From the Rector

“People today, if you ask them, ‘Why do you go to the high peaks?’ They say, ‘Because it’s fun.’ I don’t believe them. It’s not fun. It’s a place where you have to learn to cope with pain because it’s painful.”

—Rheinhold Messner, Italian high altitude climber

Dear Friends in Christ,

I’ve mentioned to some folks before my love of climbing documentaries, books, and movies. Mountain climbing is one of those things that has always fascinated me for some reason. I think, perhaps, the time I spent as a young child living in Washington and Oregon and hiking with my family left some call planted down deep. Maybe it’s why Denver and Tucson both felt like home when I first visited each—because each had some mountains I could see.

One of the things that fascinates me about mountaineering is the sheer craft of it and the dedicated practice it takes. Climbing 8,000 meters often comes down to the will to go one more yard, the tenacity to reach another inch or two, or the belief that just one more breath will carry you forward. It’s more than will, though. It is years of practice and routine that makes the final ascent possible.

Rheinhold Messner is perhaps my favorite alpinist to read. He is unafraid to say things that make him a bit of an unwelcome guest at some dinners! He’s also profoundly aware of the deep connection between will, nature, and being.

A quote of his that I’ve had rattling around lately is this, “I'm primarily concerned with what happens inside a person when they encounter the mountains. When you climb a mountain, you come back down as a different person. We don't change the mountain by climbing it; we ourselves change.”

A lot of American religion seems obsessed with changing the mountain. We will change the music or the liturgical language or our welcome process and then we will have changed the Church somehow. Maybe we’ll change the theology, tinker with the doctrine, or make some new proclamation or another. Or perhaps we will change churches, shop for a new religious experience, or go someplace that’s feeding us.

There’s a lot of tweaking and jimmying and the like that seems to go into making the encounter with the jaw-dropping, soul-searing, blazingly numbing Holy of Holies a little more bearable—a little easier. Yet, if we’re all truthful, the encounter with the living God is anything but fun.

Nowhere in the eons of human descriptions of the encounter with God is it ever described as fun! It’s rarely described as happy. It’s hardly described as enjoyable. It’s always something else.

This is where I think Messner is on to something in his description of coming to the mountains. They are a place that is painful and where we learn to cope with pain. This Advent, Christ will come among us. He does not come because everything is right with the world. He does not come because we’ve done so well on our own. He comes with all the immensity of any birth and with all the claim on our attention and our hope as any child.

We are called to make straight the path, to prepare the way. I suspect that for most of us that will feel like a climb. It will require dedication and preparation. It will be a matter of praying for the will for one more step, one more breath, or one more chance. It will probably not be fun—but it will be real. That is what Christ offers us.

We are offered the chance not to meet the God of our imagining—the God we can change. We are invited to meet the God who changes us. The God who calls us to be willing to go to the high peak with him. Not because it is fun, but because it is painful and in that painful shedding of our old self, we might find we are being made new and coming back from Advent a different person. Born again with the babe waiting for us, with open arms, at the end of our striving.

Yours in Christ,

Fr Robert