A Fifty-Year Walk

When I was 12 and what happens to boys hadn’t happened to me yet, I loved to walk alone. I would walk five miles down a railroad track to my grandparents’ place or walk seven miles in the opposite direction to a lake I liked to look at, after I had walked to the far corners of our town a half-dozen times that day. It wasn’t beyond me to walk 20 miles without even stopping to think about it, as I haven’t, really, until now.

The places I most liked to walk were outside any sign of habitation—in the carved gap of a railroad line or along a dirt road that led through pastures or corn fields to a woods. When I walked I thought of others who had walked this way before, and the only ones I had heard of who had walked as much as I seemed to walk were the apostles of Jesus Christ (along with Jesus, of course), and a U.S. president who once lived in the area of Illinois where my family was living—Abraham Lincoln.

The place I liked above all to walk was to a woods halfway between my grandparents and the lake I liked, the straight north of those two points, or so it seemed to me then, though its actual direction was west. I strolled toward it along the edge of a road that was such pure sand it was as hard to walk as the sand of an unpacked beach. All along the route hedge apples lay in the sand like limes so bloated that the pebbling of their peels resembled worms locked in molten swirls. You didn’t want to think what the thing was up to. The hedge apples struck the sand like shot puts, and if I kicked one it was almost as heavy and left a gooey sap on my bare toes. Hedgerows crowded the road, growing wild in this place as deserted and hot as the Sahara—the perimeter of a state forest I was headed toward.

Once I had sized up my route for the next mile or so, or to the next hill or curve, I never looked ahead of my feet as I walked. I don’t know why. What flowed past or flew in from the side or swung up to encounter me was more of a surprise that way, I suspect. I partly wanted to be surprised, or safely scared, as boys that age do—a natural scare that never approached the terror I lived with. My mother was dead and had died away from home of a disease I had never been able to fathom or my father had never been able to explain, so I had come to feel that my worst thoughts about her had caused her death.

The latticework of shadow from the hedge-apple rows thickened to trunks and overarching shadows of trees—tall elms still free from the Dutch elm blight—maples, burr oaks all gnarled, horse chestnut, and a dozen other varieties our science teacher had pointed out on a field trip when I was so overwhelmed by the trees themselves I couldn’t take in their names.

But I knew them as well as aunts and uncles from my weekly walks through this state forest that was also becoming a wildlife sanctuary. I felt so much at home I sang as I sang nowhere else, sometimes mere notes that I felt began to reach the tones and patterns of plainsong—this I loved, mixed with incense, as much as anything about the church I attended each week.

“Oh, beautiful trees!” I sang. “Oh, sky above me! Oh, earth beneath my feet!” It was really a shout, blasts of assurance, the same song I sang each time I walked, as if to announce my presence to the elements I addressed—the sky and earth that had seemed to govern my life from its beginning. Then these trees.

I was never afraid or lost my way no matter how many and how varied the routes I took (besides not looking ahead), and I never felt the sense of the absence of my mother that I felt everywhere else. She was born on the plains, far from actual woods, where an individual tree offered shade but too many got in your way and were a bother or threat. I had walked with her in the spaces of the plains and at the edges of woods, the blue-green conifers of Minnesota mostly, and the movement and placement of her limbs as she walked communicated to me a sense of this. But people were made to talk, unlike the spaces of earth (both empty and filled-up) that seemed to want so much to talk they trembled with an omniscience that caused me to listen as I never did with people, not even her.

Now as I sang and walked, matching the words to my right-left pace, I saw rough trunks crowd close, their shadows lying on leaves and needles they had shed, all of this closeness intertwining in a way that caused the light I saw striking my feet to take on substance. The chill of a presence slid over me as if I were shedding leaves myself, and I stopped and looked up.

The patterns of the scribbled multitude of twigs and the matching gaps of designated light matching the movement of the limbs were as much a song or shout as what I sang. This was the earth, these its trees in their multitude of beauty, twigs to branches to trunks, the sky and space brimming with angels and voices that would soon break into appearance or speech. I felt no terror, gripped by a presence of greater substance than my mother’s hand, and tears of laughter leaped out like the appearances and voices that seemed so imminent.

