Shepherds of the Delectable Mountains
I want to take a moment to speak of two lives in retirement. Both from New England. The first is John Mack, A UCC minister retiring in 2007 at age sixty-five. The paster of my church here in Washington for all of the nearly twenty years I've been a member until last summer. He was originally from Connecticut. His dream for retirement was to begin a second portion of work as an educator, a children's author, to hike in the mountains of Nepal. This was a man who held a retirement morning jog with his parishioners rather than a traditional dinner. The actual course of events was tragically brief. Hiking in the foothills of Mt. Everest he came down with pneumonia. Fearing his occasion for travel would be lost he pushed on towards base camp. This lead to high altitude pulmonary edema. After stays in hospitals in Nepal and New Delhi, over the holidays, there came a quickly arranged homecoming
First Congregation Church Washington DC - News. The other is John Shaw my grandfather, A minister retiring from the methodist church in Manchester Connecticut in 1975. Originally he was from from Vermont. His dream for retirement was traveling across America by motor-home. Even by the time he retired this possibility of adventure was replaced by attention to my grandmother who slide inextricably into Alzheimer's. During this period while I was off in the Navy he dutifully cared for her and spent his spare hours in consolation working for her brother (uncle Carl) and uncle Mason, who died only earlier this year
Hartman, 81; hired seniors to sustain his business
By Peter DeMarco, Globe Correspondent | June 19, 2007, at their small company in Needham; Vita Needle . It wasn't what he had hoped for and while never a frail man at all he died only a few winters later.
The balance of work against retirement is a cautionary tale. A vocation is a calling. It comes capitalized and uncapitalized. Avocation: a calling away. You could say one is your life's labor and the other your life's love. The soul mate of your endeavor. I've never heard anyone explain convincingly why they should be different, only many to say they they often will be. I suppose it is that one you must have and the other you only desire. In between tiny useless moments of exemption, from chore and duty we call vacation, but essentially life is in yoke. Any path followed where some weight or duty is taken on, a true calling where there is no calling away, brings strong desire to examine the fields and bypaths to the sides. The unburdened respite. Here we pile our dreams.
My grandfather had time to read which many do not have - you need to read to write sermons every week. He loved weekends at the summer house in Pocassett, but he longed to travel across the America he saw becoming a great nation through the century. He wanted to witness for himself the truth of its parts and breadth. There is a story within the family that after the war he had an opportunity to take up a methodist position in the Philippines for a few years but my grandmother nixed it, too unsettled. She had no need to ever leave New England. Like many, like John Mack, my grandfather set his sense of greater adventure and wonder aside until the burden could be safely set down and he could retire from the glare of duties spotlight. I exist in a state of avacation. The pathless life uncalled, but not without its second rate toil. Like the line in the Teenage Fanclub Song 'Everything Flows' from their album A Catholic Education I'll never know which way to flow, set a course that I don't know... I have no where, in particular, to go. No thing, to do. There is nothing behind me that impels me towards anything. No great preparation in my life. I am immersed in everydayness, and offer only that I take notes. I was upbraided (I suppose that would be the word) recently (TN!) for giving the impression of disdaining travel (and ambition). I don't believe I disdain travel so much as I admit to a touch of indifference, and of the delicate circumstances for delight in it. I took her admonition and signed the confession. I came across a quote not long after from the Bishop of Hippo: "The World is a book, and those who do not travel read only a page."
"St Augustine: (The world is a book...") As I read that I recalled another: "People travel to wonder at the height of the mountains, at the huge waves of the seas, at the long course of the rivers, at the vast compass of the ocean, at the circular motion of the stars, and yet they pass by themselves without wondering."
St Augustine: ("People Travel...") Travel, it seemed after I took the harmony of these thoughts, is best done as part of a journey already set out on.
The image of the Delectable Mountains, which I named this piece for, comes to us from the english writer John Bunyan. His
The Pilgrim's Progress. I recalled these mountains from a sermon John Mack preached some years ago. He was considering the pastoral life and reflecting on Loren Mead's book
The shepherds of the delectable mountains : the story of the Washington County Mission Program [WorldCat.org] at the time.
Delectable mountains is also, of course, a traditional quilting pattern
The Delectable Mountains Pattern & its History . One of repeating peaks and valleys that takes its form and name from Bunyan while evoking frontier America. In Bunyan the Delectable Mountains are Immanuel's Land
The Pilgrim's Progress (Gutenburg etext). One of the final stations on the way before the celestial city. A place of primitive delights. Of heights physical and spiritual and the sense of empowerment and danger they lend. The allusion is to Isaiah a vision of a wild deserted land of briars, bee's, grazing cattle and sheep with only curds and honey to eat. There are four shepherds that Bunyan has keep watch in these mountains: Knowledge Experience Watchful and Sincere. Their names speak to a lifetime's worth of dedication and service. In the peaks of the mountains are metaphoric dangers. The hill of error. The mountain that is caution, by there leads a path directly to the Doubting Castle. A door in the side of another hill is the hypocrites by-way to hell. Finally there is a high hill called clear where one can see to the gates of the Celestial City. The community for Bunyan comes down King's Highway one by one or at most by two as wayfarers fall in together, and they come torn from society they left which is never more than Vanity Fair or the City of Destruction. Life is this continuous lonely journey. They do not gather, they do not covenant with each other. Life's journey is held as an individual struggle. It does not need to be cast so starkly. This is what John Mack preached for twenty years. The shepherds complement each other by turns. The people covenant together. The well arranged community shares its cares and burdens, and arranges respite by full and fair measure. In this is arrival.
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Addendum 15 January 2008. John Mack died this morning.
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