Walking the Walk, Backpacking for the Soul

Brother Paul asked me to share a word as we were leaving Thursday morning Vigils. It was 4 a.m. and, being a bit childlike, I wondered if I had done something wrong.

The monks of Mepkin honor the Grand Silence until after Mass three hours later, so I quietly followed him from the sanctuary, relieved that he was smiling but quite curious as to what might be on his mind. Brother Paul is guest master at the monastery; I had been on spiritual retreat here for four days.

“Would you be willing to give the Second Reading at Mass this morning?” he asked.
Surprised, my brain quickly flooded with possible objections. He continued, not giving me a chance to say no. “It’s a short reading from St. Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians. When I signal you, just walk up the center aisle, and do the reading. You’ll do fine.”

The morning’s Mass on the Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception was more elaborate than the others I had attended here. This was only the second time I had been here on retreat, but I had never seen another guest read during services. I used another verse to gird me as I stressed about reading from the Bible to an audience of bishops, priests, and monks.

“O God, come to my assistance. O Lord, make haste to help me.”

The reading from Paul went well.

Mepkin is a place of comfort for me, a natural paradise up the Cooper River from Charleston. Since my last spiritual retreat here I have spent nearly seven months thru-hiking the Appalachian Trail, following its white-blazed footpath from Georgia to Maine and then hitchhiking home to South Carolina.

Hiking with the trail name “Grasshopper,” I had lived a dream and challenged body, mind and soul while exploring the amazing country that God created. I was blessed to share with trail with a wonderful community of thru-hikers and we all were blessed by countless angels on and off the trail.

Angels appeared with a ride to town or a kind word; angels left us cold drinks and snacks in unlikely places; angels came as shooting stars over bare mountaintops, as sunrises over lakes and sunsets over cliffs and ridges; angels appeared as butterflies bringing a “hello” from Jesus when it was needed the most.

Now I am back with the angels at Mepkin Abbey and even in December, its grounds and gardens are as majestically beautiful as any of the wonders I saw on my hike. This may be the holiest place I know.

Two months off the trail, I came back to reflect on my travels and on my spiritual growth. I’d had long talks with God while hiking, often asking for His help with the challenges I faced on the trail – and off it – and giving thanks for His many blessings.

Memories of my hiking adventure were still strong, but post-hike depression and resurgent bouts of doubts left me struggling to make sense of my time in the wilderness and to pray for understanding and for God’s help on the path ahead.

Fourth-century Egyptians took to deserts and lived as hermits in caves to pray and meditate on the Scriptures to give their lives to God in contemplative worship instead of to Caesar’s taxes and his wars.

After two short visits to Mepkin, I am ready for a deeper journey inside my faith while unplugging from the secular clutter of everyday thoughts that too often smother the messages we can hear from the heart and the soul. I am taking to the monastery for 30 days with the brothers of Mepkin, a guest sharing their life of work and worship in a quiet community dedicated to prayer, meditation, and reflection -- and work to the glory of God.

A recurring mantra from my hike returns as I wonder if this path is the right one. “Patience, Grasshopper. And trust in the Lord, thy God.”

I am again trusting in the Lord and I am on a monastic retreat through Lent and Easter. It is time now for me to do the hard work and dig deeper – and look higher – to see who I am and what I am as I continue to grow in the Lord.

The Cross and White Blazes

“Are you a minister?” The stranger’s question puzzled me, and I paused in confused reflection, seeking the proper way to respond.

“You’re wearing a cross,” he said, filling the silence of my hesitation. “I thought you might be a minister.”

Another pause, and I said, “No, I am not. I am just ... I am just a Christian.”

This profession of my faith came atop Maine’s Mount Katahdin, the northern terminus of the Appalachian Trail. My faith had unfolded and sustained me along the long walk north from Georgia, and I knew I had come nearly 2000 miles due to God’s good grace.

My decision to accept Jesus the Christ as Lord and Savior had surprised but comforted and gladdened me. My faith puzzled some non-believer friends, and one of them openly wondered if I had hit my head on a tree limb and offered to help with an intervention.

