Caryll Houselander includes in her mesmerizing illustrations of My Path to Heaven a mountain on which a child climbs stairways to be reunited with God the Father who has animated him at the base of the mountain and given him a candle to light his way. It’s an eerie image, disorienting in its complexity. It’s also a helpful tool for looking at the trajectory of our lives. Either we are moving onward and upward, or we are not. On any individual staircase, we may not know which way we are headed exactly. But that’s beside the point. The point is closing the distance between where we are and where we want to be.
There is an irresistible fascination with quests. From Dante’s Divine Comedy to The Hobbit, The Odyssey, Pilgrim’s Progress and The Wizard of Oz, many of the stories we most enjoy follow characters on a journey. The very best stories of quests and journeys are not thrilling, action-infused mania but rather quite true to life. Characters on their quest get hungry and tired, lose their way and lose heart. No one can blaze forward without respite; every journey requires episodes of calm with kind companions along the way.
Perhaps what we enjoy about the motion of a character from where he began to some destination out in the great beyond is his transformation in the face of challenges. While we are tempted to think that comfort will insulate us from pain, too much comfort is its own source of great pain. The triumph of persevering in the face of obstacles is essential to the flourishing of the human person.
We need not travel great literal distances to experience movement. Transformation can occur one modest step at a time. But, as we so often forget that we are embodied creatures, literal distances can play a didactic role in training the mind. The middling athlete of grade school may be stunned to discover that the feat of distance running is attainable even to the abjectly unathletic. What is required is quite simply putting one foot in front of the other.
Elite runners devote countless hours to strategy and optimization. But for the average hobbyist, repeatedly crossing the starting line is all that is required. No thought need be given to grand theories or maneuvers. Merely moving from the place one is to the place one wants to go puts one further along the way.
Like running, many situations in life can be explained with this simple model. While people often feel a need to laud people who have stayed married for many years, raised children, or cared for children with significant handicaps, the experience of struggling through those admirable accomplishments is not what it might seem from the outside. When honest couples are asked at 30, 50, 60 years of marriage, “How did you do it? What’s your secret?” many respond simply, “We just stayed married.” There is no secret shortcut or magic method of ensuring success.
Staying the course is, indeed, an accomplishment. Saying it is simple is not the same as saying it is easy. But we should not lose sight of the simplicity. Having had a child, it is natural to care for and raise up that child, always falling short of the ideals we might have in mind for ourselves but nonetheless moving forward.
The analogy of distance can help to rid us of unhelpful “all-or-nothing” modes of thinking. We can grow exasperated in light of all the many ways we are falling short and be tempted to give up. But rather than fret over what is not done, stewing in unhappiness and some imagined version of how things ought to be, we could take a step in the right direction or marvel at all the aid we have received on our way thus far.
In moments of despair, taking a positive action, however modest, can plant seeds of hope that may bear fruit in seasons to come. Where clinical depression ends and spiritual despair begins is a question for another day, but there seems to be some overlap. Before assuming that our complex brain chemistry of which we still understand very little needs to be tuned up with all the precision of a lumberjack, we could always try to address the crushing ennui of our age by setting out on the next leg of the journey.
It is not by our own power that we overcome despair. As in the quest stories, companionship is key. For the below-average athlete, adulthood can be a marvelous time to discover the joys of distance running, and a key to success is the running partner and the running group. As one group of aspiring marathon runners chant, “26.2 together!”
Expecting the laundry to be “done,” the to-do list “finished,” our lives “complete,” is an exercise in futility. As a weathered, old Cistercian monk proclaimed on a stormy afternoon, “I’ll be working until Judgement Day.” That is the case for us all, and our tasks are never finished. But segments of our journey will come to a close if we but stay the course, putting one foot in front of the other. May we say with St. Paul one day, “I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith” (2Timothy 4:7)
