Ready for a walk

Perhaps venturing out in search of some unspecified but yearned for high trail will become my final quest: a single but all consuming endeavour which may occupy me for the rest of my life. It may become the preliminary for the last walk I ever take: the cresting of the final ridge separating me from first glimpse of a destination sought since hearing and responding to a call to follow: a destination; an unknown; a growing certainty; a revelation that is both longed for and feared.

‘As a deer yearns for running streams, so I yearn for you, my God.’  (Psalms 42:1)

An absorption into a Presence, and a sense of belonging beyond not only the limits of human experience, but all possible imaginings; a return to the full awareness and shared consciousness of God walking in Eden. A walk with The One ‘who makes me as swift as a deer and sets me firmly on the heights’ (Psalms 18:33): He who has blessed me with both the ability and the longing to climb to the tree line in search of the trail.

I would have no wish to leave the trees behind save in this one necessary undertaking; I would have no reason to search for a trail above them other than to find, to see, and to descend into the welcome of the unimaginable Sanctuary to which it leads.

 '... She knows only that she must go on, for he is not here, he is beyond ... nothing to be seen save the great expanse of cold, grey sea. No land in sight. She must not turn back, she cannot stand still, she must go on, must do what she cannot do for he is somewhere beyond, calling. She steps out to walk upon the waters, to go to him whom she cannot see. To do this is to be 'there' with him.

Or, can we say she walks out upon the narrow promontory reaching far out to sea?  She walks to the very tip, with the grey sea all around save for the narrow strip of land linking her to the island. The waves are slowly washing away the earth behind her, cutting her off. She could leap back to safer ground. She does not; she remains looking out to sea, looking at nothing else, waiting in hope. She is borne away to him.'

(Ruth Burrows. Guidelines For Mystical Prayer)

This sense of knowing that there is still a long walk to be done is entangled with other thoughts; memories of other journeys made on foot; sights seen; sounds heard; persons walked with, met, and avoided; crossing the paths of others, especially those who were to become God’s provision through particular times.

More recently, these thoughts have been joined by my increasing awareness of two people for whom the pleasure derived from walking is no longer what it once was. The longing is there; the memories and associated trains of thought are undiminished; but the thinking, the relishing, the experiencing: the delights and invigorations of wind and rain and sun, of dawns and dusks, of bird flight and song, of tree and bush, of grass and moss and fern – of all things which combine to build the pleasures of walking – they are now, for the most part, enjoyed without the lifelong active ingredient which is the act of walking itself.

One person can no longer enjoy that physical freedom as fully or as spontaneously as he once did, and while the other still could, she too has lost the same degree of enjoyment and freedom through their ongoing commitment to shared time and the experience of life and love.

I can no longer walk or run through the woods or over the hills without taking my awareness of them with me in all that I see and hear, and feel and think. I have never been able to go there without at least some of my time being spent in my own form of wordless prayer, but in recent weeks such times have repeatedly folded and wrapped themselves around my awareness of them, carrying them and sharing with them my experience of being where they would both love to be.

Saturday 11^th February was an exceptional day. I shall regret for a long time not returning home for my camera when I realized what had occurred during the night. Even before reaching the northern end of the hills I could see that something had happened; a tree high on the hillside was backlit by the sun and shone as though set with diamonds. As I climbed higher the tops of trees were all the same, and higher still whole trees were encased as though in glass, and wherever the sun shone through them they dazzled and flashed in an extraordinary way. I ran round the Herefordshire side of the British Camp, in places barely able to stand motionless until dropping down into the woods. Everything on the higher slopes was completely encased in a thick layer of flawlessly transparent ice, and as I faced into the sunshine my world was simply unreal; every spike on the gorse had its own crystal sheath; every blade and leaf and twig, and every patch of stony ground not previously covered by the protection of snow was cloaked in the same bedazzling flash and fire. Other lines from E.B.B’s Aurora Leigh ran over and over through my head:

‘... Earth’s crammed with heaven

and every common bush afire with God;

But only he who sees, takes off his shoes ...’

By the time I had returned home the sun’s warmth had reduced the display to merely residual patches of light, and I had no more than memories of a rare and beautiful experience. That hurt. I had carried those same two people with me, in my thoughts and in my heart, but I had nothing to show them. I wanted to send a note or an email, or telephone, but it seemed almost cruel without being able to show anything of that morning. There are photographs to look at here  http://www.geograph.org.uk/search.php?i=29345418  but they do not show what I had seen in the way that I had seen it, or in the way that I had longed for them to be able to experience it. 

