I have absolutely no real idea what women deal with as people look elsewhere than their eyes when speaking to them. At 6’6”, I only have a passing familiarity. For these many decades, I’ve hunched over so I could join a conversation, or at least hear a little better. Along with gravity, it means I am much shorter after dinner than when I wake. 

On Kilimanjaro, though, it was a threat. One tends to lean into the hill one climbs. Bending down forward especially as you hoist yourself up 500 vertical feet of 2’ volcanic stairs. Shortened Breathing and resulting massive headaches dominated the first three nights. I was desperate. 
I saw so many others in far worse physical shape, even those without limbs I take so for granted, but most dealing well with the altitude. 
​
Then the fourth day, and a kind of screw it attitude, and spread wide the chest, breath big and full, and look up. As soon as a headache started, back up with the shoulders and breath it away. Keep the head up. If you can’t hear someone, screw it. Breath. Ask them to stop talking to the tits. 
They say you should “lean in,” a metaphor for getting involved. I’m gonna lean up. Talk to my eyes. Sorry they’re all the way up here. All my mom’s fault!

​It is helpful to attend to just how small we are. One of the good things about being away was being away. No noise about making some country great again. (For the record, we should not try to be great. We should try to serve others and we might bump into greatness along the way-just sayin🤓)

​But my smallness was evident and experienced in every conceivable way: the blood moon revealed a vast starlit sky I rarely see in the Northeast, the shortest of steps were the only means of hiking for hours on end, my choice of clothing was limited to three (3), and any pretense of confidence or pride was reduced to a reliance upon everyone else on the team for the most basic of functions. I am used to being competent. But here, not so much and in comparison, I had no room for an opinion. Our guides go up twice a month. Lead guide Ewaldi has seen summit 140 times. Looking out over the Arctic desert, I observed, “I bet this view never gets old.” The guide’s silent response set me straight. But even under a blood moon? Yeah maybe. They were focused on getting us all
up and back in one piece. When you are in the presence of focused, skilled and caring people whose goal is your success and safety, as you take on something big and difficult, it has a way of changing you. Yeah. It was like going to Church. Or maybe, that’s how church is supposed to be. 
(The first pic is not mine but exactly what we saw. )

The main ascent starts just before midnight, that’s how it’s done. After creeping up the mountain for six hours, there comes a sunrise on the top of the world’s largest single volcanic mountain. And yes, it’s spectacular. If you remember it. Some photos, then begins the descent. At that point, if you’re as unlucky as me, altitude sickness will have it’s way with your body. Brain swelling/edema is the biggest risk but for me it was the breathing and beginnings of pulmonary edema. The months of training kept the legs going but no point if there’s no lung capacity. The only medicine is lowering the altitude. But there came the most overwhelming wave of sleep. I cannot truly describe how absolute, all-enveloping and compulsive the feeling. All I wanted was to take a short nap then I’d get up and keep going down. And that would have been my end. My guide saved my life. He wouldn’t let me close my eyes. Now, he had a bottle of emergency O2 but I guess he just went old school on me. It was four hours of “Phil - don’t close your eyes!” 
​
Sartre quipped in typical cynical fashion, “Hell is life without eyelids.” He meant that we ignore the hard ugly and shitty things in order to maintain a pretty fiction. I think the Kingdom of heaven is life without eyelids. Closing our eyes and pretending it’s all ok leads to death. even if it’s hard to look, even when it takes every single bit of energy you have left to keep open, we must do so. We must see. We must act. We must participate. We must keep going. Phil don’t close your eyes. I vow never.

There is nothing noble or character building about voluntarily trekking up an old volcano, however tall it might be. Nothing special to see here when thousands do it every year. But then, we had no idea what we got ourselves into on this trip. Quite like every day I plant my feet on the side of the bed in the morning. 

I did feel trapped though, only seeing up and no real way back down. The feelings of being stuck are soul sucking. Being stuck happens. 

When last in Africa, it was the west coast, in Senegal. Made a visit to Goree island off of Dakar, a slavers house with a door of no return. Under the sweeping stairs were tiny hot rooms labeled “Recalcitrants”. A visiting Pope had shaken off his handlers and crawled into one to pray. Upon being found, he emerged claiming,”unless you know what it is to be a prisoner, you have yet to learn what Christianity means.” 

