walker’s instruction to the ascent: a guide

Shuffle through the silent wood to worship, past loblollies and scrub oak hung with flowering vines, your sick feet the nerve endings numb, the site of a glittering lake beckoning beyond the Bishop’s Walk and the Church of the Incarnation where someone sits at a piano, someone mixes water with wine, someone is blinded by the sun streaming through a window as they think about what they would like for dinner.

Step high over roots, concern yourself not with the sand slipping between your toes, breaking down your best sandals. It is for naught that you think any more which brand you purchased, how much the cost, and what you should buy next time. Think rather of roots. Enjoy the sand and how it falls out of your shoe in a playful way because you cannot walk because of your feet and it is if you are doing this on purpose, like when you were young and flopped your legs on front of you, flinging sand on your brother, on your sister, and you had more time then, all the time in the world.

It doesn’t matter you are late. You have nothing to contribute. There will always be voices in worship somewhere. There will always be worship. Not even the forest needs you though it will take you. There will always be bodies who, once animate, raised their hands in worship, return to earth and you, no longer a child, see how it begins as you fall off out of time beginning with the feet that can no longer run, the flesh that is no longer thought of or desired by those in time, and you, having once participated in a chorus, live on an edge without recognizable features or breath, where eternity has caught up with you and you and you had thought of yourself not ready and yet you are, venturing on your own. Those you thought should join you cannot follow through the divide, they cannot pass. You have tried to carry them but their fears have overwhelmed you and you must think, instead, of the little white dog who waits for you on the edge of town, the new ferns that must be watered, the meals you will make with the ingredients you just bought at the market, the son who will be home from his father’s next week. Ironically you must be more attentive to the things of time rather than to those things which wait beyond.

In the twilight worship hour, you must go alone through the loblollies and scrub oak hung with vine, the sparkling lake in the distance, until you reach the lip of it all, where the worshippers’ voices coalesce and become strongest, like a ring of sound around the world. And yet, you only see the glittering eye of the abyss in the distance and it is not in the depths of the earth but suspended and it is not dark but filled with light and fills the skies from the waters it takes from earth and one day you will be taken up from the earth and one day you will return again as rain.