"True Light...True Word"

I have reconnected with the rest of the world today. What follows are blog postings from the previous three days of retreat into the mountains...


THURSDAY

Chelan lies at the southernmost end of this long, narrow, deep lake. If the lake were more round in shape and one was to leave town driving clockwise to about eight o’clock on the map dial you come to One Mile Creek Road. It is a dusty, windy, sometimes washed out path that meanders 2 ½ miles up the mountain to just over 2,500 feet. This is where you will find Stan and Sandy’s place, a beautiful but modest cabin sitting beneath the douglass firs and ponderosa pines, barley visible from the road. Paul delivered me there today at lunchtime in my rented blue and silver Subaru Outback wagon (the unofficial state car of Washington).

The lunch table was already set with plates and silverware beneath a hung canvass canopy in the side yard. My host and hostess are strict vegetarians and, after a 30-second tour of the cabin home, began parading out one salad after another along with homemade bread. We held hands and prayed and then spent the next several hours feasting, storytelling and laughing until our sides hurt. Stan and Sandy showed me the photo album that chronicled the 2 ½ - year construction of their home. They built the entire cabin by themselves, including cutting, hoisting and situating every log. “Each timber,” Stan reported, “took a day to cut into shape.” This couple radiates due pride and grace.

Paul took the Subaru and headed back down the mountain at 3:40 pm in order to make a 3:30 pm meeting back at the church (a thirty-minute drive). He seemed remarkably untroubled by this. Sandy, a trained Benedictine oblate, conducted a tour of the property stopping first in the meadow at the massive prayer labyrinth that she had spent a summer fashioning out of rocks taken from the creek bed. She then introduced me to my home for the next several days, a one-room cabin nestled up beside the creek. There is no electricity to the cabin. No plumbing. I have spent my initial evening here reading Brian McLaren’s classic, “A Generous Orthodoxy,” by kerosene lanterns. There are no sounds here save the occasional rush of the wind through the evergreens and birds (that I am yet to identify) that are singing themselves and the woods to sleep. Somewhere in this silence I know that I shall hear the voice of God.

Before Sandy earlier left me in the cabin she asked, “There is something that I like to do for all who stay here. May I wash your hands and feet?” Then, from just inside the cabin door she collected a pitcher of water and a rough, stainless basin and did just that, i.e. she poured water over my hands and dusty feet and carefully dried each. She said, “Stan will blow the conk shell when it is time for supper. Please come.” She further invited, “I encourage you to spend tomorrow observing silence. I will bring your meals to you in the cabin but don’t feel compelled to speak. I believe you will find spending a complete day in this manner very powerful.” I have every suspicion that she is absolutely right.

Several hours later the shell sounded. After supper and another marvelous conversation, I noticed two Lutheran Books of Worship sitting at the end of the table. Sandy noticed my noticing and said, “I was hoping that we could share Vespers together.” She and I sat on the porch of the cabin and together sang through the service…the whole service! She provided readings and psalms from her Benedictine Orders for the Day. After the benediction, Sandy pulled the blanket from the back of her rocking chair, wrapped it around herself and we rocked and visited and shared “God talk” for another hour.

It is now eleven o’clock and the woods are as still and silent as they have been all evening. I have noticed that a red and white cooler containing tomorrow’s breakfast already sits on the front porch in what a few hours ago was our sanctuary. I have never known such hospitality.

Just before ascending the mountain this morning I received a text message from Brad Hodnefield informing me that Brooke was headed to the hospital to have labor induced. My prayers reside with them this night. By the time I return to civilization and post this I trust that God will have ushered into the world yet one more precious life.

There is little to do here now except pray. I have never been so eager to close my laptop.




FRIDAY

The only light in this one-room cabin emanates either from one of the two kerosene lamps or this laptop. When each were extinguished last night my world immediately became pitch dark. After a few moments my eyes adjusted and a walk to the front porch opened up a mid-November sky for me. No haze or humidity and the stars shone brilliantly. It occurred to me that we sometimes take the artificiality that fills our world for granted. I can’t recall the last time that I experienced a night uninfluenced by something electrically produced…i.e. a streetlight or sign or lamp from a neighbors house. It is nearly impossible to disconnect from the artificial. I managed to do so last night.

Not only was the night still and dark, it was also quiet. I decided to accept Sandy’s invitation to spend the day in silence. So, when I returned the breakfast cooler to her porch this morning she greeted me, folded her hands as if in prayer and, before I could slip up and bid her “Good morning,” or “thank you,” she bowed to remind me of the promise. The same was true when she brought lunch to the guest cabin at noon (make that enough lunch for a small group meeting…fruit, cashews and raisins, some Indian curry dish with rice, broccoli and tomatoes, ginger candy and an organic ginseng cola to wash it down). I must confess that it has been a wonderful, even if silently observed, day. This despite the fact that my plans for hiking were complicated by the discovery that I had left one of my hiking shoes at the Palumbo’s. I had a vision of striking out anyway and then having to explain to a passing hiker what this mute, hopping-on-one-foot idiot was doing on the trail. Not the way I wanted to break my disicipline of silence.

Just as I cannot recall the last night I spent without intrusion of artificial light, I dare say I cannot ever remember spending 24 hours without experiencing some human voice, not even my own…ever. This may have been a first. What I discovered is that it allows a great deal more room for God’s speaking.

