Moving Across the Water

Mentally- and in my journal- I have been working for a while on a number of water-related writings. I have written before of Norman Maclean's wonderfully magical line of being "haunted by waters." I, too, am such a person. One of the places where that has been true in the past is the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in northern Minnesota. They are a place of beauty made primal again by human withdrawal from their control. They are a wilderness returned from civilization to the wild. They are a place where soul can be enlivened. But not without work. Soul never is enlivened by sitting and doing nothing.

No, I don't mean some kind of "works" leading to "righteousness. I mean that work of being alive and allowing ourselves to become more alive. God calls us to work out our salvation in "fear and trembling" as Paul puts it. Nowhere have I discovered that more fully than in the Boundary Waters.

The lakes of the Boundary Waters are both the way to move- and the barrier to movement. You have to cross them to get where you want to go. In their reborn wildness they move us backward in time, even as we carry our modern conveniences of freeze-dried food and gas stoves. They move us to primal and primitive emotions.

On one of the trips we were faced on our journey into the wilderness with a howling gale force wind. It howled at and around us as we crossed the last lake of the day- working to stay upright against its own movement. It was a day we should have stayed at the camp. It was our civilized bravado- and perhaps impatience to get out into the wild. It was also dangerous bravado with relentless motion and feeling as if we were going absolutely nowhere.

Then we came to shore- the two of us in our canoe separated from the rest of the group. The two of us pushed into shore, paddling to little avail, afraid, but adrenaline pushing even harder as we fled the wind. We finally got to land- where we humans most surely belong. We rested before the very short journey across an inlet to rejoin our group.

In that was one of those unbroken circles. There was the power of the moving water which can change geography being pushed by the air moving across the waters. I no longer needed to ask why the ancient Hebrew word for Spirit was the same as the word for this fierce wind- ruach. It was this power- and much, much more out of which creation itself was born and is being reborn. Spirit was also in-through-with the water as well. The Spirit moves over the face of the deep forming and reforming- transferring the power of God to the creation.

It's been more than ten years since that wind-blown trip. It has become the stuff of myth. Not untrue, but truer than the facts; deeper than awareness allowed me at the time. At the end of the day - in wordless gratitude - one knew it was well with the soul.

It had to be because you knew that once you were out there, you still had to get back. You will once again have to push the body - against the elements- to make it back to the start. The middle of that trip was fine. Good weather. Good fishing. Good companionship. Good stargazing. But the week was always tempered by the unthought feeling- we have to go back.

Fortunately the wind, while back up was not what it had been on the way in. It took some work, but we were more ready. Isn't it odd, though, that I don't remember the return trip as well. Maybe it was because it ended back in civilized comfort.

Or maybe it was because the journey through the Spirit into the wilderness was what it was all about.