My faith is private and deeply personal, and I avoid loaded descriptions like ‘born again’ or ‘saved.’ I do not evangelize and have not sought to persuade or convince other hikers to accept Christ, but I will share my beliefs with others of faith and those who ask.

But I knew what I would do when I finally reached the summit of Katahdin and stood on the AT sign to celebrate my thru-hike. Raising my hands to the heavens, I said “Thanks be to God.”

I left Georgia in the spring, being blessed or perhaps cursed by having six months available to spend chasing a dream of hiking the Appalachian Trail. At 60 I chose to take a long hike to challenge myself -- and with three layoffs and hitting a career wall, long patch of unemployment and disappointing job searches, find purpose.

This was backpacking for my soul, bringing spiritual challenges to my merry woodlands adventure. I toted a heavy spiritual pack through difficult psychological terrain, dark forests and ravines leading to joyful vistas, insights, and discovery. My heart and soul came alive as I followed the seasons up the Eastern seaboard, struggling with a 50-pound pack and a lifetime of regrets, pain and bad choices.

Hiking can be mentally and physically grueling and it often becomes tedious, as minutes become hours and morning blends to afternoon. The solitude is at times comforting, but isolation and exertion take their toll. Body and mind are both stronger and weaker, and the elements and extreme conditions challenge the will and demand discipline and mental toughness to stay with it day after day after day.

On you go, plodding along toward a distant goal and digging deep to make it up a climb or through some off-trail personal tangle, hoping for a different outcome this time as familiar tapes play again and again in your head.

But just as I learned to lighten my pack, I also found ways to forgive myself --and others.

Grinding away through memories of past struggles as I labored over mountain after mountain, I found a way to let myself off the hook and get the spiritual help I needed to forgive myself for my trespasses as I worked to forgive those who had trespassed against me.

I restored my faith in the Lord and in myself, and I laid down many burdens along the way. I was tested in ways I had expected and in ways that I had not.

Walking the Walk

Lightning crashed nearby and the downpour turned to hail as I crouched in the open near Beauty Spot Gap in Tennessee, 300 miles into my hike, and prayed for safety from the storm.

Water filled my boots and I was soaked to the bone when I made camp and a quick dinner and then scrambled into dry clothes and my sleeping bag and shivered in my tent. I woke in a panic in the dead of night, clawing at the walls as if fighting to get free from a coffin. It was 4 a.m.; I made it out but could not see for the fog or cloud that covered my campsite and the mountain.

I had been looking forward to the hike over Roan Mountain and staying in the Roan High Knob Shelter, at more than 6200 feet, the second highest shelter on the trail. A cold drizzle and thick fog made for a difficult climb up Roan and I nearly missed the spur trail to the shelter; my spirits were low and I was deep in the dumps for the first time since leaving Georgia.

I prayed and decided that the demons of doubt were testing me and the devil was trying his best to get into my head. I would rely on my faith in God and my faith in myself.
I made it up Roan and through a three-day weather crisis with prayer and variations of a hymn of praise -- "Holy. Holy. Holy. Lord God Almighty. Help me climb this mountain, and bless me as I go.” Or, "Bless me as I hike this trail, I praise Thee as I go."

A hundred miles later and after three days of rain in Virginia, I was hiking through another late afternoon downpour on the thousand-foot climb up Mount Rogers when I snapped, screaming at the weather and shouting at God. “What’s with all the rain,” I asked. “Are you trying to send me a message?”

Night was falling and so was the rain when I arrived at a wilderness shelter at the same time as a southbound hiker. We nodded wet greetings and each worked to get dry after snagging the last two slots in the crowded Thomas Knob Shelter.

God made a miracle and sent me the message I had asked for as I walked northbound through the rain.

The southbounder’s trail name was “Messenger.” He was taking his first backpacking trip while on vacation from his work at Mepkin Abbey where he was a caregiver to the brothers. We both knew that God brought each us to this place in the rain and that we probably would never have met had we both not sought shelter on rainy day.

Messenger gave me a group photo of the brothers and mementos from the monastery. We shared stories of the brothers and spiritual support for each other as he headed south to Damascus and I went north. I was 500 miles into my hike, about a fourth of the way to Maine.