Tonight, by kerosene light, I finished the final chapters of McLaren’s “A Generous Orthodoxy,” subtitled, “Why I am a missional, evangelical, liberal/conservative, mystical/poetic, biblical, charismatic/contemplative, fundamentalist/calvinist, anabaptist/anglican, methodist, catholic, green, incarnation, depressed-yet-hopeful, emergent, unfinished Christian.” A fairly ingenious work, if you can learn to stomach the seemingly endless run-on sentences (bet you couldn’t have guessed that from the title) and overuse of parenthetical comments (like this one). I commend it to the more thoughtful of you if you are willing to be challenged about the church and matters of faith. I apparently have been inspired on several occasions to read this work as when I opened the Amazon package that arrived a few weeks ago and placed the book in my “to read” pile I discovered that another copy already existed there. So…I have a loaner to the first who will speak up. Actually I have two to hand out as this present copy, though a bit bent and smudged from the cabin reading, is not highlighted. It has been a pleasure this year knowing that I could read for reading’s sake and not in order to demonstrate to a professor that I have extracted from the reading appropriate knowledge. Such is the joy of auditing.

I broke silence tonight precisely at 9:00 pm, twenty-four hours after the silence began. The first words? “Thank you, God, for silence. And thank you for your Word, Jesus, with whom I have become a bit better acquainted in these hours.”

For a brief moment today my blackberry actually received a text. It was the text I was hoping to receive and the reason that I had not been true to my promise to completely power down. The new Hodnefield baby boy has entered the world and all are well. Let the prayers of thanksgiving ascend! There’s a time to be silent and then…

SATURDAY

It has been a stifling day on the mountain with temperatures in the mid-90’s. Not a cloud has shown itself for two days. I haven’t checked the weather back home so I don’t know if I will gather any sympathy from mid-western readers. But here the humidity is so low that even on such days as these the shade, together with a gentle breeze, is almost cool. This is why Paul carries a light jacket around even in July. “My people always seem to want to stand in the shade,” he says.

Sandy left a note with last night’s supper that breakfast was to be around 8:00 am. I wasn’t sure if this would be at the guest cabin or their cabin now that the discipline of silence was over, but at 8:05 am the conk shell sounded and I headed up the hill. I am certain of two matters…I will leave this mountain spiritually refreshed and a few pounds heavier than I came.

During lunch we apparently lowered the volume of our conversation enough for a female mule deer to show herself. I have the sense that she would have ambled up regardless of our activity as she was patient enough for me to run back to the cabin, grab my camera and play paparazzi for awhile as she drank from the bird fountain and moseyed back up the mountain. I am puzzled why a deer would be moving during the middle of such a hot day…but pleased that she was.

This afternoon I hid from the heat and breezed through most of “Church Re-Imagined,” a book by Doug Pagitt, pastor of a faith community called “Solomon’s Porch” in Minneapolis. This is the epitome of ‘emergent church’ and I am already wondering how I might venture up to experience it once I return to the Midwest. This is a church that likely looks very little like any church you have experienced. Perhaps I can report more in a few weeks if travel plans pan out. For now, google “Solomon’s Porch” and take a look.

I mentioned that Sandy is a Benedictine oblate connected with an abbey just south of Portland, Oregon. She and I sang and prayed through Vespers again this evening. Waiting a bit later than Thursday night we had to fire up a lantern that we might see to sing, “Your Word is a lamp to our feet and a light to our path.”

Over supper tonight Stan leaned across the table and said, “The other day someone asked me if I was Christian. I told them, ‘Well, I believe in Jesus. I don’t go to church but I pray.’ What do you think, Joe? Does that make me a Christian?” I suppose it depends upon your definition of Christian, and there are as many of those floating around as there are people to ask. But I know Stan’s own description makes him a member of a rapidly growing segment of our population, i.e. those who consider themselves deeply spiritual but not churchy or religious. I have a heart for these persons, for so does the Lord.

Stan is into yoga in a huge way, and has constructed a yoga yurt on the property. Don’t know what a yoga yurt is? Neither did I. (Mnemonic device to remember? “Yogurt”) It is a round, canvassed-toped tent-like structure with a heated wooden floor that is used for yoga class, which Stan instructs here several times a week. Eight to a dozen students ascend this dusty mountain and leave the world behind for a few hours to stretch and move and do whatever one does in a yurt, there with candles and pictures of Jesus and Buddha and various yoga instructors in front of them arranged in what looks like a shrine. Whenever we prayed, Stan joined hands and offered “Amen” to the petitions that we offered in the name of Jesus. But Stan is not convinced that Jesus is the only way. He stands as one among a multitude who are searching.

The only difficult part of this segment of my journey will be leaving in the morning. I will spend Sunday worshipping at Lake Chelan Lutheran Church and treating the Palumbo family to supper at the Local Mystic Pizza Shop where Sam Palumbo works and the tourists love to eat. And I will pay. (Someone call Pastor Stephen and tell him that I picked up the bill). Then on Monday I will strike out for the North Cascades and some more serious hiking before heading back to Seattle and… well… let’s not look that far ahead now.

Forgive me for my wordiness. There is something about cabins and lanterns that encourage verbosity, I suppose. To those who have persevered and slogged through this entire posting at one sitting and without snoring, you deserve my hearty “thank you!” It is a joy to share this experience with you!