Soul-Searching: On Coming Down The Mountain
In 1994 I spent a summer as camp counselor at Rainbow Trail Lutheran Bible Camp near Hillside, Colorado. Most weeks we’d take campers hiking to the top of a mountain peak in the Sangre de Cristo mountains.
The climb up is arduous. Less and less oxygen means burning legs and lungs. It’s worth the climb, but there are moments when you wonder.
But somehow there’s one thing harder than the climb itself. I found the hike back down even more difficult. It was like after the high of climbing a mountain, the low of descent was somehow even lower.
I’ve carried this spiritual insight with me ever since. If someone I know wins an award, is recognized as one of “40 under 40,” wins or loses an election, gets a grant, I try to check in afterward and see how their doing with the “descent.”
This spring it occurred to me I’m coming down a very strange mountain. First, we’re very tenuously finding our way back down a rocky path from the peak of Covid. I think on this one I forgot to bring a large enough water bottle, so I’m dehydrated.
We also had a banner year at church in 2021. We launched multiple important and widely recognized ministries. Queer Camp, basically the first church-based LGBTQIA+ camp in the south; The Transition Closet, a resource for gender-affirming apparel; and Ozark Atolls, a resource and ministry for the large and active Marshallese community in Northwest Arkansas.
I’m proud of these. I love starting new ministries. But I told my church council at the beginning of 2022, “My radical idea for 2022 is to not start any new things.”
It’s one thing to say that, it’s another to do it. One of the reasons people keep climbing mountain after mountain is the high is addictive. There’s a rush.
Coming down from the mountain, living with and maintaining just the experience of the ascent itself, that’s a whole different territory of feelings.
So here I am in May of 2022 taking a break, or trying to. I mean, let’s take an honest assessment. I’ve been in this pastor gig almost 20 years. I celebrate my 25th wedding anniversary and 50th birthday in a month. It’s kind of a stack of significance.
A demand I might inadvertently place on myself, even a sublimated one, is to keep producing new ministries at that pace. I mean, the needs of the world are great. New challenges keep presenting themselves, and old challenges we thought overcome now are making a resurgence.
I’ve increasingly thought of myself as a social justice or social gospel pastor. As that kind of pastor, I’m supposed to take responsibility for, have concern about, all the things. And of course that’s why you do find me present and supporting quite a few, from rent assistance to community inclusion to LGBTQIA+ rights to refugee resettlement to hunger to education reform to prison abolition and so on. I could keep going.
But when that gets to be too much, the only “down the mountain” activity I’ve typically imagined has been retreat. I just take a period where I attend less quorum court meetings, try to have less meetings, give myself permission to slow down my rate of response to e-mails and phone calls.
And retreat is a partial and helpful strategy. We see it modeled in the gospels, where Christ and the disciples can’t do everything for everyone, so they do what they can, what presents itself, and then also slip away to more deserted places for rest.
However, the deep spiritual insight that’s come to me the last couple of weeks, and this is what I intend to lean into for the foreseeable future, is that the reason for the retreat in the gospels wasn’t a capitalist one. In capitalism, vacation is designed to make you a better worker when you return. In the capitalist system, even rest itself is in the service of more work.
Instead, in Christian practice, retreat is for… prayer. It’s for an encounter with God. Somehow in my climb up many mountains I’d always trusted God goes with us… to the protest, to the organizing of this camp, that non-profit, God goes with me on this hospital visit, this walk with a parishioner.
But when I truly needed to rest, I looked to a host of other replacements for God in rest, including unfortunately more but different work, or entertainment escapism, or just rest focused on my own resourcefulness to be restful. Rest defined as time alone, time for my own personal desires to either escape pain or attain benefits.
What has been missing in all of this, and I’m embarrassed to admit this, has been retreat for the sake of deepening connect with God.
I’m fascinated by this essay I just finished in the T&T Clark Handbook of Christian Prayer. Paul Hinlicky has an entry, Retrieving Luther On Prayer, and he writes,
“for Luther the prayer of the newborn child of God has its setting in Jesus’ invitation to join him in apocalyptic battle. Prayer ‘under the light of grace’ is struggle through times of trial and assaults of evil, fending off terror in order to persevere in keeping the commandment to beseech the coming of God’s kingdom, the hallowing of God’s name and the doing of God’s will on earth as in heaven. Prayer thus enables action; indeed, the Christian’s prayer is already holy action… thus for Luther prayer actualizes and in turn informs the renewed human vocation on the earth, the ‘daily bread’ responsibility for providing ‘bodily goods,’ as Luther expansively interprets the petition arising from human need into a comprehensive political and ecological ethic” 381).
This is the reframing I’d so desperately been needing.1 I needed to imagine God, trust God, as accompanying down the mountain as much as up the mountain. In that re-framing, you’re in continuing relationship with God whether you are in the ascent phase, huffing and puffing and keeping your eye on the peak and the weather, or whether you’re simply watching your feet so as not to trip on rocks, and trying to find the stream where you can get enough cold water into your filter to relieve the dehydration headache that’s coming on. In both directions, you’ve got a friend hiking with you, and it’s God.
I heard recently that two pastoral colleagues, Nadia Bolz-Weber and Lauren Winner, talked at the Festival of Homiletics about needing to take 15-20 hours per week to write their sermons. It occurs to me now, hearing that, that although I’m sure there is a lot of writing involved in those 15-20 hours, that’s also space for the cultivation of a relationship with God. It may be framed to a certain degree as work, as ascent, but honestly a lot of it is probably staring at a blank screen and wondering if anything will come to mind, and that’s not unlike the final leg of a hike when your blisters have been rubbed raw and you’re nursing a twisted ankle but you still need to make it home.
One of my parishioners texted recently and said, “You know, the same tendencies that make a person an alcoholic make them a workaholic.” Well, I am an alcoholic, and thanks be to God have remained sober now for multiple years at least in part because I’ve entrusted that to God. Now, as I consider work as an addiction, it occurs to me that work is different from alcohol in this way: unless you’re independently wealthy you don’t get to go “sober” from work.
I’ve got a living to make, a calling to fulfill. So the move, similar to alcoholism, is the move of relationship, of shift of perspective, not just while I’m resting or on sabbatical, but also when I’m working. So that when I do go protest at the courthouse and the sheriffs department removes me, or I spend time with a grieving family, or I chant the liturgy Sunday morning or cook hot dogs at the cookout or rake a pine-needly labyrinth at the church or raise funds (and yes we always need funds please and thank you) I’m doing so consistently under the same rubric of the “apocalyptic battle.”
We’re in this together against some real and awful forces, y’all. But we’re in this with Jesus, and you better believe when he’s out there walking with us he’s talking up a storm to his dad. Complaining to God isn’t quitting. It’s conversation with the one most likely to be able to do something about all the things we can’t seem to fix. And again, returning to that radical Luther, who in a sermon on the Sermon on the Mount wrote, “By faith we do what God wills; God in turn does what we will.” Which is to say, if our retreat is prayer, our retreat may eventuate in changing God.
So thanks to Michael Chan at Word & World for a review copy of the book, I promise I’ll have that review to you in July.