonder about the trail ahead, where it will lead, what we will find, and what the mountain holds for us.

But the foothills remind me of our youth, and particularly of our adolescence, for another reason—a darker one, if you will. It is usually in its foothills that a mountain seems most shadowy, most confusing, most disorienting, and, in its own way, most frightening. The bears and the mountain lions, they say, all live below the tree line.

Let me put this in perspective. If you celebrated your eighteenth birthday this year, here is what life has shown you: You were born in 1990, the year of the first multinational war of the post-Cold War era, the defensive Operation Desert Shield that became the offensive Operation Desert Storm. When you were one year old Jeffrey Dahmer was arrested and charged with unimaginable crimes. When you were two years old the bloodiest European conflict since World War II began when Serbia initiated its “ethnic cleansing” campaign in Bosnia. When you were three years old the World Trade Center was attacked—for the first time. When you were four years old the massacre in Rwanda began. And so on and so on, through the attacks of 9/11, the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, and a renewed sense of nuclear threat from North Korea, Iran, and the occasional itinerant terrorist.

Imagine yourself as a young person in our society, trying to find your way through that forest to higher, clearer, sunnier ground.

And yet today—as throughout history—the young people of our society find the faith and courage to do amazing things. By way of example, the church I attend has in its membership dozens of young people who devote countless hours to volunteer work. They travel to Appalachia to help with building projects. They send needed items to victims of natural disasters. They participate in a thirty-hour fast to raise money to fight famine. They collect food and clothing and Christmas presents for those in need. In myriad ways they serve the least in the kingdom. And that, Jesus tells us, is the path through the forest.

Of course, Jesus was once a young person, too, and the Gospel of Luke tells us a marvelous story about that time in his life. Every year Joseph and Mary traveled to Jerusalem for Passover. When Jesus was twelve years old, they traveled to Jerusalem together, celebrated Passover, and then set out to return to Nazareth. After a day on the road Joseph and Mary looked for Jesus but could not find him, so they turned around and headed back to Jerusalem. For three days they looked all over the city without success. Then, at last, they discovered him in the Temple, “sitting in the midst of the teachers, both listening to them and asking questions. And all who heard Him were astonished at His understanding and his answers.”

The Bible includes many remarkable stories, some so remarkable that they don’t fit very well within our human frame of reference. But this story fits perfectly. Isn’t it just like a twelve-year-old to worry his parents? Isn’t it just like parents to struggle with understanding their twelve-year-old?

I think this story seems so true to our experience, too, because of what it says about Jesus’s own spiritual journey. He stood on the threshold of young adulthood. His parents could no longer simply carry and pull him along as they could when he was a child. The time had come for him to begin to find his own legs, his own way, his own path. And Jesus chose to start his journey at the Temple.

A time of beginning came for Jesus, just as it comes for all of us. Most of us begin our spiritual journeys from home and take something of our home along with us. In the same way, Jesus began his spiritual journey at home, in the Temple, in—as he said—his “father’s house.”

This story also tells us something about our next stop up the mountain, that middle phase of life, and it does so by describing the actions of Joseph and Mary. I think that the gospel give us a delightful little clue here. It starts the story by noting that Joseph and Mary “went to Jerusalem every year at the Feast of Passover.”

Now, why would the story tell us this? Surely, it doesn’t do so in order to convey that Joseph and Mary were people of faith—the text offers much more compelling evidence for that than attendance at a religious ceremony. So, why this detail?

I think that perhaps the story tells us this in order to suggest that Joseph and Mary had fallen into a pattern; that they followed the same course year in and year out; that they had done what so many of us do during the middle phase of life: do this year what we did last year, and next year what we did this year. Joseph and Mary had a plan, a method for managing the complex project of moving all of the family and relatives from Nazareth to Jerusalem and back again. The plan worked pretty well, had the virtue of predictability, and absorbed their attention.

But while they were focused on the minutiae of the journey, while they were following their reliable agenda, they forgot a little something: they left Jesus behind. As do many of us in the middle stages of life.

Again, the trip up the mountain tells us a lot about this. Midway up we start to get tired. The thrill of the climb wears off. Our beginning seems far behind us, and our final destination far ahead of us. Sometimes we wonder about the path we’re on, but mostly we just keep moving forward because every other possibility seems too hard. For many, it becomes a passionless time, a time for putting one foot in front of the other, a time of trudging.

