“Climbing the Mountain”
by Reverend Charles Blustein Ortman
April 30, 2006
READINGS :
Our first reading is from the book, “The Power of Myth,” by Joseph Campbell with Bill Moyers. Campbell is speaking on the topic of life as a journey:
“I am Shiva” – this is the great meditation of the yogis in the Himalayan [mountains]... Heaven and hell are within us, and all the gods are within us. This is the great realization of the Upanishads of India in the ninth century B.C. All the gods, all the heavens, all the worlds, are within us. They are magnified dreams, and dreams are manifestations in image form of the energies of the body in conflict with each other.
Our second reading is the poem, “It Is I Who Must Begin,” by Vaclav Havel, President of the Czech Republic from 1993 – 2003. A prominent playwright and poet, Havel is one of the leading intellectual figures and moral forces in Eastern Europe.
It is I who must begin.
Once I begin, once I try--
here and now,
right where I am,
not excusing myself
by saying that things would be easier elsewhere,
without grand speeches and
ostentatious gestures,
but all the more persistently
--to live in harmony
with the "voice of Being," as I
understand it within myself
--as soon as I began that,
I suddenly discover,
to my surprise, that
I am neither the only one,
nor the first,
nor the most important one
to have set out
upon that road.
Whether all is really lost
or not depends entirely on
whether or not I am lost.
“Climbing the Mountain”
A Sermon by Rev. Charles Blustein Ortman
Can you tell me
Is that boy still climbing up the mountain?
Can you see him?
Is he still making way or has he fallen down?
I can't believe it,
That he's still up there looking for the answer.
He's got a lot more courage
Than most of us have ever found.
And it makes me feel like running up there,
Just to take him by the hand,
To make sure he's got his strength
And that he still understands.
He is the last hope I know of
For the common good.
He is the last hope I know of
For the brotherhood.
He's just one, who I can think of,
Who ever fully understood,
That all dreams are the realities of man.
SERMON:
One of my all time favorite songs is, “Boy on the Mountain,” by The Association, the only major, national band to ever make it out of Dubuque, Iowa. You’ve just heard it as it was recorded, gender exclusive language included. I want to think it was written for all of us though, to cheer us on as we take our next step, whatever it might be – up hill, down hill, through a forest or a clearing, or out onto a plateau –wherever that next step might lead us on our journeys.
In the book, “The Mountains of California,” the 19th Century Naturalist, John Muir wrote about the incredible beauty waiting to be found in the mountains:
“Now came the solemn, silent evening. Long, blue, spiky shadows crept out across the snow-fields, while a rosy glow, at first scarce discernible, gradually deepened and suffused every mountain-top, flushing the glaciers and the harsh crags above them. This was the alpenglow, to me one of the most impressive of all the terrestrial manifestations of God. At the touch of this divine light, the mountains seemed to kindle to a rapt, religious consciousness, and stood hushed and waiting like devout worshipers. Just before the alpenglow began to fade, two crimson clouds came streaming across the summit like wings of flame, rendering the sublime scene yet more impressive; then came darkness and the stars.”
The mountains have always had a special allure for me. Hiking on mountain trails has, over the years, provided me with many incredibly rich experiences – poignant moments in the course of a lifetime. I remember in my early 20s, after I was newly married and then even more newly divorced, I was out in Colorado hiking in the Rockies on my own. I came onto a high point along the trail and turned back to look out over a scene quite as beautiful as the one described by John Muir. While it shouldn’t have been, it was one of the most painful moments of my life. More than anything I wanted to turn to someone that I loved and to say the words, “Isn’t this the most astonishingly beautiful thing you have ever seen!” I wanted to share it so badly and there was no one to turn to and so my thoughts escaped on the near silence of my breath as a kind of prayer, “Please, please, don’t make me endure such incredible beauty alone. My heart can’t bear it.”
I remember another time a few years later. I was with a friend, wandering through the countryside of Wales. One day we decided to climb Mount Snowdon for an overnight outing. The ascent was pleasant and not overly challenging. We arrived at a camping spot near the summit in the late afternoon, pitched our tent, made and enjoyed our supper. After we’d cleaned up, we sat out and watched a most spectacular and satisfying sunset in the western sky. As we turned in for the evening, we could see in the dimming light a gathering of clouds off in the East.
Within less than an hour, the winds came in, and thunder started to roar over our heads. A few seconds later the skies opened up… And did we ever get dumped on! It was incredible! Within minutes – literally minutes – our tent was filled with nearly a foot of water.
After a while, the thunderhead passed by, and the storm eased into a steady rain. That’s when we decided we really couldn’t spend the night on top of Mount Snowdon; we and everything we owned were totally soaked. And we were cold. We knew that we needed to try to make our way down the mountain and back into town. So we went out into the rain, packed up our gear – ringing out whatever water we could – and we set out down the mountainside, squishing our way along the trail-turned-to-rivulet.
With no moonlight, it was a dark descent. And so, when we came upon a rock slide about halfway down, making several attempts, we found that there was no way we could make our way around it. There was nothing for us to do but huddle under the leeward side of a huge boulder and wait for daylight. As it wasn’t even midnight, we had a very long wait. We were in good company with one another, but it was still a very long, shivering night. I found myself praying just to hold on.
There have been so many experiences in the mountains for me. Most recently, this past summer, my wife Judy and I drove through the middle of the night to get to the summit of Mount Haleakala on the island of Maui. There we waited in the dark with several hundred others who had made the trip to witness the birth of a new day as it dawned over the misty crater of that holy place. We stood together in silent and sacred community as the sun crested the rim of the volcano basin. …we were rapt in religious consciousness, and stood hushed and waiting as devout worshipers (Muir). The incredible esthetic beauty of the event was rivaled only by the harmony of the anonymous and yet somehow fully known to each other congregation, which had gathered. My prayer was one of gratitude: gratitude that I was present for this incredible sight; for the reverent assemblage; gratitude for having been fated to the possibility of sharing it all with someone that I love.
