The View from Bareback

Along Lake Superior's southern shore, a rock face runs in parallel, less than a mile from the big water. At some points, it is a daunting climb to reach the overlooks. Marquette's Hogs Back and Sugar Loaf Mountains are popular challenges for the young. Bareback Ridge has been a particular favorite for me over the years. It is become a vision place. The unbroken expanse of water to the east and the birds eye view of Harlow Lake to the north provide a stimulating milieu. This week, I happened by the place again. I was astonished by the richness of the hike, bringing to mind the rich blueberry crops of years past, the splashes of color that illuminated the autumn there. It might be the sort of thing one might find on a hackneyed greeting card, except that over the years, the place has become inhabited in a deep way.

So, I sat on the rock promintory listening for a familiar voice. This year, it came in the form of a look back over 20 years of hiking this path, sitting on these same rocks. In all that time, one begins to notice things. There was the hike when I happened upon an enormous jackpine snapped like a kitchen match by the east wind. Last year's footholds were not always there. A tree or a rock on which I had come to rely may have moved, fallen away down the steep slope, or taken up residence across the path. New flora appeared and receded. (The first ever jack in the pulpit appeared on this spring hike.) Old paths gave way to new. A meadow expanded to inhabit what was the shade of a now fallen oak.

One tends to associate movement in the wilds with the swirling clouds of gnats, the darting of a songbird, the lumbering shape off in the brush, the gurgling of water on the move. With 20 years of noticing along the Bareback Path, I began to see that everything was on the move. Gospel visions of shouting stones; trees and boulders that amble across the landscape and toss themselves into the sea, these are not exceptional images. From bareback such swirling movement is the fundamental fact of life.

The voice from Bareback Ridge this year does not speak in the majesty of the Huron Mountains across the north; nor in the sheer expanse of the Inland Sea of Lake Superior; nor in the intricacy of the darting life forms all around. . . it speaks is in the sheer flow of it all. Like the volcano's lava, the entire creation is awash in movement. The creation dances.

I realized that I spend way too much time looking for anchors, for boulders too large to move. I'm constantly trying to put in stakes and claim stability, where movement is the only fact of life. It is most helpful to speak of the divine life as rocks and trees as one is deeply mindful that they, too are on the move. Dancing, swimming, moving, pilgrimage, these are the images that cry out to be recovered in contemporary religious experience. It may be that the terrors of Jihad (our own and that which we fear) arise from a God who does not dance. Life in the Spirit is about learning to move.

The Rabbi lay on his deathbed. His students formed a line that stretched from the bedside, down the hallway, descending the stairs, out the door and around the block. They were arranged from the best student to the least accomplished at the far end of the line. The prize pupil asked, "Rabbi, what is the meaning of life?" The holy man whispered, "Life is a river." The students passed along this bit of wisdom, one to another, clear to the farthest student, who asked, "What does the Rabbi mean, 'Life is a river?'" The question bubbled back through the line to the bedside, the prize pupil asking, "Rabbi, what do you mean, "Life is a river?" To this the Rabbi, "So, maybe life is not a river."