That Audacious Hope

Why I'm Not Giving Up On Humanity Yet...And Neither Should You

“Faith is not the clinging to a string but an endless pilgrimage of the heart. Audacious longing, burning songs, daring thoughts, an impulse overwhelming the heart, usurping the mind — these are all a drive towards serving Him who rings our hearts like a bell.” — Abraham Heschel

I remember clearly the day on the mountain I thought I might die. 

I stood on a barren slope, more than twelve thousand feet up, shivering from cold, and soaked to the bone. Blinding bursts of lightning exploded all around me, so close the bright scent of ozone assaulted my nostrils and the hair on the back of my neck stood on edge. My whole body hummed like a charged metal rod, beckoning the lightning to ride my bones into the rain-soaked earth. Being well above timberline, there were no trees for miles in any direction. No rock outcroppings beneath which I or my companions could hide. No cover of any kind. Just endless waves of undulating mountains, laid bare below the heavy black blanket of clouds that had pounded the slopes with rain for days. There was nowhere we could run, but by that point we couldn’t run anyway. We were too exhausted. Even if we could have run, I had no clue which way to go. 

We were lost. And we were in danger.

It was meant to be a six-day backcountry hike. I had planned the whole thing, and invited a group of men from out of state to join me. Most of them had never been on a multi-day backpacking trek like this before, and I was excited for them to experience the grandeur and pristine beauty of the Colorado high country. I chose to take us through the Weminuche, the largest wilderness area in Colorado, and in the lower forty-eight states. The route I plotted carved through a relatively small corner of its grandness, but it was still many miles away from anything resembling civilization, or connectivity, or assistance of any kind. We were very much on our own — which was, of course, the point. 

I hadn’t expected rain on this trek. There’d been none forecasted beyond a stray shower or two, which was always to be expected in the high country in the summer. But the rains that came were nothing like that. 

They started the very first afternoon, when an ominous bank of clouds crested a sawtooth ridge to the west and rumbled our direction. Within a half hour they had blotted out the sun. A half hour after that, the rain began to fall. 

It did not stop falling for the next three days.

If you’ve never experienced rain in the high country before, let me tell you: It is painfully cold. Air temperatures vary wildly at those altitudes in the summer, and while it can be pleasantly warm when the sun is shining, the temperature can easily dip below freezing at night. The rains, however, are always frigidly cold, like the waters that flow off a glacier. It’s never pleasant to get caught in a high-altitude rainstorm. It’s also never safe.

We had to make camp in the rain that night. And the next night. And the next. Keeping our gear dry was nearly impossible, and once it was wet, there was no way to dry it. The same went for our clothes. By the second day nearly all of us were sloshing around in our boots and our jackets, groaning under the burden of our waterlogged packs, shivering even as we continued to sweat from the exertion of lugging them up and down the muddy slopes. 

Hypothermia, I knew, was a serious danger, so I did my best to keep the men moving, to keep their minds occupied with tasks and responsibilities so they didn’t think about the cold. But by the third day, despair was beginning to fray at our edges. Some of the guys were peeling off from the group, either falling behind from exhaustion or charging ahead in their manic need for relief. I wrangled them together, and set up new rules, assigning each a man to keep in his eye line, so no man could wander off by himself.

The rains had carved dozens of new streams into the barren slopes, all but erasing the trail in their enterprise, and the sun was lost somewhere in the grey shroud overhead. But I still had a map and a compass, and when the fog wasn’t too thick, enough light to see, and I thought if we could just keep moving in the right direction, eventually we’d come to a cairn or a signpost that would orient us again and get us back on track.

But then around noon on the third day the thunder came, and the lightning began. The moment the first strike hit, I knew we needed to get off the mountain. I don’t know if you’ve ever experienced lightning that close, but once you do, you’ll never forget it. You feel the electricity build in the air before it strikes. Your ears whine. The sharp scent of ozone fills your nostrils. Your skin tingles, like you’re standing in a river of electric current. Then everything goes blinding white, and there’s a boom like nothing you’ve ever felt. It flashes through your whole body, like it’s happening inside you, or like you aren’t even there. You suddenly feel small and hopelessly fragile. Everything just blanks out for few seconds. You can’t think, or see, or hear, or move. Somewhere in the back of your mind, you wonder if you got hit. Then it passes, and you come to your senses. Then all you want to do is run like hell.

But I couldn’t run. I had to stay calm, or at least pretend to be. I had to lead the others out of this mess. It was on me. I had to find a way through. I had to figure it out. That’s what I told myself, anyway.

As I checked in with the guys, I could hear the panic in their voices: “We need to move.” “What are we going to do?” “We have to get out of here!” “What now?"