One last mountain memory – I remember climbing to the top of Mount Tammany in the Delaware Water Gap during my sabbatical a few years back. At the peak of that climb I stopped to write a poem that some of you might remember from a worship service last year. It’s about a middle-aged man (oddly enough!) finding his way through the challenges and the blessings of the mountain trail he’d climbed, finally reaching the top. The poem ended with this stanza:
And so I stop on the top of this mountain
having made it to where resting is fair,
and I visit for a moment with a passerby…
And then it’s back on the trail,
now losing my way,
it’s back on the trail,
now I’ve found it,
it’s back on the trail,
have I been here before,
it looks like I’ve been but I doubt it,
it’s back on the trail,
and making my way,
yes, it’s back on the trail, once again.
I’m reminded of another poem that I often use in memorial services by Rabbi Alvin Fine. His very similar thoughts are included in this verse:
We see that victory lies
Not at some high place along the way,
But in having made the journey,
stage by stage
A sacred pilgrimage.
Birth is a beginning
And death a destination
But life is a journey,
A sacred pilgrimage
Made stage by stage---
From birth to death
To life Everlasting.
Life is a journey, a trek in the mountains. And though there are moments of incredible splendor, as we reach new vistas; though there are periods of respite, as we pause on a plateau, though there are times when gratitude comes easily as on a gentle downhill slope, if we are paying attention to our lives, very often life returns us to that uphill climb. To love life is not only to love what comes easily, but all of it, to love even the parts that challenge us to the core, even sometimes when we feel we hate it.
In the ancient Greek myth of Sisyphus, the gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, and when he would get nearly to the top, the stone would fall back of its own weight, rolling all the way back to the bottom. Sisyphus would then trudge back down the mountain, heft the rock back up on his shoulders, and begin again, pushing the boulder back toward the top of the mountain.
Albert Camus said of The Myth of Sisyphus that, “…the gods had had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor… Camus wrote:
It is during that return, that pause, that Sisyphus interests me. A face that toils so close to stones is already stone itself! I see that man going back down with a heavy yet measured step toward the torment whose end he will never know. That hour like a breathing-space which returns as surely as his suffering; that is the hour of consciousness. At each of those moments when he leaves the heights and gradually sinks toward the lairs of the gods, he is superior to his fate. He is stronger than his rock…
The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill [one's] heart. One must imagine Sisyphus [to be] happy.
The theologian Reinhold Niebuhr wrote, “We Must Be Saved.”
Nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime; therefore, we are saved by hope.
Nothing true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore, we are saved by faith.
Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore, we are saved by love.
No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as from our own; therefore, we are saved by the final form of love which is forgiveness.
Niebuhr reminds us that we are not climbing the mountain on our own but that we are a part of a grand legion of mountain climbers. Each of us with our own stone to push. Each of us not really knowing if, how, or when the task might be completed. Each of us with moments of clarity, moments of pain, and still moments of gratitude. And each of us, a part of all of us. And as a part of All we are saved by hope and by faith; we are saved by love and by the highest form of love which is forgiveness. Each of these is a loop on our mountain trail, and the trail is the course of our lifetime.
It is not just about our own lives, broken though they often are, that beckon us to the mountain trail, but our common life, too, that calls us to be companions on it. We look around us in a world filled with greed and arrogance, filled with intolerance and apathy and we know that we are called to be on that more public trail, not just as individuals finding our own way, but as citizens of the world, hoping to be citizens of a kingdom yet to come – a kingdom where there will be no racism or homophobia, no sexism or able-ism, a kingdom that will know no other kinds of oppression—but instead a kingdom that will be of love, for ourselves and each other, and of joy that we cherish, not just for ourselves but for each other. It will be a kingdom that will be created out of the kind of love and joy that we can choose to be a part of.
There’s an old story from the Jewish Midrash where a question is asked with the addition of a poignant cry, “God, it is such a difficult world why don’t you send someone who can change it?” And God answered, “I did send someone. I sent you.”
The question is, have we heard the call? The question is, do we have faith enough, hope enough, and love enough to heed that call? The question is, can we give our lives over to climbing the mountain trail that lies before us. Perhaps the way is pointed out to us here by poet Edwin Muir:
Friend, I have lost the way.
The way leads on.
Is there another way?
The way is one.
I must retrace the track.
It's lost and gone.
Back, I must travel back!
None goes there, none.
Then I'll make here my place—
The road runs on—
Stand still and set my face—
The road leaps on.
Stay here, for ever stay.
None stays here, none.
I cannot find the way.
The way leads on.
Oh, places I have passed!
That journey's done.
And what will come at last?
The way leads on.
The way does lead on before us. And it will lead us through challenge and grief, through doubt and brokenness, through times of nearly unbearable despair. And it will also lead us, life promises us, it will also lead us to the possibilities of a grateful heart, and to the possibilities of love and joy. Let us turn our eyes then, and set our hearts upon the hills…for there life is abundant, and demanding and full.
And so we might ask, and so my prayer is this:
Can you tell me
Is that [child] still climbing up the mountain?
Can you see him?
Is he still making way or has he fallen down?
I can't believe it,
That he's still up there looking for the answer.
He's got a lot more courage
Than most of us have ever found.
And it makes me feel like running up there,
Just to take [you] by the hand,
To make sure [you’ve] got [your] strength
And that [you] still understands.
[You are] the last hope I know of
For the common good.
[You] are the last hope I know of
For [that larger good.]
[You’re] just one, who I can think of,
Who [might have] fully understood,
That all dreams are the realities of man.
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