In the
summer of 1994 I walked from Yosemite Valley to Mount Whitney on the John Muir
Trail. It was 20 days in the wilderness,
not 40. And I wasn’t fasting. I was carrying over fifty pounds of food, fuel,
clothing and equipment on my back. On
the first day out, as I climbed the two thousand feet from Happy Isles to the
top of Nevada Falls, with the weight of my pack making every step an effort and
the pain in my hips, my shoulders and my neck almost reducing me to tears, I
felt like I’d made a terrible mistake; and there was no way I was going to be
able to keep this up for over 200 miles.
But I summoned up the will to fight through those thoughts, and as the
day went on the climb became gentler, and I got deeper into the backcountry and
left the crowds behind, and settled into a good, steady rhythm of walking and
rest. And the next day, and each day after
that I got a little stronger, and the pack got a little lighter, and my doubts
about completing the task I’d set myself grew less. By the time a week had gone by, I had walked
through Yosemite National Park, past Devil’s Postpile and Mammoth Mountain and
was in the John Muir Wilderness heading toward Kings’ Canyon.
It
was a fairly remote section of the trail, and even though it was July I hadn’t
seen another soul since the afternoon of the day before. The particular morning I am thinking of was overcast
and cool with a light rain falling, but I’d eaten a hot breakfast and had the
right gear for the weather, and was feeling good. I was hiking along at what I thought was a damn
fine clip, when a slightly-built man, who appeared to be of East Indian origin,
in shorts and running shoes, a windbreaker, and a fanny pack, passed me on the
trail. He did not stop to chat, and to
this day I have no idea how he got there, or where he was going. For all he know, he was out for a day trip
from his lavish base camp, well-supplied by mule train, but the impression he
left me with was of a wandering yogi, coursing through the mountains swift and free
as an eagle. And all of a sudden I was
self-consciously aware of the great bulk of my backpack, and my lumbering pace,
and I felt a bit of a fool.
Because
one of the things you find when you try to get away from it all is that renouncing
worldly goods and comforts can become as much a form of competition as getting
goods and comforts often is. It’s not
that I set out on my hike to prove that I was better than anyone else. It was something I was doing for myself, to
prepare myself mentally and spiritually to embark on a whole new phase of my
life. After seven-and-a-half years of
living an alternative lifestyle in intentional spiritual communities, I was
about to move into the city and get an apartment and a job and to try out
living like an ordinary American. But my
encounter with the runner on the trail showed me that, while my initial
intention in making this journey might have been humble and true, my newfound strength
and confidence as a wilderness traveler had begun to go to my head.
I
was just a little too proud of my courage in enduring the loneliness and dangers
of the trail; a little too proud of my austerity in living, for weeks at a
time, with nothing but what I could carry on my back. I was just a little too proud of the distance
I was traveling and the time I was making as I went. I had left behind the home I’d known, and did
not yet know where I would find a new one, and for the time being I was free of
the trammels and turmoil of life down there in the flatlands; I was free of
grubbing for money and jostling shoulder-to-shoulder with the other rats in the
race, and was feeling more than a little sorry for those poor saps who were not
so free. But when that man ran by me in
his jogging shorts I saw that my burden was not as light as I imagined it to be.
We
have a tradition in the modern West of romanticizing wilderness. We like to imagine it as a pristine world
apart, reflecting back to us a peace and purity that is the total opposite of
the noisy, ugly, frantic cities where we live.
But the truth is we don’t know how to travel in the wild except by
bringing our world with us, even if it’s only what carry on our backs and in
our heads. Long solitude in nature shows
us the naked truth of our dependence on human society, and how deeply our
acquired cultural values and personal neuroses are embedded in our souls. But the haunting beauty and grandeur of wild places
can also give us a sense of the transcendent ground of all personality and culture
that is the mystery of God. That
awareness doesn’t free us from the need and responsibility of life in human
community. But it does often leave us feeling
inspired and even impelled to go about living it differently.
And this is something I think the Bible
understands. There are a lot of stories
of wilderness journeys in the Bible, but they don’t idealize the wilderness as
a place that is desirable in itself, a place one would want to stay, if one
could. Maybe it is in part because the
wilderness in biblical lands is a stark, desert landscape, but in these stories
it is what anthropologists call a “liminal space,” a place you go through on
the way to a new way of being. The
desert, in these stories, is a place of preparation, of stripping away what is
not essential, and learning hard lessons, so as to be capable of handling
something new, a new way of living that is a gift from God.
In
the story of the Exodus, Israel wanders in the wilderness and goes through
various tests and trials in preparation for receiving the gift of the Law. They then screw up, and screw up again, and
so must undergo more testing, for a total of forty years, in order to be ready for
the gift of the promised land. And the
Gospel of Luke tells how, after the Holy Spirit came down on Jesus at his
baptism, that same Spirit led him out into the wilderness. There he fasted for forty days and the devil
came to him, to test him; to test his understanding of what it meant to be the
beloved Son of God, and to see if he was ready to return to Galilee on the
Spirit’s mission of proclaiming good news to the poor.
The
church is the continuation that mission.
And that means sharing Jesus’ gift of the Holy Spirit, which we received
in a singular way in our own baptism. It
means sharing in Jesus’ identity, as members of his body and brothers and
sisters in the family of God. The whole
purpose of the worship of the church is to continually receive these gifts, to
renew his spirit and identity in us, so we might play our part in Christ’s messianic mission
to the world. We do this every week in
our celebration of the Eucharist. Every Sunday is a little Easter, the centerpiece of which is the remembrance of
Jesus passion, death and resurrection. Just as the spring is the annual renewal
of the life of the earth, Easter is the annual renewal of our lives in the spirit and identity of Christ, by our participation in Jesus’ journey through death to new and inconceivably abundant life.
To
prepare mentally and spiritually to make that journey with him, we observe a
season of fasting and penitence, which the church has traditionally imagined as
like a journey in the wilderness. It is
a time of surrendering superfluous luxuries and distractions to discover what
is most essential in our practice and our faith. It is a time to confront the ways we are
tempted to use religion as a patch over our unhealed neuroses, and a prop to our unquestioned assumptions, an apology for our cultural values, and above all as a means to our own ends. But this journey of Lent is not an end in
itself. It is not a process we
control. No one cares, least of all God,
how strong our willpower is, how many desserts we have forgone, or how many
hours we have logged in bible study, meditation, and prayer. All that matters is that we are ready, when
the journey is over, to receive the gift of a new life.
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