But that is where I went wrong, and where a part of me still goes wrong; no photographs could ever yield what I wanted them to have; that could only be received through their own direct experience of the day, and that would have meant a walk.

That is the truth at the heart of walking; and that is the loss in the heart of one who longs to walk but is no longer able to do so.

Gain and loss; strength and weakness; life and death; past, present and future; they are all bound up with the simple yet profound desire to go forth: to get out and away on foot; farther, higher and deeper: away from the world while trekking into its very heart. It is a following in answer to a call.

I have quoted the following words before (29.9.08 ... Dedication) but, on more than one level, they are too apposite to be avoided here for that reason alone.

‘... we are but faint hearted crusaders, even the walkers, now-a-days, who undertake no persevering, never-ending enterprises. Our expeditions are but tours and come round again at evening to the old hearth side from which we set out. Half the walk is but retracing our steps. We should go forth on the shortest walk, perchance, in the spirit of undying adventure, never to return; prepared to send back our embalmed hearts only, as relics to our desolate kingdoms. If you are ready to leave father and mother, and brother and sister, and wife and child and friends, and never see them again; if you have paid your debts, and made your will, and settled all your affairs, and are a free man; then you are ready for a walk.’

(Henry David Thoreau. Walking.)

Called to freedom

For many, perhaps, the environment most likely to equal the trees for communing with God at any level is found in a garden; for some, the product of their own handiwork in particular: their own garden. Mine figures large in my own life, but other than as a major part of home, with all that is meant by that focus of stability and comfort – what I have previously referred to as my ‘Base Camp’ – its relevance in the present context is not particularly that it is a garden, but a space in which nature is given much more of a free rein than most true gardeners would allow. (4 & 5.7.07  Talk of trees … and of a tree)

I do not separate myself from imagined views of the Garden of Eden in Genesis, but I do find it impossible to see it as what we commonly speak of today as a garden: a controlled, manicured and cultivated area, however beautiful that may be. Yes, scripture tells us that ‘God took the man and settled him in the garden of Eden to cultivate and take care of it’ (Genesis 2:15), but that was to come, or would have done had he not been banished from it. Eden was more beautiful than anything Adam or any other man could have made of it.

We all have an inbuilt awareness of that as a profound truth, both in our use of the name to describe the astonishing wonders of parts of the world we are too late recognizing as mere remnants of what was here before we wreaked havoc with it in our advance towards ever (supposedly) higher levels of what we refer to as ‘civilization’, and in our naming of particular places that stir us in ways that rouse in our consciousness echoes, not only of Eden, but of something less tangible to which we are still connected by the ever-present lifeline manifested in our doubts (previous post). ‘Cathedral Grove’ on Vancouver Island, Canada, springs immediately to mind.

Eden is unimaginable without trees; without trees not only its garden but Eden itself would not exist.

 

‘From the soil, God caused to grow every kind of tree ...

with the tree of life in the middle of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.’

(Genesis 2:9)

Leaving gardens aside, however (if we remain within their confines we shall never discover what walking is), the only equal of woods and forests – for me at least – is hills and mountains. And whenever I find myself in a landscape where each becomes an essential part of the other, whether in Canada (28.5.09  On looking up.), in the Pyrenees (23.1.12  God is present) or during frequent visits to my local wooded hillsides, I can find myself as close to being in Eden as I could possibly hope to be.

It is the call to freedom which takes me there and which would carry me further if I had the nerve to keep going; not just an undeniable summoning from places to which I long to return, or the inbuilt desire for silence, for solitude, for space, but a call to a peace beyond all experience, yet known to be attainable at the end of a real walk: a walk without pre-planned circuit or loop, with reminiscences of what has been left behind outweighed by anticipation of that which lies ahead, and with no requirement to be back by a certain time, the same day, or even tomorrow. A walk along the one trail that has been beckoning, perhaps for years, but which has been put off for any one of a dozen possible reasons. A longer, higher, and in all ways deeper walk into the unknown; a venturing, for which my years of security and contentment spent within sight of the fireside glow of my Base Camp have been preparing me.

Perhaps it will be the fulfilment of that awareness which blossomed and thrived in each of us when our earliest walking promoted us to being called “Toddlers”. 

‘... at three,

This poor weaned kid would run off from the fold,

This babe would steal off from the mother’s chair,

And, creeping through the golden walls of gorse,

Would find some keyhole toward the secrecy

Of Heaven’s high blue, and, nestling down, peer out –

Oh, not to catch the angels at their games,

She had never heard of angels, – but to gaze

She knew not why, to see she knew not what,

A-hungering outward from the barren earth

For something like a joy.’

(Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Aurora Leigh)

An awareness too easily lost in later life, but of which we can be reminded by the tiniest of things:

‘I have not so far left the coasts of life

To travel inland, that I cannot hear

That murmur of the outer Infinite

Which unweaned babies smile at in their sleep

When wondered at for smiling;’

(Aurora Leigh)

Marking time

Those who believe there is more to come: more to our experience of existence than the life of which we are presently aware, have ways of being distracted from our paths which differ from the commonly held but mistaken belief that following our dreams can be put on hold.

We know that our ultimate dream: the dream that encompasses all that is worthwhile, disperses and discards all that is worthless, and which is the fulfilment of all our deepest desires, is more than just a dream. It is The Dream; it is God’s own dream for mankind sown and germinated within each one of us; His plan for us; our source of life, our reason for being, and our destination.

It is through our understanding that our worldly tomorrows will not always be there that we can see – however nebulous and however vague its outline – that our future is a greater reality than the anticipation of a sequence of tomorrows.

As the years of experience accumulate, all of us will become increasingly conscious of our own mortality. We may feel the same, regardless of age, and even when we notice the increasingly grey hair, the loosening skin, the aches and pains which linger instead of leaving quickly and completely, we do not readily convert our superficial knowledge of the fact that life in this world will come to an end into a full realization of the inevitability and finality of our physical decline leading to death.

At some point, I presume, we all reach a point where this changes: where reality can no longer be evaded: where truth catches up with our lack of awareness, our avoidance, or our denial. But I cannot begin to imagine how this might feel to a person without even the vaguest hint of belief in some form of continuance of existence after all trace of physical life has gone. No assumptions can be made; with a whole lifetime spent seeing all things from that viewpoint the end may be a continuation of lifelong acceptance and contentment born of knowing that this is simply how it is.

My own inability to imagine that situation stems from the fact that I find it impossible to grasp how anyone can live through an entire lifetime with such a belief without developing at least some degree of doubt. I regard doubt as to the existence or otherwise of God as being as universal as mankind’s sinfulness. Both, within ranges that extend far beyond any single person’s capacity to comprehend, are quite simply part of us. They are inevitable consequences of our individual and collective imperfection, the existence and costly influence of which is undeniable, whether we believe the story of our beginnings as told in chapters 2 and 3 of Genesis, or any of the other creation stories from around the world, or if we believe in nothing beyond the “reality” of this life.

Lives can be blighted, stunted or shrivelled by the confusions and fears caused by not keeping these two universal veins separate. They are both embedded in our very nature: they pulse and flow through us as surely as does our lifeblood, and just as our blood is constantly being cleansed by some of the essential organs of the body, and returned to the heart and lungs for re-oxygenating and redistribution, so our doubts as well as our sins need repeatedly to be returned to the heart of our being, the source of life, for cleansing, for renewal, and for the harmonizing of all aspects of our lives.

We must never regard our doubts as sinful. We do not sin when we doubt.

We should try to regard our doubting as becoming conscious of an ever-present lifeline: something which speaks of how much more we can yet be than whom or what we are today.

And that same lifeline threads through veins leading to the source of answers in the hearts of even the most defiantly unbelieving of atheists. Signs of its presence there flicker occasionally in spite of what may be considerable efforts to keep it out of reach and out of sight; and such moments themselves can cause considerable confusion. I suspect there is far more going on beneath the surface of such people than is ever likely to be outwardly shown. 

One such recent public occurrence found Prof. Richard Dawkins declaring his non-belief in God as being “6.9 out of 7”. This estimation of his own disbelief allows room for more than 14,ooo among every million declared atheists to not only grasp the lifeline but to be brought all the way into a living relationship with God. I give him considerable credit for having made known his own deceptively large margin for error. It was an expression of the doubt that will continue to play its part in every one of our lives.

( The whole debate can be watched here:  http://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/nature-human-beings-and-question-their-ultimate-origin-video )

The lifeline takes us back to our very roots. As expressed in Genesis, to when ‘the man and his wife heard the sound of God walking in the garden in the cool of the day’; to a time when the wonder and simplicity of walking had not been separated from the miracles of creation and from a consciousness of being in constant communion with the Source of Life. But what did their disobedience lead them to do?

‘ they hid from God among the trees of the garden. But God called to the man. “Where are you?” he asked.’

(Genesis 3:8-9)

Sin and doubt will follow us all the days of our lives, but whatever our past mistakes, and however great our weaknesses may be, God still wants to share our walks with us, just as He longs for us to follow Him to wherever His own walk may lead.

