Guadalupe Pilgrim

This is an excerpt from my book, Practicing Faith.

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       It was October 2003, and Cyndi and I were on our first hike up Guadalupe Peak, the highest elevation point in Texas. We were at the top enjoying lunch and looking through the logbook conveniently provided by the National Park Service, reading comments from other proud hikers. I asked Cyndi what she would write. Her eyes twinkled, and she said, “I wonder what sort of story we’ve stumbled into?” We had no idea we’d still be hiking this mountain seventeen years later. It turned out to be a big story after all.

Since that first hike with Cyndi, I’ve summited the Peak more than twenty times, yet the trail remains as hard as ever. It never gets easier. I keep asking myself the same question: Why am I still doing this?

Climbing to the top of a mountain is a satisfying experience. There is a definite goal to achieve, and the goal is easy to evaluate. You know for certain when you’re at the top. But hiking to the top of this mountain is not easy. The first hour is hot and steep and hard, a series of rocky switchbacks that gain elevation step after step. It is enough to send most casual hikers back down to their car. All you can do is put your head down and keep moving. There is no quick way to the top, no shortcuts, no secret passageways for people who buy the expensive tickets. You can’t conquer the Peak by reading or studying or going to workshops; you must hike with your own two feet, and it is hard work.

I enjoy taking groups up Guadalupe Peak; it’s a metaphor for how we achieve the most valuable things in life. The trail is hard and long with no shortcuts or quick fixes. Kathleen Norris described my own thoughts in her book Dakota: A Spiritual Geography: “Enlightenment can’t be found in a weekend workshop. There is no such a thing as becoming an instantly spiritualized person.” She continued, “Americans seek the quick fix for spiritual as well as physical growth. The fact that conversion is a lifelong process is the last thing we want to hear.”

I’m also attracted to the Guadalupe Mountains because of the view. It’s spectacular—breathtaking in its raw unconcern for the hiker. As you stand at the summit and gaze across the Chihuahuan Desert for a hundred miles, you see nothing friendly to man, nothing that cares whether humans cross. The desert is complete, self-contained, and stingy, offering no comforts to soothe a human being. Oddly enough, that indifference speaks to my heart. From Barbara Kingsolver: “Looking out on a clean plank of planet earth, we can get shaken right down to the bone by the bronze-eyed possibility of lives that are not our own.” I need to be regularly reminded that I’m not the center of life, and this desert convinces me better than anything else.

Hiking these mountains reminds my fellow hikers and me that we can push through almost anything hard, difficult, or painful if we have a compelling reason to not give up. During the last 25 percent of the hike, when we’re all exhausted, our feet are sore, we’re dehydrated and long out of water, and we can see the parking lot way down there, but there is no shortcut back to the bus and no faster way down the mountain—even then, we keep moving.

Later, once we are all off the mountain, settled into our seats for the long drive back to Midland, the bus buzzing with stories, injuries, photos, and hearts joining together—that part of the trip is one of my favorite times of the day. Sharing our stories makes us brothers.

I often say, “Without a scar, we don’t have a story.” It’s in the disasters, the injuries, the surviving, that our character is revealed, and what starts as a set of mere incidents morphs from timeline into story.

       Since that October day with Cyndi in 2003, the trail up Guadalupe Peak has become one of my most important paths. From it I’ve learned God speaks to me most often when I’m moving and when I’m vulnerable. Dirt trails have become a big part of my spiritual journey and being on top of mountains helps keep my eyes open to the larger, wider, wilder world.

 “I run in the path of Your commands, for You have set my heart free.”
Psalm 119:32

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