Fr Robert Hendrickson

Dear Friends in Christ,

Lately I’ve been on a climbing movie binge. Two of my favorites are Meru and Free Solo. Meru is about a small team led by renowned alpinist Conrad Anker. It follows three climbers as they attempt to ascend the renowned Shark’s Fin on the Meru Peak in the Himalayas. The other, Free Solo, is about the eight year journey of Alex Honnold toward free climbing (without a rope) the 3,200 ft sheer wall of El Capitan in Yosemite.

Both are stories of intense preparation and a lifetime commitment to the art of climbing. They are also about overcoming the limits of what is thought humanly possible to achieve something once thought unachievable.

What I think I find so fascinating is that the lifetime of preparation that goes into these feats (for example, Honnold climbed El Capitan 50 or so times with a rope before attempting the free solo climb) — that lifetime of preparation all comes down to the barest changes and adjustments. Millimeters between one grip and another can mean success or failure — life or death.

These climbers map every foot of these extraordinary ascents — and are extraordinarily prepared. Reaching the peak is the result not of brute endurance alone but of careful and minute adjustments made over years and decades. It is about hitting what feels like a ceiling or a floor and finding those small changes that open up new possibility.

When I think of the life of prayer I tend to think of it along these same lines. There are those who seem to have some natural connection — some ephemeral quality of holiness. For most though, especially those who seem most deeply grounded, it is a lifetime of practice and minor adjustments.

Seemingly heroic feats of faithful witness often come down to the years of prayer, study, and service that make up the life of prayer. For Episcopalians, the building block of our corporate prayer life is, for example, the daily office. Those prayers we say at the start and end of the day. They are not always the most ecstatic of things to offer daily — yet the regularity of that practice leads to something deeper.

Climbers, especially elite ones, do some things daily — like using a hanging wall to strengthen their grip. They study the routes. They test and examine equipment. They do hundreds and thousands of hours of “small” climbs and pre-climbs to prepare themselves. They work on acclimatization and endurance and more. All of this is part of the training to go beyond what even they might once have thought possible.

When I look at the lives of the Saints I so often think, I could never do that. I could never be that. Yet, their sainthood is so often not the product of a blazing instant of intense devotion — it is the result of a lifetime of practice. It is the result of small changes in their devotions opening up new horizons of possibility and relationship with God.

What I love about climbers like those in Meru and Free Solo is that they show us the strength of the human spirit and the result of a lifetime of commitment to something so many thought impossible. This is the lives of the Saints for us — they show us just what is possible with a focused commitment to, day by day, going deeper with Christ.

I don’t think I’ll be an elite climber nor a Saint anytime soon — but I keep watching and reading and praying so that I may be inspired to do the daily work, and make the small changes, that lead to breaking through the boundaries I think we all too often set for ourselves in life and in faith.

Yours in Christ,

Fr Robert