Chapter 17- The Guests

From the journal of Sunday, June 8, 2008, while on the trail from D.C. to Pittsburgh while memorizing the gospel of John.

Early morning.  The proprietor has said that there is always a breeze up here in the campground, even in a hot spell.  He is right; the branches of the oaks are lightly rustling in the warm air.  We are camping just west of the Savage Mountain ridge in high country.  The Eastern Continental Divide wanders through here, maybe even under our picnic table.  The two ponds lying in the nearby fields are in ambiguous territory.  Does the ground beneath them drain into the Mississippi or the Atlantic?

The frogs that make their home in the ponds could care less.  They need to more concerned about their survival with the barred owl making forays out of the neighboring forest.   My bird book says barred owls don’t like to be seen by people, but she is less cautious and has been hovering around the mostly empty campground in the evening.  Perhaps the frogs rimming the ponds are too tempting since, we are told, there are owlets in a nest that need feeding.  Last evening we found her hunting perch by listening to the fierce squawking of robins sounding the alarm for all smaller birds to take cover.  The owl stoically ignored them while concentrating on watching for a meal.  But the crows refused to receive their guest into the campground.  When their protest annoyingly became too raucous, she moved to another perch twenty yards away.  By following the direction of the robins’ commotion from tree to tree, we took several pictures of the owl with our telephoto lens.  She has never allowed us to stand near her watch post long before she has lifted her solid body and slipped into the woods.  Sometimes we can hear a distant “Who cooks for you....who-o-o?” and know the owl is still in the area, but far enough away that the robin mob and the photographers have given up.

Another camp song is offered by the veery who gives a concert every dusk.  His melancholy, double-tone flute call circles and drops through the branches like drifting leaves.   But this Sunday morning,  I have decided that it is the wood pewee who has the most persistent and pestering call of all.  He visits the tree behind our camper.  Beginning before dawn today, he has started his “pee-a-wee,” repeating it over and over and over again.  Pee-a-wee...the thin whistle song slides up.  Pee-wee...it slides back down.  It is the first thing I hear as I cling to a sleepy dream on the edges of my mind.  Pee-wee.  I don’t want to get up yet and pull the covers over my head.  Pee-a-wee...peewee.  It reminds me of my children’s whining when they were little.  The inflection is the same: “Are we there yet?...I’m bored...Are we there yet?....”  With the wood pewee’s insistence, I finally climb out of bed and into reluctant wakefulness.


Sabbatical Sundays are so different from my “other” life.  I have been thinking how this time away has given me a chance to know who I am again.  I have time this morning, with the wood pewee's accompaniment,  to open the map on a sheer whim of curiosity.  I trace the Yukon River, whose headwaters we saw last month, and see how it wanders north through British Columbia and Alaska before emptying into the Bering Sea.  It feels like honoring God on this sabbath day simply to take time to know more about this wild river. I imagine going there someday.

Sabbatical Sundays are also different because I don’t have to use my public speaking voice to worship. When I visit a congregation, I can worship with my reclaimed, soft-volume voice (unlike the pewee).  A few weeks ago, with the sabbatical half over, we had a wonderful “midway-through” picnic at a park near the canal trail.  People from the congregation traveled in vans, laden with food.  It rained torrentially, and we felt like we were swimming when we ventured from under the picnic shelter, but it was so good to be with them.  I love them dearly.  And yet, I was uncomfortably aware of the public persona settling down on me, speaking loudly so everyone could hear, organizing conversation, doing the work of making connections that pastors automatically do instead of sitting down at a picnic table and observing.  Once a few years ago, a person accused me of being  insincere when I greeted people at the door at the end of worship.  The accusation has stung, puzzled and lingered.  Now I wonder: who is the real me?  Do all of us have a “public” side that we shed for a “down-time” side?    Is there an inevitable split between work and relaxation.  Is one side “fake” and the other “genuine”?  I am called as a pastor, and the  “public voice” is an inevitable part of the job description.   Would it be more healthy and genuine if this softer spoken pastor could be set free into the public workplace more frequently?   I do not have answers to those questions this morning.

