Home
Minister
Young Church
Music
Governance
Calendar
This Week
Silence Yearning to Speak
July 28, 2002
"The tops of mountains are among the unfinished parts of the globe, whither it is a slight insult to the gods to climb and pry into their secrets, and try their effect on our humanity."Most of you, I'm sure, know by now that I hail from the great state of Maine, which the minister at my sister's wedding ceremony many years ago misconstrued as "the great state of Mind," which perhaps it is. Some of you may be surprised, then, to learn that I had never climbed Mt. Katahdin until just over a week ago. Along with our friends John and Florence Mercer, both highly experienced mountain hikers, I finally made the difficult ascent of Maine's highest mountain, having correctly surmised that at age fifty, my window of opportunity for making such a challenging climb might be narrowing somewhat.
--Henry David Thoreau
Climbing Katahdin was one of those items on my mental "to do before you die" list, along with visiting Shiprock, New Mexico and Canterbury Cathedral, both of which I was able to accomplish during my sabbatical. Of course, there is no end to this list. Or rather, as soon as one item is removed, another is added, and so I suppose it will continue to expand for as long as I am alive. At least, that is my hope.
Climbing Katahdin was a pilgrimage of sorts, not only because it is a sacred place in itself, as perhaps all mountain-tops are, but also because for me it was a fulfillment of something like one of the qualifications for "authentic Mainer." After all, every kid growing up in Maine has read Don Fendler's harrowing account of his childhood experience on Katahdin, Lost on a Mountain, and how can one really say she is from Maine if she has never climbed Maine's highest peak? So, it was something I had to do--and it did not disappoint, though it is good to remind oneself on such an outing that "pride goeth before a fall."
Our ascent was made in a thick mist, which meant that we were able to see little on the way up except for the steep trail of heavy boulders immediately before and around us. Though the weather report below had called for sunny skies, we were literally lost in a cloud, with some question as to whether we should continue or turn back. In places, the wind blew hard and damp and cold. Remembered tales of hypothermia made the blood run colder still. Thoreau, on his climb to the top of "Ktaadn" in the 1850's, described a very similar day:
At length I entered within the skirts of cloud which seemed forever drifting over the summit, and yet would never be gone, but was generated out of that pure air as fast as it flowed away; and when, a quarter of a mile farther, I reached the summit of the ridge . . . I was deep within the hostile ranks of clouds, and all objects were obscured by them. . . . Sometimes it seemed as if the summit would be cleared in a few moments, and smile in sunshine; but what was gained on one side was lost on another. It was like sitting in a chimney and waiting for the smoke to blow away.Unfortunately for Thoreau, the top of the mountain never cleared, and he was forced to descend below the cloud line in order to capture some of the magnificent vistas which the summit of Katahdin provides to the persevering climber.
It was, in fact, a cloud factory,--these were the cloudworks, and the wind turned them off done from the cool, bare rocks.
John, Florence, and I were more fortunate. We had been at the summit for no more than ten minutes before the clouds mysteriously broke and blew away, providing us with spectacular views of the mountain we had just climbed and hundreds of miles of the surrounding State of Maine as well. It was a moment which can only be described by that favorite word of the Romantic poets, "sublime." It was a religious experience.
Of course, we still had to make the trip back down--over five miles and a steep one mile drop. But the exhilaration of reaching the top, then having the clouds lift and blow away revealing such an amazing vista was more than enough inspiration for the descent. And besides, the religious searcher knows that the mystical moment is always followed by the dark night of the soul. Anything worth doing is worth some blisters and sore muscles, whether of the body only or of the spirit.
On Katahdin, Thoreau seems to have confronted a face of Nature the like of which he had not met with in sunny Concord. Having reached the extensive table land at the top of the mountain, albeit still in the fog, he wrote,
. . .It was vast, Titanic, and such as man never inhabits. Some part of the beholder, even some vital part, seems to escape through the loose grating of his ribs as he ascends. He is more lone than you can imagine. There is less of substantial thought and fair understanding in him than in the plains where men inhabit. His reason is dispersed and shadowy, more thin and subtile, like the air.Later in the same chapter of The Maine Woods, he wrote,
Vast, Titanic, inhuman Nature has got him at a disadvantage, caught him alone, and pilfers him of some of his divine faculty. She does not smile on him as in the plains. She seems to say sternly, Why came ye here before your time. This ground is not prepared for you. Is it not enough that I smile in the valleys? I have never made this soil for thy feet, this air for thy breathing, these rocks for thy neighbors. I cannot pity nor fondle thee here, but forever relentlessly drive thee hence to where I am kind. Why seek me where I have not called thee, and then complain because you find me but a stepmother? Shouldst thou freeze or starve, or shudder thy life away, here is no shrine, nor altar, nor any access to my ear.
