Desire of the Everlasting Hills
In the summer of 2021, we took our children to see mountains. I plotted a route, a nearly 4,000-mile loop from mid-Michigan, stretching out to Rocky Mountain National Park and including an extended stay at my parents’ home in New Mexico. It would mean at least sixty hours for our family of six in our Blu-ray-playerless, haggard Honda Odyssey.
“Enjoy this pilgrimage and time with family,” our parish school principal wrote, after I notified him that we’d be leaving a week before the end of the school year. His response caught me off guard. I love planning trips—the more audacious the itinerary, the better—and was relishing the chance to escape the year’s worth of COVID drama, as well as see family and friends after the imposed separation of shutdowns. The assumption that we were loading our children, including a three-year-old whom we quickly learned travels terribly, into a minivan for spiritual reasons glanced off me as I turned my attention to packing lists and hotel reservations.
Then, a couple of weeks into our time in New Mexico, we decided to take on a bigger hiking challenge than the two- or three-mile treks we had anticipated with young children. My husband and I took our two oldest, aged ten and nearly nine, up a tram to the ridgeline of the Sandia Mountain range that looms over Albuquerque. We caught one of the first cars of the morning, trading the quickly warming desert at the foothills for the crisp air above 10,000 feet, gaped at the city and empty land sprawled below, then pointed the kids to the trailhead leading seven miles down.
It’s not hard to understand why the Ancestral Puebloans who settled in this part of the Rio Grande Valley considered the Sandias sacred. From the ground looking up, they remind me of the Mt. Sinai Charlton Heston ascends in The Ten Commandments, a formidable presence rising altar-like out of the flat desert. Driving east towards the mountains, across the Sandia reservation, there is nothing else to command your attention so fully—the range fills your vision and silently demands a response. A couple evenings before our hike, we were driving by the foothills, and the sun’s golden hour drew the colors, spires, and folds of canyon edges into such sharp relief I felt I either needed to turn my eyes or else let them fill with tears in order to hold in the sight.
Still, despite my easy awe towards the mountains from below, I hadn’t considered how their resounding presence would be felt from the top, as well. As we started our descent—packs heavy with water, hearts still light in the cool air (my son had even snuck a joke book into his satchel)—I suddenly realized that the ridgeline was vibrantly green. In a reverse of the bare, stone-capped Rocky Mountain “Fourteeners” to the north, the mountain crest here was teeming with forest life; the harsh and arid landscape was below. Towering spruce, fir and pine trees enclosed us in their shadows, their needles carpeting the trail. Clumps of wildflowers—columbine, iris, and many more I didn’t know—adorned the rugged cliff faces like offerings in a pilgrim’s niche.
At one point, we stopped and gazed at the steep, dazzling emerald of the eastern slope before it plummets into sheer ravines. How does this vastness exist? Who are we, these small creatures with our even smaller children, to be picking our way through this corner of the earth’s foundation? And over the next mile or so, we prayed a Rosary aloud, pausing to let other hikers pass, and feeling something like pilgrims.
For the rest of our stay out West, the switch stayed flipped, and I began taking in nature in a way that reminded me of my semester as a backpacking undergrad trekking around Europe’s cathedrals, gazing wide-eyed at flying buttresses and star-spangled ceilings. That fall, my nineteen-year-old self had learned to be a pilgrim. The road required a certain posture, an openness and docility to being led or shown things that were true. To linger at side chapels and tuck my prayers into the candlelit alcove of a minor saint, to feel the weight of centuries of pilgrims before me, kneeling in these same, worn spaces seeking clarity or mercy, to find in holy places—whether a UNESCO heritage site or a roadside shrine—familiar touchstones in a strange land.
Now, whether I was guiding my three-year-old through the ankle-deep water of a canyon in the Jemez Mountains or shivering with my family in the thin air of the Rockies, I felt my heart copying the motions of a pilgrim fingering her rosary beads. I was grasping for something to hold on to, something solid I could feel between my fingers and draw comfort from—a promise of home.
Whether I knew it at the beginning or not, I did carry a pilgrim’s intention into our road trip West. A few weeks before we left, we had found ourselves on the receiving end of public derision from someone we trusted, a sweeping judgment that caught us off guard with its willingness to scapegoat, ridicule, and egg on others to do the same. It took place within the context of our church, a community we loved dearly and had striven to hold tight to during the pandemic, even as the same fault lines that split the world made their way into the pews. Before we left, we’d come to a fragile place of forgiveness and reconciliation—
possible only by grace, I realized in the moment—but it still hurt. Our sense of belonging, of being at rest and at home and safe in this corner of the Church, was still shattered.
A couple weeks before that, I’d learned of and written about a horrific case of clerical abuse at my proudly Catholic alma mater, and I was still awash in messages and phone calls relating to it. At one point, women were contacting me almost nightly to share their own experiences and to discuss allegations of spiritual and sexual misconduct and abuse in connection with the school and some priests who served there. I didn’t think I held any illusions that any Church institution is perfect, but this was overwhelming. Angry and fumbling for words in confession during our trip, I said something along the lines of, “burn it down,” and the priest, sympathetic but caught off guard, urged me to remember the good the Church has brought into the world.
That didn’t really take, if you can believe it, and I started looking for solace in the natural world instead. I didn’t want to be in church, so, as cliché as it sounds, I went to the mountains, and dragged my children along with me. In New Mexico, it doesn’t take long to realize how thirsty your eyes are to soak in the color green. That was me that summer, not just for the life-giving shades of green, but for all instances of natural beauty I could snatch to my heart and pour into my ache like a salve.