Dysentery or some other dread intestinal disorder struck hard as I moved through Virginia and the fabled Virginia Blues set in. I began questioning my resolve and commitment to hike the entire trail and to stay in the woods for another four months. My fear of making the destination made me lose sight of the journey and the wonders around me day after day.

Nearly 2000 hikers left Springer Mountain headed to Maine and Mount Katahdin in the early spring. Many dropped off the trail, and there were fewer than a thousand of us still hiking and fighting the heat wave that baked us across Pennsylvania and into New Jersey.

We were a disparate tribe that evolved into a community of fellowship and of shared pain and joy. The secular and social adventure was nearly as rewarding as the spiritual one, and I dedicate my hike to the friends of every age who I met and came to know along the way.

When camped, I sometimes read from the Gospels and Proverbs and from a wonderful little book -- More Than a Carpenter, which offered proven historical documentation to Jesus' life, ministry, death, and resurrection. It satisfied the journalist in me that Jesus was/is God and neither a liar nor a lunatic nor a fraud, and somewhere in Virginia, I asked for his Salvation. He said, “Yes.”

My faith and belief in myself were restored as I passed the 1000 mile mark and was more than halfway to Maine. My faith sustained me twice in Pennsylvania – first when I was lost and scared in a steep boulder field on the Superfund climb out of Palmerton, and again near the Eagle’s Nest Shelter when I nearly stepped onto a fat rattlesnake coiled on the edge of the trail.

I had called Mepkin Abbey the day before the snake scare, hoping to talk to Messenger. He was not at work, but I was able to talk with Father A.J. and we caught up on news from the monastery and the trail. He closed with a wonderful goodbye that replayed in my thoughts many times along my way to Maine and home:

“God Bless You, Grasshopper.”

Get Thee to a Monastery

My long walk brought me to New York at about the time my son, Noah, had to be in Manhattan, and I was able to juggle my schedule and jump off the trail to meet him.

I caught a ride to the Greymoor Spiritual Center, a Franciscan monastery near the Hudson River, and sat out two days of steady rain there. I shopped in the monastery gift store, shared some laughs with other hikers, and attended morning Mass while waiting for a ride to Pawling where I would catch a train to the city for the day.

Manhattan was like Mars after life in the woods, but my spiritual journey took me into St. Paul’s Chapel near Ground Zero, and to St. Patrick’s Cathedral.

Graymoor was one of many sources of faith-based respite and comfort along the trail. Churches near the trail hostel hostels or brought dinner hikers, made churchyards available to campers, and one even left a box of socks in a hiker box on a table alongside flyers and tracts and pledge cards.

But none of these places could be as special for me as Mepkin Abbey, and I am eager to return to where I began a serious return to the Lord at a retreat nearly two years before. Then a newcomer to a religious life, I felt lost.

But my return now to the monastery is far more evolution than great leap because as my life has been a slow slide toward monasticism, solitude, and simplicity. I will travel light. Packing simple clothes, a Bible, and a few books about the life of Christ and spirituality, a notebook and a pen. I look forward to the rhythms of the Abbey.

During my first spiritual retreat at Mepkin, I used “Urgings of the Heart” to guide me into imaginative contemplation and into the life and times of Jesus for a journey of self-awareness through meditation and through Biblical lessons and teachings.

This retreat took me into the shadows where we are taught that we deserve our failures, pain, and unhappiness and convince us that we should not love ourselves. I have been to the poisonous places where we judge our lives and the lives of others, or obsess on past slights, failures or mistakes, and where we fear for the future, doubt ourselves and question our faith.

But I have now hiked the Appalachian Trail, conquered mountains, fears and doubts and completed a 2,000 mile journey of faith and discovery.

I return to the monastery today better and stronger than the man who came here in retreat nearly two years and a lifetime ago. I have laid down many burdens and I have come a long way, but I still have far to go.

Starting today, I give up the secular life for Lent and hope to live the monastic life until Easter. I believe that my months in the wilderness have strengthened my soul and my long talks with God on the trail have prepared me for this new journey.

While I breathe, I hope, but I also know this path is the right one.

“Patience, Grasshopper. And Trust in the Lord, Thy God.”

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