Instead, I drive into town to find a worship service, glad to be a quiet participant and not a leader.  I find a Lutheran church and slip into the pew with a greeting or two, familiar hymns, good message.  But on the way back home, I decide that once again I am a sinner.  There is nothing surprising about that, of course, but I realize that when I met people in worship today, I was more interested in telling them about myself and what I was doing in town rather than finding out about them.  Wouldn’t it have been much more interesting to ask about their town?  Their congregation?  Why they like living here in the highlands?  What they like to do?  No, instead, I wait for them to ask the guest about herself so that I can tell them about walking the trail and memorizing John.  "Wow” should be their admiring, appropriate response.  What hubris on my part!

But I also have discovered throughout the sabbatical while visiting churches, that people, including pastors, aren’t too interested in those visitors who are only passing through.  These guests won’t be joining the church or putting significant money in the plate.  They are not useful in that they are here now and gone in the next hour.   I can tell this by the way questions fizzle out and eyes drift away from me when they realize there is no chance I will return.  Granted, this is a tourist town, and maybe there is weariness with the numbers passing through.  But I don’t think of myself as a tourist; I am a pilgrim on a journey;  I am a sister needing prayer on the way.  Instead I am learning how a pilgrim is made anonymous by the drifting gaze of others.  The worst part is realizing that I, too, have been guilty, when I knew the guests would never be back, of not pursuing conversations, of quickly going on to the next person. What opportunities I have missed!   What hubris again!

Back at camp the wood pewee is still singing.  He is the only bird in the vicinity, in fact, making noise at this noon hour, although he does sound slightly less energetic in the heat of the day.  I wonder if he ever stops to catch a fly, which I have read is the ultimate pewee fast food.  But it is the Spirit's persistent nudging that is also waking me up---belatedly.  Perhaps being a walking pilgrim is changing me for the better if I am learning to value someone, even though they are a temporary guest and passing only briefly through my sphere of responsibility.  If I become more alert to this, I may become a more genuine person in a truly Christ-like sense.

Jesus said:  "Whoever receives one whom I send receives me; and whoever receives me, receives the one who sent me."  John 13: 20

The grace of small favors

From the 2008  journal while walking from D.C to Pittsburgh, while learning the gospel of John.


Poison ivy everywhere.  If I manage to avoid it, Chester can’t, and his fur shares it with me.  But today, even I can’t keep prevent stepping into it.  In a five-mile stretch of the canal towpath, nothing has been mowed all season.  Usually the path is well tended, but in this section not even the campground has been mowed.  The grass is two and a half feet high, hiding the picnic bench, hiding the sinister ivy leaves ready to blister my skin.

I grow ornery when a park ranger truck rolls down the trail.  There is absolutely nowhere for me to move out of the way except off to the side in yet another stand of poison ivy.  Grrrrr.  With the windows rolled up in his air-conditioned truck, the driver does not even wave his thanks.   Here I am, sweating it out in the high 80's with 90% humidity.  I can imagine with dread my entire body itching tomorrow.  While he motors out of sight, I wish that I had stood my ground in the middle of the trail, forced him to stop, voiced my complaint to the park service, lamented what severe reactions to poison ivy are like for those who choose to walk instead of ride.  But all I have done is to move out of the truck’s way and then call Rick to gripe for awhile. What a wimp I am!


Step after step, vexation melts into more sweat until, finally, somewhere near Cumberland, gratitude happens.  Of all places, a water treatment plant bordering the towpath offers freshly mown grass and a shade tree.  This is all it takes for sheer joy to take over.  We veer off to the side, stretch ourselves out on the clean lawn, cool ourselves with drinks of water, bless the summer, close our eyes and forget that such a thing as poison ivy ever existed anywhere on this good earth.

Chapter 16: Tunnel Vision

This is from my journal dated May 30, 2008, as I was walking from D.C. to Pittsburgh while memorizing the gospel of John.  My friend Diane has joined me for this day of walking.

Here, camping among the forest dwellers in this wilderness section of the trail, I have made friends with the night.  If there were no darkness, I would not be able to see the white crescent that rises just beyond the reach of branches and casts moon shadows across my path on the night walk to the restroom.  Darkness gives quiet space for conversation around the campfire.    Darkness is a gifted time of rest from sore feet and tired muscles.  Darkness settles the daily nesting frenzy of the bird kingdom.  Shortly after dusk many creatures bed down and observe the great silence shared by monasteries.  There are a few exceptions: the call of the hunting owl,  the  rustle of a foraging mouse, the ambles of a skunk. In my life as a town dweller, darkness hardly prevents my activities since I can artificially light my indoor and outdoor space.  But here in the woods, I cannot hike in the night.  The onset of darkness puts boundaries on routine and enforces slowing down.  I have come to cherish this darkness.

