First Church of the Higher Elevations: Mountains, Prayer, and Presence
Peter Anderson ISBN: 0-9760729-4-7 Trade Paperback, $15.95
November 5, 2007 Anna Mills on Nature Writing reviews & profiles First Church of the Higher Elevations by Peter Anderson
Excerpt from the book:
Straight Ahead Till Morning
Reprinted From First Church of the Higher Elevations: Mountains, Prayer, and Presence
by Peter Anderson, Ghost Road Press 2005
Buy this book from Small Press Distribution here
I remember one of the last times we saw the Padre, he was tethered up to an oxygen tank which rankled his independent spirit. On that same visit, he let out a spirited celebratory whoop when we told him that Grace was pregnant.
“Whoever this little soul is, they’ll be putting in some mountain time,” I said.
“It’s in the genes,” he said, as he offered our child-to-be his blessing.
In October of 1999, just a few months short of the millennial summit that he had hoped to reach, I received word of his death. Grace and I drove out to St. Louis for the memorial service. Under turning leaves and a clear blue October sky, I helped carry his casket to a gravesite only a few hundred feet up the hill from the ground where my grandfather and my father’s twin brother had been buried.
On the windowsill above my desk is the silver hip flask he gave me. It has a few dents, a little solder here and there. I know it held a lot of Yukon Jack. I like to think that shots were poured on Mt. Wood up there in the Yukon, on the way in to Everest, or in his Alaskan parish after a rescue mission at seventy below.
Not long ago, I turned the page in an old journal and one of the last clippings he’d given me fell onto my desk: “Action presupposes contemplation: it springs from the latter and is nourished by it. Love cannot be given to one’s brothers and sisters unless it has first been drawn from the genuine source… . ”
I thought back on that short walk up the Padre’s last hill, the beginning of what he understood as the grand ascent to that source. “Death is nothing to worry about,” he once said in a homily. “Peter Pan had it right: it’s out the window, second turn to the right, and straight ahead till morning.”
An interview with Peter Anderson
Your book has been in the making for almost ten years—can you say that this book is a labor of love for you, and looking back on your journey of writing it—how has it changed you?I’d been doing a lot of different kinds of writing before the idea for this book started percolating in my journal. Most of that writing, whether for newspapers or a children’s book or a project with the Park Service, involved a specific piece of work that I could gauge in terms of what kind of research it would involve, how long it would take, how much it would pay—all the things that freelancers have to take into consideration in order to make it all work. I had no idea at the outset what this book would entail.One thing I was clear about was that it would be unlike anything I’d ever done before. I had no idea, at the beginning, that it would prompt a move from Utah to a Quaker seminary in Indiana. This was a pretty radical move for Grace and me, especially Grace, a mountain gal who had never spent much time east of the Mississippi. “Where are you taking me? “ she said after looking at the U.S. map and seeing how far away Indiana was. I had an image of old homes, tree-lined streets, a small Midwestern campus, with the good potluck conviviality of a graduate school situation. And the fact that there was a scholarship involved added to the allure. But what really prompted our move for me was my desire to write about place from a spiritual orientation. I knew enough about the places I wanted to write about. I knew a lot less about spirituality, or writing about that kind of thing. Earlham School of Religion became a place where I could explore the spiritual side of it. And it also gave me a chance to learn more about the Quaker tradition, which had become a part of my life in Salt Lake. But it was a highly irrational move in terms of a “career.” I had been able to work out a pretty good life freelancing, teaching, and working summers as a wilderness ranger with the Forest Service in the High Uintas. I had no intention of becoming a pastor or anything like that. I just wanted to find a way to write about an issue that had become important for me—namely, the experience of wildness and wild places and how someone might understand that as prayerful. Like many people who spend time in mountains or other wide places, I wondered if there were a way to sustain that kind of presence or flow or “mountain mind,” as Tom Lyons put it, once I was back into the daiIy flatland grind. The wonderful sensation of being fully alive in wild places is related in some way to the kind of experience one might find in prayer, meditation, or in my case, Quaker worship, which is in many ways a mix of the two—a kind of Christian Zen. That’s what I wanted to explore in writing. And I was fortunate to find a place where I could do that.Your book discusses the contemplative way, spirit and place and how it all comes together through walking in prayer—what should readers take away from these essays? I think a contemplative orientation can be found in any religious tradition and also in activities that have nothing to do with religion, at least not in an obvious way. And for that reason, it’s a wonderful and very experiential “place” for people of different background to meet and to talk about those moments that have been really meaningful in their lives. I looked up contemplative a while back, and in the Oxford dictionary, they often include a sentence from some piece of literature to flesh out the definition. The quote Oxford includes refers to someone “smoking a contemplative cigar under the starlight.” Sure, why not? Or it might be planing a piece of oak. Or casting a fly out into mountain stream. Or watching the long yellow line down Highway 17. It might be chanting the psalms in a Trappist monastery. Or sitting zazen. Or walking. The important thing is that a contemplative orientation opens us in some way to another dimension of experience and of being human. That’s what this book is about.