Hildegard of Bingen (who held nothing back in her own scathing letters condemning corruption and abuse in the medieval Church) often referred to what she termed viriditas—something like a greening, invigorating force that infused growing things and was reflective of, connected to, the healing and generative power of God. I remember times in college when I would sit in front of the tabernacle of our dorm chapel, whispering my desire to be shaped by the Divine Presence. Now I just wanted to sit at the foot of the mountains and wait—to be comforted, reassured, strengthened, or all of the above, I don’t even know. I just knew where I was drawn.
Was this a pagan impulse? Was my “I Went to the Southwest Desert and Found the Divine” summer just another terribly appropriative deconstruction narrative of an American Christian millennial? I don’t think so. I did keep going to Mass. The mountains, canyons, rolling Kansas prairies and Colorado night sky floodlit by the full moon were heralds of God’s existence, no more and no less than Bernini’s imposing saints above St. Peter’s Square. But God, they seemed gentler. Even amid their dangers—dehydration, falls, heat stroke, hypothermia, wild animals—they spoke of their creator in a way I needed, without being filtered through the hands and mouths of those who mar everything they touch. One late afternoon hike, we found ourselves urging our children to move faster towards the end of a trail—the sun was setting faster than we expected, we’d seen a huge snake earlier, and we were suddenly hyperaware of how defenseless and prey-like the children were to predators likely stirring from their lairs. Still, as day began transitioning to murky dusk, the play of the dying sunlight on the tall grass and mountain creek felt like a gift. The Lord of nature is both terrible and gracious. We were blessed to pass through.
As a teenage pilgrim years ago, I learned to pose questions to the sites that struck me. In Poland: Why has this icon of Mary called to barefoot pilgrims for centuries? What do these desiccated breadcrumbs—saved by priests in concentration camps and molded into a tiny paten so they could secretly celebrate the Eucharist—mean to me, the college girl so easily distracted at Mass? In Rome: What threads connect me to these bones under St. Peter’s Basilica?
In turn, the wild places of my 2021 pilgrimage posed assertions to me.
In the slot canyon in Jemez, watching my husband lead our delighted youngest by the hand against the mighty backdrop of volcanic rock carved for millennia by the water she now splashed through: It is good to feel little.
In the early morning air of the Sandia ridgeline, listening to my son tell jokes at the top of the world: It is good to be light.
Even in the crowded trails of Rocky Mountain National Park, treading well-worn paths with a host of fellow, awestruck hikers: It is good to journey with other pilgrims along the way.
The day we hiked down the Sandias was the Solemnity of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. I’d never given much thought to that particular devotion—it always conjured saccharine images of flower-wreathed, wounded hearts on holy cards, like an antique Valentine, but with blood—but I’d recently discovered the Litany to the Sacred Heart, a prayer scrapped together by French religious since the 1600s. The titles attributed to Christ’s Heart mystified me: “House of God and Gate of Heaven,” “Our peace and reconciliation,” “Desire of the everlasting hills.” I pondered that last one as we painstakingly threaded our way through boulder fields that seemed to never end. Jesus said the rocks of the Mount of Olives would cry out praise if man was silent. What would the Sandia Mountains say for me? Could their yearning for the heart of heaven carry me, this out-of-shape hiker with my own bruised heart, with its reach?
Like all pilgrimages, this one eventually turned towards home. The three-year-old was crying herself to sleep in each new bed on the road—clearly, a pandemic-era child who’d spent half her life at home. And so, back to sea level. My oldest immediately got COVID. Relationships were still strained, and the physical act of coming to church and returning to sit among community was exhausting. The camaraderie I felt with strangers on the trail—fellow seekers of transcendence—was replaced with weary apprehension towards people I’ve welcomed into my home. Did they know my hurt? Were they among those who laughed at it or encouraged it?
What do the everlasting hills have to say here, this sanctuary carpeted in faded beige?
There was never a magic resolution. Summer gave way to a new school year, and I kept learning the hard way that grace makes community possible, but not easy. As we tried to pick up the pieces of the relationship that’d sent us literally packing, I was struck by this person’s humility, openness to critique, and willingness to admit wrongdoing and to repent—something I still found notably absent in the scandals plaguing the Church in general. Real disagreements remained, but I grabbed at the goodwill I could find as a thread of good faith and hope of healing—not just individually, but hope that if we could be reconciled, other pieces of our shattered society could as well.
Worshipping in the liturgy slowly became a balm. I started attending morning school Masses and found myself leaning on the faith of elementary students in the same way I wanted to rest my heart against the mountains out West. Their earnest voices, singing even the most repetitive choruses like Lord I need You/Oh, I need You/Every hour I need You, were gentle to pray with and honed my attention to the altar. I began to recognize marks of childlike faith in others—a fierce yet tender courage to embrace the Cross and remain in Christ’s Church, knowing even better than children what that entails—and I clung to them, too.
The Litany of the Sacred Heart invokes Jesus’s Heart in its most wounded and vulnerable state as the fixed point upon which everything else turns: the ordering of the cosmos, the unseen, vivifying grace that permeates and sustains us, even our cries for peace, healing, and reconciliation.
In the liturgy, I began to feel this like a taut wire pulling me towards a center, its vibrations resonating past all my walls of stubbornness, pride, anger, and doubts. In the most majestic places I’ve ever stood, I can feel my entire body longing to grasp the beauty before me and hold it close. This is impossible, of course, and the most creation offers me is to fill my vision, like that sunset drive towards the Sandias that made me want to cry. But at a weekday Mass, I merely open my mouth and receive. The center has a Name. It has a Body, and a Heart.
The everlasting hills, which are, in fact, not eternal, taught me that summer how to stay. Because the Church not only welcomes me in my longing, it has the audacity to give me something in return. The cathedral of the natural world, even with its star-splayed sky, forested buttresses, and millennia-old foundations, embraces me in its nave and dies slowly along with me. Somehow, in the middle of a carpeted sanctuary, I’m given something more.