The author of John’s gospel does not use darkness in this renewing way.  In his gospel, light is connected to God, life, and belief; darkness is light’s sinister opposite.  We hear in the opening poem: the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.  Darkness represents the powers that oppose God’s presence, the blindness of the human situation without a relationship with God, and ultimately death.  Darkness used in this manner reminds me of the Paw Paw Tunnel.

The darkness of this tunnel is not the welcoming kind that provides a background for stars.  Instead, it is a creepy, damp, suffocating kind of darkness; I have not made peace with it.  The first time I walked it with my husband Rick, over a year ago now, I  chose not to retrace my steps through the tunnel, but returned to the parking lot by climbing a strenuous trail over the mountain in order to stay in the open air.  One time through the Paw Paw was enough tunnel vision for one day.

Today is the second time I have hiked through the tunnel, and I am walking with my companion Diane, relieved not to be doing this alone.  The tunnel is a half mile long.  It was built where the Potomac River makes a wide loop and the construction of a tunnel across the neck of that loop through the mountain would save several miles and precious time of canal travel.   Inside the narrow tunnel the towpath shares space with the canal.  A railing separates the two and keeps pedestrians from stepping off the dirt ledge and falling into the standing water.  Since this railing is a new addition,  I wonder if any mules slipped off the edge years ago.  I heard a story at the local diner of a guy who leaned against a previous metal railing in the tunnel;  it collapsed with him into the canal.  Fortunately, the water was rather shallow, and he was rescued with only a broken bone.

Once Diane and I enter the tunnel, our flashlights barely illuminate the darkness that wraps around us.  Our lights only reveal  small, dim spots on the ground directly in front of us.  We have to pay attention to where we step. The path under our feet is uneven dirt, and puddles  have collected here and there from the dripping rock, caused by spring rain seeping through the mountain above us.  We can, however, see the half-circle of light, almost a glare, at the far end.  

When I came here before, we  heard noises coming toward us but could see nothing until people were suddenly walking three feet before us,  staring us in the face.   On this day we pass no one and only hear the drip of water and scrape of feet.  Diane walks in front of me, but since she stays close to the tunnel wall, she is completely absorbed by its blackness and I cannot see her silhouette against the distant light.  It is strange how I  feel alone in this bleak space, even though she is so close and Chester is at my side.  Sometimes vague florescent green eyes glint  under the surface of the black water below on our left.  Our flashlights do no good in helping us discover what creature, what kind of metallic rock, or what trash is resting there.  From the time we first entered,  we have watched the opening at the other end;  yet, after ages of walking, the light does not seem to grow significantly larger.  The  tunnel walk lasts about twelve minutes, maybe fifteen, but tunnel time for me is interminable.

The gospel of John makes it sound like a person is either walking in the dark (metaphorically speaking) or walking in the light, but I think the reality of discipleship is not so simple.  Because I am a sinner living in a broken, sometimes chaotic and cruel world, there are dark tunnels I must walk through.  Some tunnels are longer than others.  Some curve so that it takes a long time before I may even see the half circle of light at the other end.  The walk in the midst of these damp walls of the Paw Paw  is a picture of times I have felt overwhelmed by the darkness of grief and loss, or by discouragement and failure, or by anger and unforgiveness, or by my own critical cynicism.  Some darkness I bring on myself, although I may deny it at the time.  Other dark tunnels just happen.

As Diane and I near the end of the Paw Paw, I stop and get out my camera, wanting to capture the significance and relief of stepping into the light.  I fuss because there is a  construction sign  posted at the exit, “messing up” the picture.  When later I look at the photograph more carefully, I  notice that there is a cross made by the wooden frame holding the sign.  Looking from the darkness of  the tunnel, the light is just beyond this wooden cross.  How appropriate to tunnel vision!  If there is anything that the beloved disciple has been teaching me in John, it is that I can only see  the true light toward which I am walking through the cross of Jesus Christ.   My darkness, whether it consists of  unbelief, distrust, denial or grief, can never seal me out of  the light of God’s presence for this reason: Christ in love gives his life for the world, including me.  I walk past that very cross of Christ whenever I step into the light of my relationship to God.


The beloved disciple tells us that Jesus said:  "I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness but will have the light of life." (John 8.12)


I am still friends with the evening of the forest dwellers, but it is good to know that no darkness, tunnel or otherwise, can thwart God’s loving grip that keeps drawing me out into the life-giving light of God’s self.

