Deep River / Advent Day 8

Sunday morning, the way the others live. No sermons to worry. No service schedule to make. As the day sets up, the usual challenge: how to hold on to something basic and essential when living in a new place, living essentially a new life. Sixteen floors up in a city which spans the most dangerous earthquake fault in America. A window, a bathroom, a couple of beds, shared with Marin, her dad John, and Matteo. And the city out there.

It’s true that I almost always sense that I’m losing myself when I’m in travel or vacation mode. Maybe it’s because you suddenly are putting a percentage of your energy reserves into engaging the new place, schedules, public transit, destinations, group decision making. And that percentage is just enough to take you past an important boundary into new territory. When you’re a distance runner, and you pass the three or four mile point, you hit a plateau where you become one with your body, you go on cruise control for the next 10 miles. But if you start cramping, or get a stone in your shoe, suddenly there is no more cruising. Every step, every moment is a distraction from the flow which was there before. It’s only a percentage of distraction, but it’s a critical one.

I’ve wondered in the last several years, with the changes of getting married, quitting preaching, caring for my aging mom, living in a small cabin with Marin, and having a baby, whether I’ve passed a boundary, which I can cross back over when things settle, or whether I’ve just changed. I’ve lost some of my predisposition to taking risks, to planning adventures, to jumping in.

Spiritually, so many of my reference points come from going into the unknown, and discovering nothing to fear, everything to love about the hard knocks, the exhilaration, the simple demands and rich recompense of venturing into terra incognita.

From my earliest sense of self, how I was different from my parents, and my companions, I valued the risks, the discomfort, the wide-openness of behaviors like sleeping out, like hitch-hiking, like kneeling in meditation until your knees ceased to feel anything and your heart was in the stratosphere. Leaving home, I promised myself I wouldn’t get pinioned by many comforts, by little schemes to save money, by weeks gobbled up in disconnected details. For years my journal considered the dichotomy between "comfort" and "intensity."

Promises, promises. We were simply exhausted by travel details by the time Teo finally went down, exhausted enough to stream and watch "Into the Wild," the Sean Penn movie about Chris McCandless’ journey north to Alaska after college and a couple years of wandering in the lower 48. I was prepared by Fairbanks reviewers to be condescending to the Chris McCandless character for his utter lack of knowledge of or preparation for the wilderness that so seemingly allured him.

But Penn, or Krakauer (the author of Into the Wild), or McCandless himself, or a combination of all three, won me over. I was fascinated not only by the quirky, experimenty cinematography, but also by how the narrative went between Chris’ 12 or so weeks the summer of ‘92 in his bus out on the Stampede, and the hitch hiking, friend-making, and general adventuring which preceded and informed the writing found in his journal after his death. I liked the long, silent sequences of mountains and rivers and skies. I’ll admit, his rejection of his parents was hard. His mother especially seemed to long to know and connect with him. But she had also betrayed him by staying in the marriage to a father neither she nor young McCandless could live with.

The high point for me was the end. Penn (or was it Krakauer) put in this totally brilliant, necessary scene which fires off as Chris McCandless enters the irrevocable spiral into death. In a dream sequence, Chris is seen arriving home to a huge embrace by his relieved parents, and the tragic sense of his immature and irresponsible abandonment of them and his sweet kid sister is suddenly mitigated. However, as the potent reconciliation plays out, the camera showing a tangle of hair and tears from faces pressed together, his gaze turns beyond the moment to the clouds, and we see his eyes have grown distant, and we sense the irrevocable longing for what is still out there. This dream, which, were it to come true, were Chris McCandless to survive and come back home, would imprison him in a deadly domestication. And so it vanishes mercifully, as a false road, as a temptation he managed to resist, as his consciousness returns to the bus, and his dying, the price he was willing to pay for what he learned – and we learn – in the process.

Precious, dear knowledge. The knowledge which transforms is often dear.