predicament and pilgrimage

“In 1914, with the prize of the Pole having been claimed, Shackleton embarked on a new challenge–to cross the entire continent on foot, from the Weddell to the Ross Sea. Leaving the island of South Georgia in December, his ship Endurance battled her way through pack ice toward the continent. But while deep in the pack of the Weddell Sea, the ship was trapped and slowly crushed by the ice.”

Two images in my head tonight: a severed forearm wedged between a rock wall and a canyon chockstone and a frozen ship caught in the maw of a polar sea.

Two people, Shackleton (and his 27-man crew) and an upstart kid climber from Colorado, who once having set out for two adventures of two different sorts, both end up in unimagineable predicaments.

Shackleton in 1914, before the age of polypropylene, gortex, sunscreen, Gatorade, and PowerBars was forced to live for 14 months on a hunk of Antarctic ice that would, in springtime, break away from the continent and begin drifting out to open sea. He had set out on a hazardous but grand-glorious adventure to achieve something no one else had done. Out of his control, the sea took his boat and, temporarily, his ambition for this goal. And so, he charted a new course of action: to save all his men.

Ralston, the climber, set out on a solo hike in the Canyonlands in what seemed benign, but isolated, country. A fluke of timing and placement, a huge rock falls onto his right hand, crushing it against a canyon wall. Trapped and equipped with limited food and water, he is forced to make decisions that would, under normal circumstances, be unthinkable.

Shackleton’s journey: 15 months adrift, stranded on ice floes, a terrifying convoy of 3 open lifeboats to an uninhabited island taking 7 days, a 17-day, 800-mile journey through the world's worst seas to South Georgia Island in a modified lifeboat, and a 26- mile on-foot crossing of the island’s mountains and glaciers, which were considered impassable. All his men were eventually rescued. Not one was lost.

And so he achieved his goal: the one which was forced upon him by circumstance, not the goal of his choosing.

Ralston’s arm, wedged impossibly between stone and stone, would be his demise if he was not somehow able to free himself. His solution after 6 days of hypothermia, dehydration, starvation, and pain was to amputate his own arm. This wasn’t easy to manage with rudimentary tools, no painkillers, and only a few hours sleep in nearly 7 days.

I’ll save you the superfluous 200 pages of Ralston’s book to tell you: he survived. He broke the two bones in his arm and chopped off the skin, ligament, muscle, tendon and nerves, managed a 60 foot free rappel, and walked out of the desert canyon.

And he, like Shackleton, also achieved his goal: the one foisted upon him by peculiar circumstance. He survived.

Pain and threat of death apparently cause people to make extraordinary choices. A lucidity that does not prevail in ordinary life moves us, at great cost to ourselves, into a new realm of thought and action. What once was not remotely in the realm of consideration becomes elevated to the category of – the possible.

And here I am, a pilgrim, someone who has struck out on a journey. This journey begun not for the sake of adventure, though that will certainly be part of it always, but for calling. Jesus beckons me. And He beckons me come places that I do not wish to. Especially now.

When I set out to follow Him at 16 years of age, I had certain goals, aims, things I imagined doing for Him and in His name. Some of them, I have done, but many times, I have found myself as Shackleton and Ralston...impinged upon by outer and inner predicament, and I have not done what I desired to. My version of Future and Reality forced to face up to a Someone much bigger, smarter, wiser, and more loving than myself.

This is the point of pain and threat of death. If I do not bow my puny cosmology down to His, I am in serious danger of meeting my end. Not by Him, but by my own madness in believing what is farcical.

Will I then, lucid of mind and heart, amputate the inhibiting limb, push my lifeboat out into raucous seas where seeing into a farther place, Faith shouts Hope and Life and Jesus calls me?