A grace between chapters

This is from my journal of the spring of 2008, while walking on a trail from D.C. to Pittsburgh, learning the gospel of John by heart. 

Something just landed in the algae-covered canal with a peal of alarm.  I think it is a female wood duck who is now swimming toward six downy babies.  (No, I didn't get a picture.) She skims to the other side of the canal and slaps her wings on the water, whether to distract me from her babies or to get their attention to follow, I don’t know.  But follow her they do, while she makes an unusual, clear call.  I continue to walk in the direction they are swimming when suddenly the mother bursts ahead, skittering and slapping on the green muck.  The little ones can’t keep up, and they quickly lose her. Then they start peeping frantically, looking for her.  I am beside them now.  Fearing the stranger, one of them turns around and heads back in the opposite direction, moving far away from me.  Since mom is not around, the others chase after their sibling leader.

Meanwhile the female duck, farther ahead of me, is swimming in circles.  Her little ones, now a distance away, are still calling for her, but she holds back.  Finally, having waited until my walking brings me closer to her, she lifts herself out of the canal, glides over the towpath to the river, and furtively circles back behind trees in the direction of her babies. The peeping stops, a good sign, except for one lone peep sounding nearby.  A duckling, slightly bigger than the others, calls from the spot where the mother duck took to the air.  Does this one belong to her or is it an orphan?  Will it find its siblings?  Or will it, out on its own in the algae jungle, become turtle or hawk food?  I do not know the ways of ducks, but I do know the vast vulnerability that can come from loneliness and separation.  It is echoing now across the water.  Yes, I have known in many ways, in myself and in others, that pitiful search for a safe haven, a soft wing.

"They will not follow the voice of a stranger, but they will run from him, because they do not know the voice of strangers."  John 10:5

Jesus said that.  He did not consider himself a stranger. Once he thought of himself as the wing of a mother hen.  Food for thought.

Chapter 15: Flying Fuzz

 It has been a long time since I have posted anything.  A new baby granddaughter has a way of doing that.  But now that I am back, this is a continuation of my journal written along the pilgrimage of 2008 from D.C. to Pittsburgh while learning the gospel of John by heart.

Wednesday, May 28, 2008:      Cohill Station to Little Orleans

 It is exhilarating to be hiking the trail again after several weeks away. I have missed it.  Not that I wasn’t thrilled by our explorations on the northwest Pacific coast where creation seems dominated by the ocean and sky, and where majestic, mountainous islands are only brief interruptions to the flow of tides.  Along the coast of British Columbia and Alaska, the land submits to powerful winds, gouging glaciers, and torrents from melting  snow.    Water and air perform their work on the earth: they flood ravines, carve rocks, and scrape massive spruce trees into the surf.

Here on the banks of the Potomac, a river I have grown to love, the water and sky are more humble.  The memory of the western sea’s vast volume fades.  In comparison, the slender channel of this eastern river borrows only modest space from the hillsides and bottom land.  The unlimited expanse of the Pacific coastal sky is gone.  Here the sky is tucked securely behind trees in full foliage.  I had grown accustomed to the swaying ship, but now I am back to standing on stable ground.  I recognize that the towpath looks different to me, partly because of where I have been and what I have seen, but partly because it has done its own changing while I was gone.  The bluebells are long faded and fallen.  In their place wild flocks of pink, white and lavender scatter along the shaded pathway.  The large full-grown leaves overhead have introduced a new rustling sound.  Weeds are tall, ferns are lush and poison ivy  climbs tree trunks with great vigor.

Since Rick has stayed behind on business in Vancouver, a friend from church has joined me for a few days.  Diane walks a ways ahead of me while I mumble through the ninth chapter of John.  The drawn out story I am learning is full of detail  about a man who was born blind and healed by Jesus.   I suppose Jesus could have just said the word and the man would have been able to see, but instead the healing happens in steps.  First Jesus spits on the ground.  Then he picks up the damp mud with his fingers.  He spreads the mud  on the man’s eyes.  Then Jesus tells the blind man to go wash in the pool called Siloam.  The man goes to the pool, washes and comes back able to see.  Even though the man has his sight for the first time in his life, the story is not done yet.  He will learn to see even more. 


