Saturday night I was in my tent in the Pine Top Campground, just off the Bush Mountain Trail in the Guadalupe Mountains, thinking about the afternoon. I was backpacking with John and Thomas and Pete, and we had exhausted ourselves hauling our heavy packs up to Pine Top. In fact, as soon we set up our tents, all four of us went straight to ground and slept for an hour. At least we were scattered around the campground enough we couldn’t hear each other snoring.
Earlier that morning as we were driving to the mountains in my pickup, John asked the three of us, “Why do you guys go to church?�
I said something like, “I go because I always have and I don’t know any other way to live.� It was the best I could do while concentrating on driving.
So sitting in my tent reading by headlamp, I could still remember the excellent supper cooked by Pete: spaghetti with peppers, onions, tomatoes, and black olives. It was wonderful. It was much better than the trail mix and energy bars I usually eat when I’m up here by myself.
I was reading from a book by Kathleen Norris titled “Dakota.� She’s one of my favorite writers: a poet who surprisingly returned to religion late in her life. She wrote, “Like many Americans of my baby boom generation, I had thought that religion was a constraint that I had overcome by dint of reason, learning, artistic creativity, sexual liberation.�
During an earlier reading of this same book, I’d written in the margin: “I saw religion as a gift, a purpose, an obligation.�
Unlike Norris, I don’t think I ever chafed against the constraints of religion, even when I was young and rebellious. I remember going to church a lot, and the vast majority of my friends came through church or band, religion or music.
And even through the hippie years of the 1970’s I never had much of a rebellious period that you would’ve noticed. What little rebelling I did showed up in the length of my hair. In high school I kept my hair as long, usually a bit longer, than the dress code allowed. I remember my dad asking me, “Have you noticed there are a few modern hairstyles around that aren’t quite as long?� But he never pushed more than that, which was smart, since having that hair seemed to meet the demands of my adolescent angst … such as it was. As soon as I got out of high school and entered junior college I grew my hair out longer. I kept it long all through college, until I started interviewing for engineering jobs.
But I went to church, and kept my church friends, all through high school and junior college, and even during my three years at the University of Oklahoma. It seemed natural to me.
I don’t write this to tell what a good boy I was. I don’t remember feeling I was all that good at the time, or obedient. Any credit for how I lived goes to my parents and my grandparents. They instilled in me a relationship to church that never came with guilt or sense of burden or restraint. It never felt smothering or confining. For me, religion felt natural and peaceful. It felt like home.
So when I read Norris’ description of her return to religion I could barely relate. And that’s one of the reasons I enjoy reading books by Christians who came to God later in life; it’s so different from my own experience, and I want to understand how it happened for them.
And so, sitting in my tent at Pine Top, I realized how I should have answered John’s question. I should have said, “I go to church because it brings joy and purpose and depth and richness to my life.� Left on my own, I’m afraid I would live a trail-mix-and-energy-bar life; but going along the journey with fellow believers, with fellow church members, well, the experience has proved much richer, and much deeper.
I was already looking forward to our next night at Pine Top when Thomas was planning to cook jambalaya. Are these great guys, or what? Traveling in community is a good thing.