It was too much. In that moment, all I wanted was to escape. To run away. To hide. To be anywhere else but right there and then. Why was all this happening? How did I get it all so wrong? I thought I knew what I was doing. I had completed many multi-day treks before this point. I knew how to plan them, what to prepare for, what to pack, how to be safe. How could I have missed the forecast so badly? Except I didn’t; I knew I didn’t! I checked it at least twenty times before we embarked. Why was the forecast so far off? I felt like a fool for trusting it, and a failure for letting the guys down. But mostly, in that moment, I was just so damn mad at the world. This was not how things were supposed to go. I had done my part. I had cleared all the contingencies. I had prepared the crap out of this trip! I had been diligent. I had done all the right things. But none of it mattered. It was all for nothing. The world just went and jacked it all up anyway.

I have returned to that moment on the mountain a lot in recent weeks. I think it’s because I’m having a lot of similar feelings about the world right now to those I had back then. Collectively speaking, it feels like we’ve all been trying to hike through these wild, unknown lands for quite a while now. Maybe they’re beautiful, maybe they’re not. We can’t tell either way because all we’ve experienced these last several years is just one devastating storm after another. Pandemic. Political Division. Climate Change. Economic Distress. Geopolitical Unrest. Violence. War. The maps and waypoints we have historically relied upon to tell us where we are and which way we need to go — religion, government, education, culture — have all failed us. The very heart of friendship and community has been hijacked by the false connections of our social media landscape. We don’t trust one another anymore. We don’t even believe in the same reality anymore. 

Somehow we have wandered far off the trail. Now we are lost, with no idea how to find our way home.

But, it wasn’t supposed to be like this. 

Look, I know there are evil people in the world. I know not everyone has good intentions. But I believe the vast majority of us are honestly doing the best we can every day. We get up in the morning and we try hard to do the right thing. We show up every day. We put in the work. We do our part to try to keep our lives going, and not hurt anyone in the process.

But right now, it feels like none of it matters. None of it will make any difference in the end. Because no matter what we do, or how good our intentions are, or how hard we try, this jacked-up world is going to force its way in and jack it all up anyway.

We think we have to fix this mess we’re in now. But nobody knows how. Lots of smart people are tossing out ideas of what to do, but nobody really has the whole picture, so none of their ideas really make sense. Our lives are caught up in these impossibly complicated webs of cause and effect, the impacts of which are actually what’s destroying us. But nobody knows how to untangle it all, or do anything different. So we just stand there dumbfounded, feeling angry and hopeless, while the lightning keeps striking all around us.

But there’s something beneath all of that that most of us are ignoring; something that I believe deserves our full collective attention as a people.

We need to acknowledge — to ourselves and to one another — just how deeply heartbroken we all feel. 

Why does this matter? 

Because now our heartbreak has become our common ground.

Whatever our politics, religion, ethnicity, finances, or any other metric by which the machine may parse our humanity, all of our hearts are breaking right now. We all share a similar grief, this deep ache in our bones that we cannot quite name. It is the loss of a disappointed dream: The dream of who we might have been as a people, of what we might yet be able to become, if we could only find a way.

If you want to know my dream for us as a nation, it’s simply this: That instead of railing against each other in our fear and anger, we actually begin to share with one another the heartbreak we all feel over our disappointed dreams. 

Heartbreak, after all, is not a place of weakness, but of fresh possibility.

"Your heart is made to break; its purpose is to burst open again and again so that it can hold evermore wonders.” — Andrew Harvey

We needed to get down the mountain, and we needed to do it right then. But the slopes around us were steep and treacherous, made even more so from all the rain. We were all exhausted, which made us prone to mistakes. One misstep could mean a broken leg or ankle, or worse. The map showed a river to the west down at the bottom of a deep ravine. If we could get to it and follow it, it would cross the trail farther to the south. So our best bet, I thought, was to leave our charted course and head directly west, down the side of the mountain to escape the danger of the lightning. If we were careful, and very, very lucky, we might be able to reach the bottom of the ravine by nightfall. 

I shared the plan, and the men agreed. So we began. But the way was steep and slick, and the lightning continued to flash all around us, making it difficult to focus. It was already early afternoon. We had many miles to go, and there was no trail to follow. Even if we made it out of the lightning, and no one fell or got injured on the way, I doubted very much we would reach the river before dark.¹

But then, something incredible happened.

The next mountain over started to move. 

Through the haze of the rain, I could just make out the green-grey slope of the mountain to our south. As I watched it, the great skirt of its body seemed to drift eastward like a dancer in slow motion. At first, I thought my eyes were playing tricks on me. I knew I was sleep deprived. I hadn’t eaten much either. I thought maybe hallucinations were just to be expected at that point. 

So, tentatively, I asked the other guys to take a look. They saw it too. Nobody had a clue what it might be.

We decided to head south again, toward the moving mountain, to see what it was. Maybe it was a sign? Maybe it was something that could help us. Or maybe it was a group hallucination. Maybe we were all just losing it together. 