For many of us the middle part of the mountain poses great risks. We stop cutting a bold path and start following an easy one. We keep going in the same direction even if it’s wrong. We stare at our feet and we miss the view. We forget all the promises we made to ourselves back in base camp. Our dreams become small, and we become small with them.

The Masters of Zen Buddhism understood this phenomenon. They understood how easily we become dull and detached, how easily we become deluded and diluted. And so their writings call us to wake up, to live in a full and focused way, to watch so keenly that nothing escapes our notice, to listen so closely that we might hear the sun set and the moon rise. “You must concentrate upon and consecrate yourself to each day,” the Zen Master told his student, “so that you live as though a fire were raging in your hair.”

Jesus calls us to rage—to rage with purpose. To rage for peace; to rage for justice; to rage for the downtrodden and the defenseless; to rage for an end to poverty; to rage for an end to prejudice; to rage for those in harm’s way when disaster strikes; to rage for love.

Midway up the mountain we have serious climbing at hand. Those who climb hard will face obstacles; but they will also find angels at their heels; and angels will bear them up.

And this brings us near the top of the mountain, our later years in life. We have some pretty clear instructions that apply to this part of the mountain.

The first is this: Do not forget that you are still in God’s service. God’s call does not include a retirement plan. Your employer might think of you as retired. Your employer might think of you as retired; the government might think of you as retired; the spouse you annoy on a daily basis might think of you as retired. But God does not retire anyone from any of the most important work we do in life: the work of forgiveness; the work of compassion; the work of building community; the work of sharing joy; the work of easing grief; the work of playing and praying and praising.

You see, in God’s eyes, our job description remains unchanged regardless of our age. And, in God’s hands, we find the strength to do that job—no matter how far up the mountain we have climbed.

The second instruction in the later stage of the climb is this: Watch out—God may still surprise you. Some of us, nearing the top of the mountain, think we have seen it all and that life can hold nothing new. I wonder if anything we think gives God greater reason to laugh at us.

Indeed, the Bible is full of stories of God’s surprises—including many visited upon people rather late in life. When Sarah concluded she was too old to bear a son God surprised her with Isaac. When Elizabeth faced the same disappointment God surprised her with John. When Noah’s children were grown and married God surprised him with a very ambitious project. It was probably later in life that Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea encountered one of God’s greatest surprises to the world—a carpenter from Nazareth named Jesus.

I know a little about late-in-life surprises. In her mid-eighties my mother relocated to a lovely retirement community in St. Joseph, Michigan. She’d had a rocky life. Her first husband died in the Second World War. Her second husband (my father) died in his sixties of a heart attack. She fell in love again, and that good man passed away as well. Throughout all of this she battled cancer, chronic heart problems, and a severe loss of vision in one eye. I’m sure there were many dark nights when she thought she was done with life, and wished life done with her.

But God had some surprises in store for my mother. She found a new community of friends. She did some creative writing, and rediscovered her joy of music. And she met Ed.

Then my mother did some surprising of her own—she and Ed eloped, got married, and moved in together. In the late days of winter, God surprised my mother with the bright sun of summer.

And this brings me to our last instruction about these later days. There is a story about Picasso that I think expresses it perfectly. In an interview near the end of his life someone asked Picasso why his early paintings were so formal, geometric, and studied, while his later paintings were so free, unstructured, and spontaneous. “Well,” Picasso replied, “it takes a long time to become young.”

It takes a long time to become young, indeed. Because it is only in wisdom that we rediscover the virtues of being open, innocent, accepting, non-judgmental, quick to laugh, eager to play, sensitive to suffering, and attentive to the soft still voice that comes to us at night and belongs to the Holy Parent who loves us all. Oh, how Jesus understood this. “Let the little children come to Me and do not forbid them,” he said, “for of such is the kingdom of heaven.” (Matt. 19:14)

And so, it turns out, my experience on that mountain in the Northeast provided a worthwhile flash of enlightenment after all. For, at the end of all our climbing, all our seeking, all our wandering and wondering, at the top of the mountain, at the limit of our quest—we find the moon-shaped face of a child. Staring back at us. Smiling. Laughing at how seriously we have taken ourselves. Puzzled at how long it has taken us to arrive. Inviting us to lift ourselves up over the top, join hands, sing loudly, and dance in a crazy and gleeful circle as if we were children loved beyond all describing.

Because we are.

And because of such indeed is the kingdom of heaven.

Amen.