And yet we have not seen pure Nature, unless we have seen her thus vast and drear and inhuman. . . . Nature was here something savage and awful, though beautiful. I looked with awe at the ground I trod on, to see what Powers had made there, the form and fashion of the work.Of course, Katahdin is tamer now than when Thoreau climbed it, with well-marked trails and fellow climbers to ease its loneliness. Help is only a cell-phone call away, not one hundred and fifteen difficult and uncertain miles down the wild Penobscot river to Bangor, as it was for Henry. His awe is understandable; he was right to be cautious. That said, the mountain still demands our respect and caution, and that more are not lost or injured on its unforgiving slopes is a miracle of sorts.
As I made the descent on that nearly perfect day, in the company of such fine companions, the phrase which kept coming into my mind was one of Jacob Trapp's: "an inarticulate silence yearning to speak." I meant not only the secrets held by the mountain. It occurred to me that I could not adequately describe what I had just experienced, any more than could Thoreau a hundred and fifty years before me. I could not adequately describe the sense of accomplishment at overcoming my fear of the unknown. I could not describe the feeling of awe when the clouds finally lifted and rewarded the weary climbers with a glimpse of sublimity. Was it all serendipity, or is it possible there is a god, after all?
But more, it occurred to me how much of what I feel and experience I am unable to fully articulate. This, I suppose, was the great mountain's lesson. How difficult it is to speak our love, our hope, our memory, our sorrow, our wonder, and our joy. So often our silence is misconstrued as carelessness when in fact our silence yearns to speak, but is unable to do so.
Because of this, we sometimes turn to the poets to speak for us, those who have mastered words better than we. But nothing will completely satisfy. I truly believe that most of us are deeper wells of emotion than can ever be fathomed. As the reading I shared this morning has it, we "long to speak the deepest words we have to say," but for so many reasons we dare not say them, or cannot say them.
Our silences yearn for a voice. But often, we are forced to admit, the deepest emotions are voiceless. The most profound experiences are often inexplicable. So much of what we call "religious" is experienced in the gut, at the level of the emotions and not the intellect. It is the feeling of interconnectedness we sometimes get when we gaze heavenward at the stars, and realize how small and insignificant we are against them. Or it is the grief we are unable to express, because we are unable to look straight upon it for fear it might consume us like the holy of holies. It is the joy that we long to share, but for a million reasons find we cannot.
This summer there is so much going on in the world to discourage and disappoint. The woes of the stock market, the worsening situation in the Middle East, murder and mayhem in our streets, the perversion of sexuality among trusted leaders. But we cannot choose the time in which we live, and move, and have our being.
Some of us are also struggling with personal griefs too deep to be fully told. A few of us, I daresay have experienced great joys, or deeply religious experiences such as mine, on the top of Katahdin. Let us be gentle with one another and give ourselves the benefit of the doubt, for we can never know what is transpiring in the heart of another person.
Of the many depictions of God in the Bible, my personal favorite is Elijah's "sheer silence," of which I read to you this morning [1 Kings 19:12 NRSV]. That too, we are reminded, was a mountain-top experience. We wait in vain for God to speak to us, but in so many other ways the universe speaks to us every single day of our lives. Sometimes it is the silence--our very own silence--which speaks. We must be prepared to hear what the silence has to say, and to be able to rest content in it. We must learn to be kind to others in their silences, and to ourselves in our own.
After all, too many times we wish we had remained silent. We say that words "fail us," and so they often do, especially when we are trying to speak of what is nearest and dearest to our hearts. We "prattle and chatter lightly and hide [our] hearts behind words [Tagore]."
My message to you this morning, and for the rest of the summer, is to be kind to yourself. Enter into the silence of these remaining summer days. Do not feel that you must always find the words, but listen carefully to what the silence has to say. Perhaps, it will say, some things are better left unsaid.
May your days be bright and blessed with gentle summer breezes. Amen.
The Rev. Harold E. Babcock