The rain was so heavy and the clouds so thick, it took the better part of an hour to get close enough to make any sense of it. But eventually we realized what we were actually looking at. 

They were sheep. Not bighorn sheep. Not mountain goats, either. Sheep sheep. 

Sheep? At thirteen thousand feet? In the Colorado Rockies? But there they were. Hundreds of them. Thousands. Moving like a living carpet across the rain soaked mountainside.

As we kept plodding closer, we spotted something else. A tent. A big tent, actually. 

That meant humans were there too.

With renewed energy, we cinched our waterlogged packs and forged ahead. At that point, I stopped thinking about anything else except the tent. I ignored the lightning and the rain, forgot about the cold and the constant shivering, and the fact my feet had gone numb a long time ago. All I could think about was how dry it was inside that big tent. How there was probably a fire in there, or a heater or something to stave off the cold. How there would be people who knew where we were, and could point the way home. 

I was so focused I didn’t even notice when the sheepdogs started charging straight at us, their teeth bared in warning. One of the guys called out, and we all stopped in our tracks, unsure what to do. But then a tiny man ran out of the tent. He saw us, and whistled, and the sheepdogs stopped and ran back to him. He tied them up. Then he came out to meet us. 

He did not speak a word of English. I was the only one of us who spoke decent Spanish, so I ended up acting as the liaison for our group. I learned that he was a professional shepherd from Columbia. He came to the States every summer on a work visa to shepherd the sheep. It was some kind of government contract between the Forest Service and various sheepherding industries. That part was hard for me to catch. But I did understand that he missed his family terribly, that the job was lonely for him, and that he only did it for the money, so his kids could have a good education back home. 

Oh, and his name was Jesus. And no, I am not making that up. 

I told him our situation, and he said he could help. He said he knew where the trail was, but that it was a long hike through more exposed land, and the storms were not going to be letting up soon. He said it would be better if we did not take it. Instead, he knew of a shorter trail, one that cut through the trees to the south and led to an old mining shack where we could rest and dry off. The official trail would pick up from there. 

We happily acceded to his wise counsel. He led us through his flock all the way to its western edge. There, he pointed to a dark break in the trees far below. “Ese es el rastro,” he said. That’s the trail.

We trekked down with renewed hope and almost frenzied expectation. In good time, we found the hut, and clambered inside, free of the pelting rain for the first time since our trek began. We stayed there for several hours, drying off as best we could, joking around in our relief and marveling at what had just happened. 

Would anyone ever believe us? we wondered. Lost in the wilderness, besieged by foul weather we never expected, beaten down and in danger of death. But then to be rescued by a shepherd named Jesus from a far off country, who appeared out of the wilderness as if from a prayer, and who literally saved our lives by guiding us to a trail only he knew, a trail that led us out of danger to a place of shelter we desperately needed? 

I mean. What are the odds?

Call it trail magic. Call it Divine intervention. Call it the Great Mystery of Love at work in the universe. Whatever you call it, I believe it is the thing Abraham Heschel is talking about in the quote at beginning of this story. Something more than we can see is going on here. Something greater is at work. 

And its work is good.

No matter how hard life gets, or how messed up we are, or how broken everything might become, I believe there is still a Larger Story being written in the world that is far grander and more beautiful than whatever darkness we currently see. I believe the One who writes it can with a flick of its finger turn tragedy to victory, and hopelessness to joy, creating what Tolkien coined a “eucatastrophe,”

“a massive turn in fortune from a seemingly unconquerable situation to an unforeseen victory, usually brought by grace rather than heroic effort.”² 

It is this audacious hope, this stubborn confidence — that the forces of good at work in the world are stronger and shrewder than those of hate — that keeps me believing that things may yet turn out for the good, even if we cannot see how, or cannot say when these current troubles will end.

My buddies and I could not find a way to save ourselves from the storm in those mountains. But when we needed it most, a way was made for us. 

As counterintuitive as it sounds, maybe the best thing for us right now is to stop trying to save ourselves for just a little while, and take some time to simply let ourselves be brokenhearted together. I think if we did, not only would we be able to recover our connection as a people again, but we’d also, through the humility of our shared grief, make room for a fresh upwelling of grace to arise among us, one that could bring with it the divine direction we all seek — toward a new and better way for us to go as a people, and a new and better dream of what we can become.

“The Lord is near to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit.” — Psalm 34:18

“The heart that breaks open can contain the whole universe.” — Joanna Macy

1. Reaching the river before dark was critical for two reasons: 1. You can’t pitch a tent on a steep mountain slope. To have any hope of sleeping that night, we needed to reach the flat ground near the river. 2. Hiking down a steep backcountry slope in the rain with no trail while carrying a heavy pack is dangerous. Attempting it in the dark with unskilled, exhausted mountaineers is suicide.  

2. From Tolkien Gateway.