Being captive to an event that must be seen through reminded me of that moment. It must be said strongly this little musing is not to diminish the incomprehensible cruelty of the real thing of slavery. 
​
That said, we get a minimal glimpse in daily life of being in places and relations that feel less than free choice, though I enter into them freely. Life still seems stuck some days. Maybe it’s why I am drawn to work in a prison setting, quite apart from Deacon Byrer’s not so subtle recruitment! Not to pander to those there, but because I know I am one of them. (I’m wearing a Kufi a friend in prison made for me)

Yes, I know it’s not a word (yet). But it is apt for this cleric’s life. Things don’t have beginnings middles and ends. There’s too much life for one lifetime. There’s always another Lent to plan. There’s not many completions to rack up in a parish. Perhaps it’s why I enjoy the trades so much. The plumbing job gets done. The room is painted. The table is sanded. A past tense is experienced. With people in a parish, not so much. Nor is that even a part of my faith. They say the Mass is never ended. I think that means that the celebration of resurrection is continuous,and our little revelries, however Sunday by Sunday and/or daily, are merely moments we hop on the great train for a time. When we hop off we are mistaken to think the dismissal is any real ending. So it is with the climb up Kili. I guess I did it, but it is ongoing. It got hiked but I am stilled changing by it. Like the people I love but see no longer.
​
My brother called before I left, to suggest I bring back a summit rock to place in the memorial garden of St. LUKE’S, Metuchen. He said our folks would have loved that I did this. So yes, back with a few. And I gave the hiking poles of my Mom to my guide who admired them and needed a pair. Not sure why I kept those when we emptied her house years ago now. Except perhaps that Jerome would need them now. Unfinishableness.

Our guides repeatedly called out, “Trust your boots!” That was the one piece of equipment they inspected before leaving at the very start of the climb. New boots get you sent home. Broken-in boots a must, so much so, you wear them on the plane; the one thing you can’t replace were luggage to be lost. Made sleeping a problem in coach, as size 13 heavy duty hiking boots just don’t fit in a regular aisle. But you learn to trust them. Plant your foot, balance your weight, shift, turn, lift your body. Plant your other foot. Repeat. I trust my boots. 

I don’t trust my gut though. They say, “trust your gut,” but I think that’s wrong. Your gut is a mash up of under-thought intuition, amorphous fears, vague notions, and unfounded feelings of confidence. I don’t trust people who trust their gut. It means they chose not to think it through. We over weight our gut at the least. Better to trust your boots. 
​
I mean by boots, of course, the people I love & the traditions & the honed and broken in powers of reason and thoughtfulness, the practice of daily prayer and reading. All leading to the presence and meaning and purpose of the one in whom we live and breath and hike with.

​The term seems medieval and entirely negative with gastro-intestinal overtones even. But consider all the "stuff" that rattles around the brain, soul and psyche. How about all those patterns of thought and frames of thinking that seem so resistant to change? All those agreements you made with yourself? All those memorialized memories? Under the right conditions, the container breaks: the clinging haunts fall away, the long assumed surrender to what was just going to be the way it is ends and a newness is felt. Under the right conditions. One doesn't need a 24 hour flight, and hiking in extremis to encounter such a freedom. But these conditions just don't fall into your lap. Constant breathing patterns, hours upon hours of intensive effort, with no obvious relief anywhere, leaves you liable to a container break. Once open, you just don't want to go back, no, not about going back to the people you love whom you can't wait to embrace again, but the patterns of thinking, the acquiescence to a norm assumed, the regimen of expectations. You see things differently, again. E.B. White had it just right, as he reflected upon a brutal encounter during long night of gentleman farming, in an essay, Death of a Pig, he observed, "I discovered, though, that after having given a pig an enema, there is no turning back, no resuming one of life's more stereotyped roles."

​The beauty of the five different climate zones one hikes through on the way to ascending Kilimanjaro is hard to describe. But it is the desolation and remoteness that impresses at this distance. The notion that you are removed from any immediate medical care, should trouble come near, underscores the nature of the desolation. Ancient wisdom embraces this moment. Early Christian mystics down to our own era actually seek out these experiences. For extroverts, there’s another layer of intensity about the sheer quiet of it all. Life is stripped down, elaborations of thought fall away, trudging one foot in front of the other. It isn’t so much clarity of answers to life’s issues that arises. It is a view and embrace of the very few things that matter, things being people you love. A calling to love most fully.

Hiking for several hours at high altitudes each day with steep degrees, and walls of 2’ steps reduced the light conversations among a team of hikers. I spent the time just breathing and getting one foot properly placed before another. Casey Carr-Jones asked me to get myself a hiking mantra. I’m so thankful she did. Taize chants come off the breath so naturally in meter with the footwork as do also the songs of Ana Hernandez. Without them I’d never have gotten past the third day.

Here's Father Phil in the Edna Mahan kufi worn up Kilimanjaro