Faith

Trust in the Lord with all your heart… In all your ways
acknowledge Him, and he will make straight your paths.
Proverbs 3:5-6

With the feasts of Passover and The Resurrection rapidly approaching
and while the entire Family of God’s People – on every continent,
regardless of faith or religious attitude –
experiences the servitude of fear and uncertainty surrounding a pandemic,
we hope to accompany you through these days with small gifts.
We pray that our reflections – on patience and humility,
the Eucharist and forgiveness, death and resurrection –
will lighten your hearts,
deepen your faith and make straight your paths.

Sometimes, perhaps too often, Americans – even those of us struggling to stay ahead of bills and hoping to avoid a major medical problem - forget just how fortunate we are and in the forgetting we miss wonder.

I remember that last night as I recalled “climbing” Hua Mountain with David and Sico and some American friends visiting Xi’an. Many of my Chinese students had repeatedly invited me to climb the mountain. ”It will be ‘fun’ and ‘an adventure.’” And, I thought, a unique opportunity to get to know them outside the classroom or shared meals.

A great idea, until I learned they climbed all night. 

“All night?!? Are you kidding me!?! Why????”

“To see the sunrise!”

“To see the sunrise! I’m from Miami. If I want to see the sunrise, I just hang out at the clubs on South Beach and wander to the beach ‘bout five-thirty in the morning.”

Xi’an sits in something of a bowl and the smoke and smog of Chinese cities being what it is, “seeing the sunrise” waits until Brother Sun is well above the horizon and has burned through the haze. 

Turns out that my students were so poor that the cable car, popular with Western tourists, (we’ll come back to that in a second; but it only goes only partway up the mountain) is extremely expensive by Chinese college student standards – about a month’s worth of lunches and dinners. Thus, they climb all night to see the sunrise. 

Now, back to the mountain and cable car. Absolutely, definitively not for the faint of heart! Described as having five peaks (the South Peak is the highest at 7,070 feet), Hua Mountain is one of the Five Great Mountains of China. From the Second Century BC, it has been dotted with Daoist and Taoist temples and other religious structures. Today, Hua Mountain offers two cable cars, hanging 900 meters and 755 meters (2952 feet and 2477 feet) above the gorge and each ride is about a mile – 30 and 40 minutes - long. 

When you reach the end of the cable car rides, you still have hiking to do. Wow! Do you have hiking to do! 

At the bottom of the mountain, before your ride, you really should buy a pair of gloves – cotton and throw-away because, at various points in the climb, pounded into the side of the mountain are chains – well rusted over the years. You need them to pull yourself up the treacherous mountain paths to reach the summits. In some areas, you must repeatedly clip and unclip your carabiners one-by-one – reattaching them to the chains bolted into the mountain. If, accidentally, you unclip both at the same time, you’ll literally and figuratively barely have time to sing “Near My God To Thee” ‘cause it’s bye-bye time. 

The truly adventurous can always risk The Plank Walk – often referred to as “one of the most dangerous hikes in the world.” Hikers are essentially suspended in mid-air by two or three narrow wooden planks that are crowded by endless processions of climbers heading in both directions. 

Vertigo sufferers and those with fear of heights are advised to visit Hua Mountain via You Tube. And, even if you’ll never go there, some of the pictures and YT videos are worth your time. 

That Chinese students, seventy years after Mao’s  revolution, will travel hours by bus, climb through the night, risk The Plank Walk, and literally pull themselves hand-over-hand up parts of the mountain to see a sunrise, speaks to a profound need of the human being, of the human soul – to see, to perceive, to be caught-up in beauty and splendor and wonder. 

Without beauty and wonder the soul will wither. 

You have read very good books, I am sure;
there is an excellent book however,
that never grows old;
it is the one that God has written on every plant
on every grain of sand, in yourself; 
it is the book of Divine love. 
Give, therefore, your preference to that beautiful book
and add to it a few pages of admiration and gratefulness.
Read and understand all other books in light of this one.
Father Peter Julian Eymard

Yes. “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” (Thank you, Margaret Wolfe – 1878, even though we can find variations of your famous phrase in Third Century BC Greek.) It’s also true that the beauty that nourishes the soul is – or can be – different from soul to soul. 

“You have made us for yourself, O Lord,
And our heart is restless until it finds its rest in you.”
St. Augustine of Hippo

I can imagine my soul melting into rest in the hues of the stained glass of the Matisse Chapel of the Rosary in Vence (France). My brain ceases to function, my heart rate and breathing slow, and I am beyond peaceful when SCUBA diving on a coral reef. Yet the desert doesn’t call to me, though I think I could happily get lost in the mountains for days of silence – as long as it’s no colder than sweatshirt weather.  Yet, I have friends who live for their time in the desert. Even one who goes to Disney World three or four times a year with his family and truly does find it “the most magical place on earth.”)

“Nature's first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf's a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.”
Robert Frost

Cumulatively I can spend hours a week just gazing at my orchid plants – whether they are in bloom or not. In bloom, I marvel as the subtlety of the changes in color along the petals and through the center, the fragrance they release toward sunset, the exquisite simplicity and simple complexity of their beauty. At other times of the year, I can be happily anxious looking for a new leaf or watching a spike appear and inch its way skyward, forming buds that grow plump and, secretly, edge into bloom in the dark of night – to surprise us with the dawn.

The flicker of candlelight in the eyes of the person you love; the quiet of a baby – in deepest sleep on his back with his arms and legs open to all the world and at peace; butterflies – the earliest Christian symbol of the Resurrection of Jesus; some songs and hymns -  the quiet assurance of the “Be Not Afraid” and the surrender of “Here I Am, Lord” by the St. Louis Jesuits or the soul-wrenchingly soul-filling “Pescador de Hombres” by Cesareo Gabarain. Beauty.

The baby wakes, the hymn ends, the bloom fades and the soul is nourished by memory. The sun whose rise we witness from the mountain top will set on the distant horizon and Western coasts. If we pause, if we stop to appreciate, to revel, to celebrate, to allow our hearts to be touched and our souls to rejoice we shall know 

“All shall be well, and all shall be well, 
And all manner of things shall be well.”
Julian of Norwich