The eCrozier

Jon Katz in his delightful book, Running to the Mountain, tells of his midlife crisis. He didn’t belong to any faith tradition (he was born Jewish), but he was experiencing a spiritual longing to which he wanted to respond. So, he decided to buy a cabin on top of a remote mountain in upstate New York, live there, and find what he was looking for, or at least do his best to do so. To do this, he had to leave his (clearly quite supportive) wife, teenaged daughter, and his home in suburban New Jersey. He “ran” to the mountain with the collected works of the monk, Thomas Merton, and his two Labrador Retrievers, Julius and Stanley.

The mountaintop experience turned out to be far more challenging than he had imagined it would. He dealt with a bitter, cold winter, battled a mice infestation in his cabin, and struggled with personal isolation. He also discovered a truth about his dogs. He’d always thought that Stanley & Julius had been well trained. In suburbia they were models of obedience. He could take them walking off-leash on the hiking trails near his suburban home and they would always stay at his side. But on the mountain, he discovered they began to return to the wild. They would run after anything that held the promise of being food. He’d call them, but they wouldn’t come if they were on the scent of something to eat. This was a great shock to Katz. His dogs had become different animals once they were removed from the disciplined context of their lives.

Now we aren’t Labrador Retrievers. The Bible does call us sheep and we have enough in common with both Labs and sheep for this story to resonate with us. We know that when we walk away from our disciplines of prayer, worship, and service with our fellow disciples, we begin to lose touch with our identity and purpose in Christ. Now, we may not walk away. We may inch away. We may slide slowly away. And we may even do all these things without even realizing they’re happening.

There’s a story told of two men walking down a crowded, noisy city street. In the midst of the noise of horns blaring, people screaming, and jackhammers chewing up pavement, one of the men stops walking and says: “Did you hear a cricket chirping?” The other man says: “What? Are you crazy? Who could hear a cricket in all this racket?” Without saying a word, the first man took a quarter out of his pocket threw it up in the air, and then stood back to see what happened. The quarter bounced on the sidewalk and then came to rest. Immediately, people stopped walking and looked for the coin. The first man smiled saying: “We hear what we want to hear.”

People hear what they want to hear. If we lose touch with the disciplines of prayer, worship, and service, then I’m certain we will find ourselves listening to other voices that are all too ready to tell us what we want to hear, rather than what we need to hear. So, whom are we listening to these days? Are we listening to the Scriptures, are we humbly listening to that other person who has a word for us, are we listening to God’s grace imparted in the Sacraments? It’s so easy to get distracted away from God’s love and grace. Our spiritual disciplines keep us near the side of Jesus.

+Scott