I spent the last three days in the wilderness of the Olympic peninsula with a buddy of mine. We’ll call him Padre.* I get to see him maybe once or twice a year, and it almost always involves some foray into the woods to find some lake or some mountain… usually a lake or mountain farther than initially promised and, of course, harder to get to. That’s hiking with Padre.
Example:
It’s three o’clock in the afternoon, and we’re standing on a ridge line. The clouds that we’ve been hiking through all mourning have thinned, and we finally get to look at Mount Olympus in all it’s snow covered, I’m-bigger-than-you-and-made-of-stone glory. After taking approximately 300 pictures of the mountain and the ridgeline near it, he looks over and I know, just know, that the next words out of his mouth will involve something insane. I was right. You see, when we were standing on the ridgeline, the ridge had a bow in it, and the tip of that bow blocked some of the view. Sure, you could see most of the Mount Olympus ridgeline, but you couldn’t see all of it.
One half hour, an awkward slip-sliding, trail-less hike up a huckleberry bush covered slope, and a scramble out to a slender rock outcropping later, we got to see it all. Sure, we’re standing on a narrow rock outcropping with a fifty foot shear drop off three of four sides, but we got to see it all: from East to West, ridge after snow covered ridge ripping through the sky like so many stone teeth. On the valley floor to our right, a black bear munched happily on the huckleberries that covered the ground like God’s own carpet. Pairs of hawks soared below us, flitting through the trees with reckless abandon that would make fighter pilots look prudish. To our left, a hawk and raven were involved in a dog fight: diving, striking, and spinning away at the last second. Like I said, we got to see it all.
Do you know what I love about hiking with Padre? It’s not just the crazy stories I get. I have one for just about every trip we’ve been on. It’s the simple fact that I see him only once or twice a year, and every time I see him we talk like we’ve only missed the last few days. There’s no pretension there, no posing or playing. I don’t have to pretend to like Padre (like we seem to do when people are around every day). If I didn’t like him or he didn’t like me, we simply wouldn’t hike together. It’d be easy enough to find a reason not to. He doesn’t even live in the same state as me. But we make time for the simple reason that we like each other, and hiking together seems as good of an excuse to escape for the weekend as any.
We got to talk about everything from high school to now and all the years in between. About life and love and work and girls and God. All that makes life worth living, and all that makes life hard. And all of it was shared with the simple honesty that friendship and wearing socks on your hands for gloves brings. (It was cold. I forgot my gloves. A man has to improvise.) There are times when I wish all my relationships were that… uncomplicated.
I’ve changed my goals for my relationship with God. I don’t want to be Superman anymore. I don’t want to be able to walk on water or cure blindness or awe thousands with the power of my words. I want a relationship with God that lets me be perfectly honest about everything. I want a relationship without pretension.
*I call him that not because he’s Spanish, but because he has a BA in divinity, so he’s almost “preacherly” which is the Quaker equivalent of the Catholic “Fatherly” which is, of course, the English translation of “Padre.” For those of you who followed that logic, you have a career in philosophy and should head straight to the nearest college or seminary.
Example:
It’s three o’clock in the afternoon, and we’re standing on a ridge line. The clouds that we’ve been hiking through all mourning have thinned, and we finally get to look at Mount Olympus in all it’s snow covered, I’m-bigger-than-you-and-made-of-stone glory. After taking approximately 300 pictures of the mountain and the ridgeline near it, he looks over and I know, just know, that the next words out of his mouth will involve something insane. I was right. You see, when we were standing on the ridgeline, the ridge had a bow in it, and the tip of that bow blocked some of the view. Sure, you could see most of the Mount Olympus ridgeline, but you couldn’t see all of it.
One half hour, an awkward slip-sliding, trail-less hike up a huckleberry bush covered slope, and a scramble out to a slender rock outcropping later, we got to see it all. Sure, we’re standing on a narrow rock outcropping with a fifty foot shear drop off three of four sides, but we got to see it all: from East to West, ridge after snow covered ridge ripping through the sky like so many stone teeth. On the valley floor to our right, a black bear munched happily on the huckleberries that covered the ground like God’s own carpet. Pairs of hawks soared below us, flitting through the trees with reckless abandon that would make fighter pilots look prudish. To our left, a hawk and raven were involved in a dog fight: diving, striking, and spinning away at the last second. Like I said, we got to see it all.
Do you know what I love about hiking with Padre? It’s not just the crazy stories I get. I have one for just about every trip we’ve been on. It’s the simple fact that I see him only once or twice a year, and every time I see him we talk like we’ve only missed the last few days. There’s no pretension there, no posing or playing. I don’t have to pretend to like Padre (like we seem to do when people are around every day). If I didn’t like him or he didn’t like me, we simply wouldn’t hike together. It’d be easy enough to find a reason not to. He doesn’t even live in the same state as me. But we make time for the simple reason that we like each other, and hiking together seems as good of an excuse to escape for the weekend as any.
We got to talk about everything from high school to now and all the years in between. About life and love and work and girls and God. All that makes life worth living, and all that makes life hard. And all of it was shared with the simple honesty that friendship and wearing socks on your hands for gloves brings. (It was cold. I forgot my gloves. A man has to improvise.) There are times when I wish all my relationships were that… uncomplicated.
I’ve changed my goals for my relationship with God. I don’t want to be Superman anymore. I don’t want to be able to walk on water or cure blindness or awe thousands with the power of my words. I want a relationship with God that lets me be perfectly honest about everything. I want a relationship without pretension.
*I call him that not because he’s Spanish, but because he has a BA in divinity, so he’s almost “preacherly” which is the Quaker equivalent of the Catholic “Fatherly” which is, of course, the English translation of “Padre.” For those of you who followed that logic, you have a career in philosophy and should head straight to the nearest college or seminary.
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