The man’s  neighbors next argue over whether he could be the same person, blind from birth, who use to sit and beg.  When he tries to assure them that he is indeed the same man,  they ask him how it happened.  He tells them a man named Jesus did it. Then the religious leaders get involved and ask him the same question.  He  responds again that Jesus healed him, explains to them the steps of washing in the pool, and when asked how in the world that this could have happened, the man replies that Jesus  must be a prophet.  An argument among the religious elite commences, some refusing to believe what the man says happened to him, others complaining that Jesus should be condemned a sinner for breaking the Sabbath by healing.

Meanwhile as Diane and I  walk, we become increasingly aware of white fuzz  drifting through the air.  By midday, it is like a lazy snow shower.  Although we gaze above and below us, we cannot identify its source.  Diane finds a wad of the fuzz resting on a plant on the ground.  We at first think we have discovered what we are looking for, but further investigation shows there are no nearby plants shedding the white stuff.  If a ground plant is spawning the fuzz, we finally ask ourselves, how come so much of it is flying so high?  We start peering upwards for the culprit as we walk along, eyes straining, necks aching.  Where is it coming from?

“Here is an astonishing thing.  You do not know where he comes from, and yet he opened my eyes.” (John 9.30)     

This is how the man answers his examiners when he is  brought in a second time by the Pharisees for questioning.  He says  that certainly Jesus could not be a sinner and do such an extraordinary healing.  It is only logical, he says,  that Jesus must be sent from God, at which point derogatory comments are hurled at him, and the man is thrown out of the gathering.    The religious community, skeptical neighbors, even his parents have let him down. The gift of sight has come to him with a cost. 

Jesus, hearing what has happened, searches for the man and asks him a pointed question: “Do you believe in the son of man?”   The term “son of man” was used by people to designate the one that God would anoint and send to save the people.  The man asks Jesus who this son of man is so that he can believe in him.  I imagine Jesus’ reply has a trace of teasing humor, “You have seen him.”  (Remember, the man hasn’t been seeing anyone for more than a few hours, so the possibilities of who he has seen are  limited.)  Then Jesus, the light of the world, reveals himself by saying, “The one speaking with you is he,” and the man quickly responds, “Lord, I believe.” 

Understanding and inner sight come step by step for the blind man: first knowing Jesus as the man who healed him, then Jesus as a prophet, then as one sent by God, then as  the son of man for whom the world has been waiting, and finally as the one  in whom he, the man who can now see, believes.  The man not only sees Jesus with his healed eyes, but now with a heart of faith, a true progression from blindness to belief, a progression of grace upon grace.

Diane and I are making progress too.  Diane finally spots  several large, dangling pods high above us in a tree.  The fuzz  is spilling out of them and we can see it scattering in the breeze.  In the tangle of branches, however, it is difficult to tell to which tree and trunk the pods belong.  She pulls her plant and wildlife book from her backpack, and we compare the possibilities of trunks standing near us.  Yes, what we are seeing fits the description of an eastern cottonwood tree.  For the rest of the day and into the next, we watch the cottonwood seedlings blow past us, their white softness collecting like snow on the dark canal water.  Then, suddenly, the season of flying fuzz has passed; the air empties.  The cottonwood seeds sink into water, burrow into the ground and go about the business of germinating.  Meanwhile, their parent trees concentrate on photosynthesis now that the daylight is at its longest.

I wonder if in our resurrected life I can have a interview with this man who received his sight from Jesus.   I would like to ask what surprised him the most when he suddenly had this new dimension of seeing.  Was it the blossoms on the olive tree?  The face of a beautiful woman?  The clouds streaked with sunrise color?  The steam curling from a warm loaf of bread?    I would like to ask him how the rest of his life went: what work did he take up when he could leave the business of begging?  Did he have children and, if so, did they then run out to play in the mud every time he told them this story about Jesus spreading mud on his eyes?  In their pretend game,  did they argue over who could spit the biggest to be Jesus and who would get mud smeared on their face like their daddy?

The beloved disciple tells us that Jesus said: “As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world.” (John 9.5)

This pilgrim prays:

I see astounding things on this trail everyday: like these  fluffy cottonwood seeds, pregnant with new life, gliding on the breeze to discover a home.  I am grateful for sight to wonder at your world.  I am even more thankful for the inward sight to know you---a gift that is even  more precious and which changes me profoundly.  I trust that one day I will see you face to face as clearly as I have finally seen these eastern cottonwoods.  Meanwhile, be my vision, Lord, still invisible  to my eyes, but a light in my heart.