Speak to Me (Advent) Sunday: Verso L'Alto

Part of the inner world of everyone is this sense of emptiness, unease, incompleteness, 

and I believe that this in itself is a word from God, that this is the sound that 

God's voice makes in a world that has explained him away. 

 -Frederick Buechner, Secrets in the Dark (A Life in Sermons)

Once Upon a Time I climbed a mountain.

I was in Breckenridge, Colorado with three friends and on the third day of our visit, dressed in layers and carrying backpacks, we stood at the beginning of a 3.4 mile hiking trail that went straight up a mountain to Mohawk Lake.

Over dirt trails, rocky crevices, and overgrown roots we climbed up and up. We crossed streams, walked through meadows, and scrambled over logs. We passed other hikers going up and said hello to hikers going back down. We made a wrong turn, which turned our 3.4 miles of going up into 4.2 miles of going up. We were tired. Sometimes it hurt to breathe. During the last mile, the trail turned rocky, the ascent became even steeper, and we weren’t so much hiking as looking for footholds and pulling ourselves up and over large boulders.

Then, after almost four hours of hiking and climbing, after four hours of not being able to see the peak but nevertheless continuing because we knew it was there, after all that time of looking upward as we climbed, we arrived. Finally. And the feeling was indescribable.

There was exuberance, yes, and certainly a feeling of accomplishment. But mostly I felt humbled to have worked, and struggled, and climbed, and sweated in order to finally arrive exactly where we had been heading. And as I caught my breath and drank in the view, I thought of a prayer card I had with a photo of Blessed Pier Giorgio Frassati climbing a mountain with the words, Verso l’Alto, written in the corner.   

These words were scribbled onto a 1925 photograph of Blessed Pier Giorgio Frassati climbing a mountain. Translated literally, verso is a preposition meaning towards and alto is a noun meaning height, but Blessed Pier Giorgio Frassati wasn't referring to the physical act of climbing so much as what we are doing while climbing; in other words, verso l'alto refers to all that we DO while on our spiritual journey as we strive to reach the height of heaven.

So, as I stood on the shores of Mohawk Lake on top of that mountain in Colorado, as I breathed in the crisp mountain air and delighted in the indescribable beauty, I also felt restlessness – a longing for more. I remembered how Carl Frederick Buechner once wrote that the unease (or restlessness) we may feel is the sound God’s voice makes in a world that has explained him away. And that’s why I felt humbled. Because I knew there are more mountains to scale; God is forever calling us to him and in our spiritual journey one can move forward or backward, but one cannot stand still.

We are meant to be heading somewhere; we are meant to strive, and climb, and struggle. We will have moments of rest, but when we rise we will, like the Wise Men following that star, look up and continue climbing …

Verso l’Alto.