Thomas Knob Shelter, VA, May 27, 2011.
We arrived at about the same time from different places, both drenched and a bit whipped by a hard few miles in a late afternoon storm.
He was coming south – Atkins, VA to Damascus; I was headed to Maine. We grabbed the last two spots in a crowded shelter. I was cold and famished, shivering and perhaps in low-grade hypothermia, and wasn’t interested in anything beyond dry clothes and a warm sleeping bag.
I asked Strider for food – anything -- Scooter gave me three small Snickers bars and the chocolate gave me the jolt I needed jolt to get organized, hang wet gear and make my space in the crowded shelter, eat and get rid of the chills.
It was the end of a 14-mile day, and I had spent the last 90 minutes asking God if He was trying to tell me something with all the rain. I had talked to Him about the weather off and on during my weeks on the Appalachian Trail, and I was weary of yet another day of rain.
“What’s with all of this rain? What are you trying to tell,” I asked out loud as I slogged through mud and skidded on wet rocks and roots, looking for the shelter in the fog. “Is there a message here somewhere?”
“Patience, Grasshopper,” I can almost hear His smiling voice,” and trust in the Lord thy God!”
Indeed.
Five of us were nearly 500 miles from Springer Mountain Georgia, Caveman was stretched out and reading on one side of the shelter, his dog Dirtbag, snoring softly at his side. Strider and Scooter were working on their dinners, and Penguin lay across the far end of the shelter, hoping to sleep off a bad cold.
We talked trail conditions shared what we had seen that day. The southbounder said brought news from the north as he had been camping with thru-hikers and had heard about some the others he would meet along the way. He had camped with the Wolfpack: Fish, Lemon, and BearBait, a group I had hiked with in the Great Smoky Mountains.
We told him our trail names. “Why does the name Grasshopper sound familiar,” he asked himself.
What’s your name, Strider asked? Some section hikers have them, some don’t.
I am the Messenger,” the southbounder said.
The trail name was not familiar, but meeting a “messenger” certainly gave me a jolt.
I was still thinking about my long wet conversation with God and grousing that I would sure rather be in my tent than crammed in a shelter with five or six other hikers as rain pounded the roof. I remembered that the southbounder also had been disappointed at being forced inside because he couldn’t pitch a tent in a steady downpour.
Something else seemed familiar, but I couldn’t place it; so I asked,
“I have a feeling that I know you from somewhere,” I said. I had been in the woods for more than six weeks at the time and had long since misplaced the daily reality of home. “Do you mind if I ask where you are from?”
“Charleston, SC.”
“Me, too.”
“Mount Pleasant, actually,” he said.
“I lived on Rutledge Avenue. Downtown.”
Strider is between us, looking one way and then the other as his two neighbors look for the common ground. The Messenger sees the connection and senses that we are supposed to be having this conversation, as unlikely as that seems.
“I work at Mepkin Abbey,” he said. Strider starts laughing out loud, and I choke on a peanut.
“I volunteer there. I work with Vivian in native plants.”
Even Caveman’s dog Dirtbag, train name Dink, knew this was a trail encounter of cosmic proportion.
“Were you at Ursula’s retirement party? He asked. “Nope. Did Angel get her job? “Yes.” “Cool.”
Mepkin Abbey has become a spiritual home for me. The monastery is on the Cooper River an hour from Charleston. Its grounds and gardens are as majestically beautiful as any of God’s mountains and valleys that we have seen between Georgia to Virginia. It is as holy a place as I have ever seen, lovingly cared for by the score of Trappist monks who live, work, pray and meditate there.
My special time on a retreat last summer and my time around the monks put me on a path that reconnected me with The Lord and changed the direction of my life.
The Messenger’s real name is David, and he is the medical caregiver, the Infirmarian” at the monastery who takes care of the aging community of monks. He and I had not met, but we knew that night in the shelter that God’s afternoon rain had again put us in the same place at the same time.