However disbelieving, and however insurmountable our doubts, He still calls to each of us just as He did to Adam:  “Where are you?”

May we never be so afraid that we hide from Him, least of all when having already ventured out to enjoy the wonders of His creation.

It can be equalled, but there is no place better in which to meet with Him than among trees. They would rather not grow at all than aid us in our separation from Him, and at the very least they can speak of a hope living at the heart of all struggles and countering our temptations not to persevere; even to the smallest doubts in the hearts of atheists.

 “At the timberline where the storms strike with the most fury, the sturdiest trees are found.”

“The greatest oak was once a little nut who held its ground.”

(Authors unknown)

Early steps

 ‘As He was walking by the Lake of Galilee He saw two brothers, Simon, who was called Peter, and his brother Andrew; they were making a cast into the lake with their net, for they were fishermen.  And He said to them, “Come after me and I will make you fishers of people.” And at once they left their nets and followed Him. 

Going on from there He saw another pair of brothers, James son of Zebedee and his brother John; they were in their boat ... mending their nets, and He called them. And at once, leaving the boat and their father, they followed Him.’

(Matthew 4:18-22)

When we read of Jesus calling his first disciples, the most noticeable feature of their response is that it appears to have been immediate: without hesitation or doubt they simply stopped what they had been doing and followed Him.

Until now, that has been my almost automatic, and only way of viewing the scene; but, with walking having been a more or less continual thread running through my thoughts during recent weeks, the realization that this was the only possible physical response they could have made suddenly became relevant to me.

No cars; no public transport; they were fishermen and had access to boats, but other than on later occasions when they and Jesus used them, they were of no use as a means of staying close to Him. And that is what their following required of them: not just the bodily act of following wherever He would lead but listening, questioning, discussing, pondering, learning, trusting, believing. Following was uncomplicated; it simply meant walking with Him, not just for an hour or two, but remaining in His company: in His presence. It meant being with Him in a way that allowed and enabled Him to fully share His presence with them: to be with them in ways beyond their previous experience and comprehension..

Walking with Jesus is not the same as walking with any other person.

Even when in the company of our closest love: spouse, partner, child, parent, or dearest friend, we walk with another whose heart, mind and spirit – however close we may be – are forever separate from our own. We know them and are known by them, but though the fact remains unrecognized in the constant flow of love between us, we do not know each other completely: our moment by moment emotions, thoughts and imaginings are much more of a private world than most of us would ever admit; and the privacy goes even deeper than that: into the fantastic isolation of  false realities in which we dwell without ever really becoming aware of their existence or of the hold they have over us. They occupy and bleed into more of both our intellect and our emotions than we know; at least until a subtle and elusive change is brought about within us: a change which will, at the very least, gradually alter our mindset. If accepted, encouraged and pursued the change will also bring about undeniable changes at a deeper level: it will alter our heartset. It has the power to transform us.

Jesus knows us as no other. He knows the truths that have already taken root in us and those we have not yet accepted; He knows the deceptions that writhe and thrive within us: ways of thinking, believing, feeling and being, scarcely recognized as parts of the persons we believe ourselves to be yet running freely at the supposed centre of our existence.

We can easily settle into a comfortable place where we feel close to our destination; resting awhile will do us no harm – indeed we believe we have earned our rest; all we need do is cover the short distance remaining at some time in the future; it wont take long; we just have to do it before we run out of time – tomorrow, or the day after, will do fine.

In such a time or place there are two things we cannot possibly comprehend: that we have scarcely begun our journey, and that all necessary answers have been made available to us and spring from one particular living source: ‘the Way, the Truth and the Life’ accessed through our own decision to place above all present priorities a commitment to follow Jesus wherever He leads: to come close to Him whatever our doubts and  fears: to walk with Him in all weathers, in all seasons, in the brightest day and the darkest night, in the very best and the very worst of what life lays before us.

That decision is not truly made until thought is confirmed by corresponding action: by laying all distractions and excuses aside and following Him: by setting out to walk in His company.

Buddha recognized the need to make such a journey through one’s life: “There are only two mistakes one can make along the road to truth; not going all the way, and not starting.”

Confucius too knew the journey to be necessary and ongoing: “It does not matter how slowly you go so long as you do not stop.”

One way or another, we all make one of these mistakes every day; we either give ourselves a break, a rest, or a longer holiday, or we perpetuate our preparations without ever setting forth on the path before us.

We believe we can wait forever to follow our dreams; that our tomorrows will always be there.