One presence was here, I saw, as I turned with my face raised, in the trees and sky and the earth that supported me as I turned. This presence had put all this in place to teach me about myself and its own qualities and makeup: God. I had been instructed to love Him, but the words of English I knew couldn’t approach the language pouring from everything around with a familiarity that aroused in me a wordless love that for the life of me I couldn’t define. I was given a glimpse of it when I came to read, The Heavens declare the glory of God. … Day unto day utters speech. … There is no speech or language where their voice is not heard. … For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made. … For by Him all things were created that are in heaven and that are on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or principalities or powers. All things were created through Him and for Him. And He is before all things, and in Him all things consist.

Here were two languages put partly into English, and what they stated in the language I partly knew was so unimaginable—especially that last phrase—that I’m jolted from the trees and left flat-footed in the present. As I studied the statement, I found it has been so seldom touched upon by any portion of official Christendom you would think it doesn’t exist. And the more I studied it and turned it every which way, it still persisted in saying, in Him all things consist. How could I reconcile this with my present-day understanding of nature, pragmatic and tone-deaf—my hard-heartedness toward grass and trees and birds and fish and beasts and bracken and oceans and the stormy wind that He says fulfills His word? Lopped off from that boy who hadn’t learned to reason and didn’t pay any more attention to his body and its developments (or so far, anyway) than the developed creation around him, I seem farther from the truth of the actual words of that statement than those who worshiped trees and imaginary or real spirits trapped inside them.

And those who practiced that missed the truth that this statement, and all the others before it, also teach: it’s more than trees or the spirits trapped in them, when you understand that they are communications of Christ.

Carefully and with the greatest accuracy I may write a description of my favorite six-foot patch of nature or, if my spirit is feeling expansive, my favorite ten acres, and if anyone who reads it afterward doesn’t sense in the description some hidden attributes of God that we are told exist but try to deny because they do not fit with the rationalism that enlightened thinking (rather than the language of God) has brought to us, then our description is a failure in His face.

Language was given to return to Him the sort of language He proclaims to us, when we normally hear only if we’re surrounded by stereo equipment.

On some days, if I lie for hours on the ground or crawl on my belly through grass or weeds or walk into a forest where I might get lost and lie down and take a nap and then wake—on those days I sense voices clamoring from all sides as they did when I went walking in the woods. Do you ever roll in new-mown grass and feel the reek of its greenness fill your nostrils until it seems your nose will bleed and then realize that the reeking is the blood of grass, or something more astonishing than your grip on language has been able to grasp?

There are times when, with a warning in my legs of a spongy weakness, the earth is revealed as molecular—able to give way at any second—and every gesture and word formed and even every thought is being weighed and measured (right foot, left foot) on shifting scales that are accurate to every millimeter of infinity. The giving earth itself is His handiwork, and my treading on it is communicated through a network so complex that even our mightiest computers can’t begin to estimate its effect. I sense this and tend to rest on its evidence even when it’s unseen.

This is faith. In whom do I have faith? In God. Where is God? Everywhere.

That’s what I learned in the English language.

Then why don’t I bump into Him or step on Him?

I do, in a sense, but wouldn’t know it if He appeared in front of me, since I so seldom acknowledge that.

If God is everywhere, it’s as Spirit that He is. This is the age of the Spirit He has given the World through His Son, and even though the world came into being for that purpose, the world does not know Him or recognize Him or receive Him or the message that the handiwork of His world continues to communicate in every detail we take in.

A glimpse of this was given to a poet who had suffered the rigors of the Gulag and was trying to read an anthology of modern English poetry with his faulty command of the language. He says,

I remember sitting there in the small wooden shack, peering through the square, porthole-size window at the wet, muddy, dirt road with a few stray chickens on it, half believing what I’d just read, half wondering whether my grasp of English wasn’t playing tricks on me. I had there a veritable boulder of an English-Russian dictionary, and I went through its pages time and again, checking every word, every allusion, hoping that they might spare me the meaning that stared at me from the page. I guess I was simply refusing to believe that way back in 1939 an English poet had said, “Time … worships language,” and yet the world around was still what it was.