“The last time I was there, I was at Father Leonard’s funeral,” I said. Fr. Leonard was the first African-American to be ordained in Charleston (1951) and the first to perform mass there. I was quoting from the eulogy where the Abbot recalled a conversation with the 92-year-old Leonard a week earlier. “You are a good man, Leonard,” he said.
“I hope someone else tells me that real soon,” Leonard replied.
The Messenger said, “the Abbot was talking about my son at the end of the eulogy.”
The Messenger said he had been told one of the volunteers was hiking the trail, but he didn’t know who or when they had started. His section hike as put together quickly as his wife suggested his week in the woods as a good birthday gift.
“Father Christian (who is 96) told me I should not go hiking,” the Messenger said advising him that, “you might run into a bevy of beautiful women and be tempted.”
The Messenger remembered the three nuns who came to visit Br. Vincent last summer and because friends to me during my five day retreat that week. We shared other quick monastery stories and I got the latest about Vincent and brothers Joseph, Robert, Stephen and others before we quietly let the shelter return to less spiritual and more practical and immediate matters. The others knew that their hiking friend Grasshopper had just had a trail encounter of epic proportions.
Strider, who has heard me talk about the Abbey many times over many miles, just smiled, knowing that God had worked a miracle with the afternoon storm that brought Grasshopper the message he had been asking God about.
The rain stopped during the night and the Messenger and I took our time getting back on the trail the following day. There was much ground we wanted to cover about the monastery and our dreams for it, sharing our common love of the peaceful and godly place and the depth of its meaning in our lives.
The Messenger gave me news from this spiritual home and passed along a 5x7 group photo of the brothers, the order of the Psalms they read each week at each of their services through the day and other Mepkin materials so I could “follow along” from the trail. He saw the Mepkin Abbey hat I sometimes wear and knows that the cross I wear on a boot lace around my neck came from there.
The days of rain were giving way to blue skies that morning. I told the Messenger that I may come to Mepkin this fall for a 30-day retreat and that I would love to write a history of the Mepkin Abbey and record oral histories and take photographs of the remarkable men who live there.
My last visit there came on the day of Fr. Leonard’s funeral as that week I came to volunteer on a Thursday instead of my usual Tuesday. I did not know the man, but I was moved by the funeral mass that honored him and brought together members of his monastic family and nieces and nephews from Charleston and around the country.
Fr. Leonard lay peacefully in a small wooden box on the floor in front of the stone Mepkin Abbey altar. His family brought an African-American, “black funeral” feel to the simple and beautiful church.
The brothers are buried on the bluff between the church and their private quarters and the brothers and family gently carried his body to the open grave outside.
Abbot Stan knelt and draped a white cloth across his brother’s face, and
brothers used white cords to lift his earthly remains from the open wooden box and lower him into the grace. The Abbot explained that according to monastic tradition brothers are buried without caskets and the monks, friends and family would use shovels to fill the grave and commit Leonard’s body to the soil.
The Abbot said he understood that family might not be comfortable with that tradition and he offered them red roses to drop into the grace as a loving goodbye.
The Messenger, David, and I talked all about Fr. Leonard’s funeral – and the story about his little boy that the Abbot shared in his eulogy.
David’s two-year-old son Nathaniel, was very sick last fall and faced possible heart problems if the illness became any worse. David and Fr. Leonard were very close and David came to the old priest one afternoon to tell him that was leaving work early that day because Nathaniel needed him and he feared for his health.
Fr. Leonard told him not to worry.
“I talked to God and the boy is going to be just fine,” he told David. “I am going to be leaving soon.”
Fr. Leonard started to fast that afternoon. He died two days later. I believe that David was with him when he breathed his last.
Grasshopper and the Messenger reflected briefly on the miracle that brought them together at an Appalachian Trail shelter so very far from home. They hugged and hoisted their packs – one headed south to Damascus, one headed north to Maine.
What was my message from God?
Patience, Grasshopper. And trust in the Lord thy God.
I have now been reconnected with Mepkin Abbey and have a new friend in Charleston who shares my love of backpacking and the monastery. I have shared a miracle and awed by it.
And I have a message from God that I am on the right path – both with the Appalachian Trail and on my quest to become closer to Him.
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