A couple of miles into our first day trekking in the wildness of the Eagle Cap Wilderness I told Rae I was thinking of us as saunterers instead of backpackers. Rae, my daughter who gifts me with invitations to adventure with her in some wilderness for a few days every September, graciously tolerated my foray into word etymology.
Earlier this summer I came across John Muir’s claim that the root of the word saunter emerged from Middle Age pilgrimages. As pilgrims passed through villages and were asked where they were going they’d say “to the Holy Land” (a la sainte terre), and so became known as sainte-terre-ers or saunterers. I’ve since learned dubiousness hangs around Muir’s etymology, but for now I’m claiming the description. Backpacking suggests rigor and accomplishment, while sauntering hints at a slow meandering that encourages pausing to notice unusual rock formations rising above on one’s left, ducks crossing the lake with their babies in tow, and picking and eating the last of the summer salmon berries.
I’m reading Nicolas Black Elk: Medicine Man, Missionary, Mystic and brought all 17 ounces of it with me, one of two weight splurges (the other being the backpack chair I spent chunks of time reading in). Reading about Black Elk’s life while sitting beside the Lakes Basin allowed his words to resonate and sink a shade deeper than they might have at home.
A good number of people I companion in spiritual direction speak of sensing God most poignantly and powerfully when outside. It is no surprise as our native home is “outside.” I resonate with them and indeed, seemingly God waited for me around every bend, in the remaining few wildflowers blooming in the open meadows, in the chipmunk that seemed to follow us from campsite to campsite, in the utter and deep silence of the mountains, in majestic peaks and alpine lakes, jumping fish, soaring hawks, the movement of the clouds, and in the tiny lakeside frogs we joined for lunch one day on a flat rock by Moccasin Lake.
With every encounter God was already smiling, saying, as it were, “I was expecting you! It is delightful to see you!”
And I would say a bit shyly, chagrined perhaps by my surprise, “it is delightful to see you, too.”
What would it be like, as Eric Clayton [1] suggests, to live with a disposition of expectancy at seeing God at every turn? The truth is (one Clayton names as well), we don’t need to go looking for God. Our invitation is to live aware and awake to God’s constant dwelling within us and simply to recognize that of Christ in us recognizing that of Christ in all things—and with delight.
I find it easier (of course I do, we do) to see God in these natural world elements. I want to live out of that awakeness when it comes to seeing God in my more ordinary life, in people who sometimes annoy me, in people I have hurt and who have hurt me, in people I would like very much not to get elected into positions where they become my local, state, and national representatives.
What would it be like to live with a disposition of expectancy in seeing that of Christ in the stuff of ordinary life, rather than primarily in saunterings in the wildness? What might change in the delight I sense from God, and the delight I mirror back? How might we nudge our shy awareness so that gentle joy and delight emerges in seeing God in all of our seeings and doings?
Today that is my prayer. And echoed in a prayer of Black Elk’s:
Grandfather, Great Mysterious One, You have always been and before You nothing has been. The star nations all over the universe are yours, and yours are the grasses of the earth. Day in and day out, you are the life of things. You are older than all need, older than all pain and prayer. Grandfather, all over the world the faces of the living ones are alike. In tenderness they have come up out of the ground. Look upon your children with children in their arms, that they may face the winds, and walk the good road to the day of quiet. Teach me to walk the soft earth, a relative to all that live. Sweeten my heart and fill me with light, and give me the strength to understand and the eyes to see. Help me, for without you I am nothing. Hetchetu aloh. (Amen).
[1] Eric Clayton, “Now Discern This: A Disposition of Expectancy” on the Jesuits.org website.
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