The Spirit of Backpacking

The folks crossing this Sierra stream--Ron, Karin, Tina and Cynthia--are at this point already halfway to their goal: the 14,495' summit of the formidable Mt. Whitney. By the time they reach it, they'll have hiked 170 miles of the John Muir Trail over a period of 17 days. And all their survival gear on this arduous trek must be carried on their backs.

Yet in the Sierras, where a violent thunderstorm or a sudden freeze or a misplaced boot on a slippery trail can injure or kill the unwary hiker, survival gear is everything. Thus, this team of family members and one good friend spent a year planning what would go into their 35-45 pound packs: down sleeping bags, all-weather tents, rain gear, backpacking stoves, silk underwear, wool socks, gloves, ski hats, first aid supplies, bear canisters, dehydrated food, headlamps, water filters, water bladders, sun screen. They also thought hard about their mental health on this long trek, and added chocolate, journals, New York Times crossword puzzles, a very skinny paperback or two. The night before they set out on the trail, they got on the scale with their loaded packs, then went through them one last time, eliminating anything they possibly could.

Mike and I hiked with them for the first long week, and as we bade them goodbye at Muir Ranch, they drew still more items from their packs--things they'd thought they couldn't live with 50 miles ago--and thrust them into our hands: candy, walkie-talkies, a book, a camera, extra clothes. They'd reached the tipping point: the weight of their possessions was now a bigger burden than their anxious worries about mental and physical survival.

In this, they were certainly not alone. Muir Ranch is a resupply point for most hikers on the JMT, and here was the incontrovertible evidence that, in anticipation of the worst, almost everybody overpacks: twenty 5-gallon buckets filled with discarded food, candy bars, medicine, clothing, skinny paperbacks, all free for the taking should anyone be willing to add another ounce to the already daunting weight on his back.

When Jesus says, "Come to me, for my burden is easy and my yoke is light," he is revealing one of the deepest secrets of the spiritual life: that when we lay down our anxiety-generated burdens because we simply cannot bear to carry them any longer, we are set free to accomplish remarkable things. This is the secret the underlies the strict asceticism of the Desert Fathers and the various renunciations of the monastic life: self-absorbed anxiety gets in the way of genuine liberation. Yet ironically enough, we've been taught in our time to allay that anxiety by adding to, rather than eliminating, our burden of unnecessary possessions.

We watched them saddle up, a short string of human mules who would rack up a 33,000 feet of climbing and descending before they reached their goal. I sadly suspected that sometime along the way, there would be other things they'd wish they'd left behind--but with nobody to carry them out of the mountains, they'd be stuck bearing up under the extraneous and the unnecessary.

Just like me, no matter how much I long to be entirely free of worry. Instead, the slow pushing back of anxiety is a daily thing--lots of prayer, and one foot after the other.

Creative Destruction

A few minutes after I took this photo near Truchas, New Mexico, the storm broke: rolling thunder, fireworks of lightning, a whirlwind of hail. A violent June storm, completely out of sync with the normal weather pattern for this time of year. For some reason, the foreboding scene made me think of a Robinson Jeffers poem that drew me hard in the old days before I came back to Christianity. Here, the storm that comes is fire rather than rain. When the siege is over, the poet returns to the still-smoldering hillside to see an eagle perched "insolent and gorged" on a burnt jag, the lucky recipient of free game, driven toward him by the flames. Jeffers speaks of the "merciless blue" of the sky, the "merciless black" of the ravaged hillsides, and the "sombre-feathered great bird sleepily merciless between them." And then, when it seems that this poem can only end in nihilistic despair, he adds a final redemptive line: "The destruction that brings an eagle from heaven is better than mercy."

Though Jeffers was a pantheist rather than a Christian, his work helped call me back to the great mysteries of Christ, which are often rife with frustrating paradox. But it was not until I found the monastic path that I began to discern the religious truth in Jeffer's last line. He is speaking here of the blessing of creative destruction--the magnificent but eerie beauty that rises out of death. And it occurred to me that the whole monastic vocation is about voluntarily embracing dying.

What must be put to sleep? The ephemeral delights that give our life meaning. Our jealously guarded self-image. Our most private and personal notions about God. Former Benedictine abbess Mary Margaret Funk calls these the "three renunciations" necessary for monastic transformation.

Such un-selfing can be agonizingly difficult. This is why St. Romuald of Ravenna, founder of the Camaldolese Benedictine congregation, adopts such a gentle tone when he describes the creative destruction we must undergo: "Sit in your cell as in paradise. Put the whole world behind you and forget it. . . .Empty yourself completely and sit waiting, content with the grace of God, like the chick who tastes nothing but what his mother gives him." If we give in to it--if we raise our arms to the licking flames or our faces to the bursting skies--then God can do the work in us. If we refuse to go through this annihilating passage, however, we risk trading away our spiritual inheritance for Esau's pot of steaming porridge.