<p> </p>Spirituality is an “ambiguous and troublesome” term, yet your book can be considered highly spiritual. We live in such an individualistic age that the word spirituality has been stretched pretty thin and covers such an incredibly wide range of activities. In that sense it can be “ambiguous and troublesome.” Using it almost always demands further definition. I wanted to try and find a language that would help me to name experiences that I considered spiritual, by which I mean experiences that have led me into an awareness beyond my “self” and that nudged me along a trail toward wholeness.I came to believe that making the right choices wasn’t about just me, it was also acknowledging that there was more to the choices I made than my own personal volition, that there was a “Motion of Love” in any given moment I could find a way to be aligned with if I was receptive enough. But I wanted to focus on practice, not theory. More specifically, I wanted to talk about the role of prayer or meditation in one’s experience of place, and the role of place in one’s experience of prayer or meditation.I’m pleased that you think the book has some spiritual value. If it is reverent, my hope is that it’s also appropriately irreverent. I hope the book reads in a way that’s also grounded in that which we can taste, hear, see, and feel. In my view the Spirit, the Holy Spirit if you like, infuses everything all the time and we just have to slow down long enough to know that. But this is certainly not a how-to book. It’s a collection of essays that reveal some of the challenges and openings that I’ve experienced along the way.
How have writers you admire influenced your own work? Finally, an easy question. The two most important voices for me early on were Wendell Berry and Gary Snyder, both of whom have integrated a rich spiritual life with a deep understanding of home and place. Gary Snyder found a way to do that as a Buddhist, and Wendell Berry as a down-home, socially engaged Christian. Both writers are great contemplatives. And both writers continue to be, in my opinion, two of the most important prophetic voices of our time. I love the energy and vitality in Jack Kerouac’s early books—The Dharma Bums was a formative book for me, which is why I revisit it in the title essay of this book. But in the long run, I think Gary Snyder really found a way to integrate the most valuable insights of the Beat period with the evolving needs of later decades. And to his credit, he’s still alive and vibrant, unlike a lot of his old buddies. Wendell Berry taught me that the Bible is an “outdoor book” in the sense that some of the most significant stories that we read there happen not in town or in the temple but in essentially wild places (many of them take place on mountains.)Another important writer for me has been Max Oelshlaeger, an ecological philosopher whose book, The Idea of Wilderness, gave me a wonderful historical perspective on the way we think about wild places. One night in a Forest Service guard station in between back country hitches, I stayed up most of the night reading by candle light while the resident moths did a kind of sizzling suicide dive into the flame. The book, also by Oelshlaeger, was Caring for Creation: An Ecumenical Approach to Environmental Crisis. I know it doesn’t sound like a real sizzler of a read. But for me it was really important because it highlighted the potential for the wisdom stories of the Judeo-Christian to challenge the 20th century material-world status quo. If there was one book that tipped the scale in my decision to go to seminary, it was this one. The fact that he was writing not as a Christian, but as an ecological philosopher, made his book all the more convincing.
In terms of authors I admire now whose work reflects my own orientation, values, and aspirations as a writer, I would say David James Duncan (The River Why, The Brothers K, and My Story as Told by Water) is right at the top of my list. He’s a fly fishing contemplative who’s not afraid to delve into matters of the Spirit. And he does so with a lot of grace and humor.
“Home. Land. Security.” draws a thoughtful contrast between the events of 9/11 and your daughter’s innocent perception of the world. Is this the world you’d envisioned for your children, and how do you apply the lessons you’ve learned to allow your children to grow up accepting and unafraid? 9/11 and the cultural dialogue that came about with it became a jumping-off point for me in taking a look at our understanding of home, land, and security and to do so in a way that would make sense with my two-year-old daughter, Rosalea, in mind. She’s now five and her sister Caroline Marie is coming up on her first birthday, which is about how old Rosalea was when we first came here to Crestone. I have friends who say things like, “I would never bring a child into this world,” and I have sympathy with that point of view, only because hope can be a hard thing to sustain in our time. All too often, it seems like we’re headed in the wrong direction on just about every count. But there are ways of looking at things that can be of help.<p> </p>
I read a book called Hunting for Hope in which Scott Russell Sanders responds to his son’s parental critique: “You’re way too negative, Dad.” Scott writes the book in order to identify and name those things that give him hope—like good craftsmanship, like strong families, friendships, and communities, like the regenerative powers of the natural world, and the solace of the Spirit as experienced in silence and solitude. For someone like myself who is prone to slipping into a gloomy place around the directions things seem to be headed, it’s essential to identify and convey those experiences that give us hope. That was certainly part of my intention in this book.<p> </p>
I want to help my kids develop a clear sense of home—both inward and outward, of land and place and belonging to a bigger picture, and of real security that, paradoxically, may involve an attitude of humility and vulnerability, especially as far as prayer and the life of the Spirit are concerned. All of these ideas are topics that I explore in the book.
The final episode of Home, Land, Security really embodies hope for me. I was carrying Rosalea on my back and we were walking past a vulture roost—these turkey vultures come back to roost year after year in some aspens down the way from our house. Not exactly the swallows of Capistrano but I love watching the vultures come home to their trees after a day out scavenging out in the valley and I find some reassurance in the regularity of their migration—gone in October, back in the first week of April. Anyhow, Rosalea and I were walking underneath the vulture roost and a couple of them flew overhead. “Where do you think they’re going?” I asked my daughter.
“To school church, “ she said.
“Where’s that?” I asked.
“It’s out there,” she said, pointing out over the valley, “and it’s where your dreams go when you close your eyes.”
PETER ANDERSON has lived in the American Southwest for twenty-five years, working as a river guide, journalist, teacher, wilderness ranger, and editor. He earned an M.Div. from the Earlham School of Religion, where he subsequently taught writing for several years. He is the author of many books on nature and Spirit. Anderson lives on the Western Slope of the Sangre de Cristo mountain range in Southern Colorado, where he serves as editor for Pilgrimage Magazine and poetry editor for the Mountain Gazette.
First Church of the Higher Elevations: Mountains, Prayer, and Presence
Peter Anderson ISBN: 0-9760729-4-7 Trade Paperback, $15.95