This is Joseph Brodsky, the Nobel laureate, and he wanted to make clear the effect on him of that distilled statement from W. H. Auden’s “In Memory of W. B. Yeats”—time worships language. Brodsky abhorred artifice and sham and was so attuned to language, and especially the language of the Bible, that he saw Auden’s statement as so revolutionary it should have altered the known world. Time is the lesser compatriot to language and so time, whom many of us personify and revere as a god, bows to language. With language people build adornments that will last while time merely passes away—just as God, through a poured-out language, the breath of His mouth, He says, formed worlds that endure and will last for eternity. A Russian poet grasped this on first sight under straitened conditions, but it flies past most of us—with the thrumming beat and glide of a flicker, I hope; the bird, I mean, with its yellow-gold ribs and that flash of red you can’t miss.

When I remember how I drew in as if in gulps the words of Brodsky as he explained the struggle he underwent toward his transformation, I can see my feet moving through the woods and hear the words of the song I shout. The words were given to me, and just as Brodsky, arriving by the labored steps of an unfamiliar language to the understanding that transformed him, could not believe the world had remained the same, so I once suffered in a smaller sense. When I set down “I feel a pressure behind and turn and there are the cottonwoods and willows at the far end of the street, along the edge of the lake, flying the maidenhair faces of their leaves into the wind, and beyond their crowns of trembling insubstantiality, across the lake dotted with cottonwood pollen, the blue and azure plain abuts against the horizon at infinity”—when I set that down, as it arrived on its own, I knew I would never be the same. It was a period when the balancing scales beneath me were jiggling so much I was sure they would give way, and my search became a desire to rest, as if on a tree, on Him.

But I forget and become deadened, as I think I’ve said, and walk around whispering, Sure, God’s everywhere, that’s why my life’s so wonderful—this in a detached and abstract cynicism so bitter it could burn holes in the air. When I reached a moment like that once again, a year ago, my wife said, “Will you pray, please?” Sure, I thought, sure, I’ll pray, and lit into a prayer with such anger a hole indeed appeared to burn open to the presence I’d forgotten or abandoned, and I felt the ladder that Jacob had dreamed, with angels ascending and descending on it, appear. The pure power of the Spirit poured down on me with such force that prayers for my wife and children, who had gathered, were pressed from me as prayer had never been pressed before in 50 years, and when I looked up I felt I was seeing each of my family for the first time, transformed.

They were clearly in Him, as I was, or more than I. They had waited for this confirmation, it seemed, and I had been too cautious and rational and bitter (if I could have explained my state in words) to give in to that presence mightier than Time.

I went to bed. It was all I could do. But in bed I couldn’t sleep. The pressure that had once caused me to turn in recognition of a horizon exerted a fraction of its real weight, as I sensed, and I couldn’t move. I lay underneath it—a molecular current containing, yet revivifying me—and every petty act of mine was an electron above an abyss in the magnificence of the current that kept flowing through and out of me.

I couldn’t move for hours. Everyone I had hated or could not forgive appeared over the night, not so I could see them, but I sensed the presence of each one and knew who it was and was astonished and grieved at the smallness of my hate in the weighty glory of the forgiveness I was receiving. Tears sprang from my eyes as they had in the woods and I was lodged so close to joy I felt that if this was the end, so be it. And it was the end in one way, perhaps (you will find me as unforgiving and petty as always, I suspect, the next time we meet), because I understood I was being called to rise up and walk.

I couldn’t move but had to, and once I was out of bed and made it from the room, barely (never waking my wife; she never woke this whole night), I slowly ground around the perimeter of two small rooms and a hall, my pacing grounds, and was given a partial sense of bearing in a body the weight of glory for those steps, all I could bear. I realized I had been prepared for this by that sense of pressure, the turn to a new horizon, but even more by those walks in the woods where I watched my feet lit by the sun as I listened to a language leaping past time and entering me in a beginning I couldn’t begin to explain, or wouldn’t have been able to, until I sat down and re-entered that fifty-year-old walk.

Larry Woiwode is a founder of the Beth-El Institute for Arts and Sciences in Carson, North Dakota, where he currently teaches. This article appears in slightly different form in Things in Heaven and Earth, edited by Harold Fickett. Copyright 1998 by Paraclete Press. Used by permission of Paraclete Press, P.O. Box 1568, Orleans, MA 02653.