Seek and Hide

Is God hiding from you…or are you hiding from God? The common complaint is that God has left each of us to fight our own fight. It is as if we are claiming to be like lost children who frantically search everywhere, but cannot find our parents anywhere. We are the abandoned ones, betrayed by cruel and unloving parents who have exposed us to a harsh and dangerous world because they have left us to fend for ourselves. Our assumptions are shattered. Our parents are gone forever. And this is how we feel about God, too.

But how hard are we really looking? Or are we just repeating in our own time a pattern that was set in place from the very beginning. In the Eden story, found in the Book of Genesis, the man and the woman transgress and immediately feel shame and, as a result, go into hiding. God calls out to them, but they hide from Him at the very time when God is searching them out. In the time of the prophets, Isaiah identifies the intractable persistence of this problem of who is seeking and who is hiding: “We all, like lost sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to his own way....” (Isaiah 53:6)

What causes us to hide from God? Is it us or is it Him? And what might cause us to hide in the first place? In the Genesis story the man and woman flee from the presence of a searching God because of shame and fear. If they had nothing to hide, they would not have taken cover. But they did have something very real to hide which was an act of utter unfaithfulness. After the man and the woman are cast out of Eden as punishment for their original crime, they seem to pass on to their own child Cain the same inclinations of faithlessness and rebellion. Cain murders his brother, and when he is caught, he cries out that his punishment is more than he can bear. He rejected God and became not a seeker but rather a “restless wanderer of the earth.” From then until now that is the condition of despair that many of us suffer from day in and day out. Perhaps it is time to find out what it means to be a seeker rather than a hider.

In Praise of Richard Branson

Shortly after traversing that low, snow swept ridge in northern Tennessee (see Trail Epic), I embarked on a weeklong trip to London to attend the London Book Fair, an annual April event. My assistant is a wonderful person, but when it comes to booking flights, I sometimes get the impression that she is worried about the expense of the airfare ticket interfering with my ability to pay back my college loans. I try to tell her to stop projecting, but to no avail.

So when I discovered that I had been booked on Virgin Atlantic for the seven hour flight to England, I had no choice but to fear the worst. You see, I have never flown on Virgin and I figured that with a name like that I would be forced into the company of a whole host of aging hipsters. Of course, I do not know Richard Branson, the owner of Virgin Atlantic, but I had formed a fixed idea about him, and so, I approached JFK with much fear and trembling.

And my initial fears seemed to be confirmed when I stepped up to the check in counter and found that no seat in steerage (economy) had been assigned to me. “Oh boy,” I mused, “talk about prophecy fulfilled!” Yet the lady manning the computer persisted in her search, even as other passengers behind me began to shuffle impatiently. I half expected her to say, “Well, Mr. Kampmann, we have nothing in the cabin but we do have some extra space on the wing. Would that do?”

But she didn’t say that. Instead, she called a manager over and together they found a nice big comfortable seat in Premium Economy which is equivalent to Business Class. I was shocked (and delighted). But the real shock came when I entered the cabin and buckled in for the trip across the Atlantic. It has been a long, long time since I could say the experience of flying was as fun and worthwhile as the trip itself. Clearly, this is an airline with very high standards. I thought about my remarkable reversal of expectations and I finally had to conclude that Richard Branson must be responsible for the superior quality of service provided by the people working for his airline.

Branson is a very successful businessman and he is successful for a reason. He is that rare entrepreneur that adheres to high standards and, as a result, passengers benefit in countless ways. American enterprise was built by people like Richard Branson. Unfortunately, too many of our great corporate leaders have been replaced by either pirates with an itch to pocket as much from the corporate coffers as possible, or men and women in grey flannel suits with endless advance degrees in this or that. Often the goods and services these faux leaders provide are as poor as the murky vision that guides them. So a toast to Richard Branson and to all entrepreneurs of vision: May the future belong to you.

Trail Epic

It’s 9:30 AM and I have made a last minute decision to hike a full twenty-two miles rather than the more modest trip I had planned days before. Though snow is on the ground, this is Tennessee. And it is April. Leaves should be budding from the branches of once dormant trees; flowers should be lining the sides of the trail leading me happily to my journey’s end. (I took the picture on the right during my journey.) Even with the snow and the clouds and the cold, I am still optimistic that I will finish with ease.

As I look about, though, the gray clouds are moving ominously across the sky from west to east. The temperature is in the low 20’s and the forested landscape is painted in a symphony of whites and grays. Even though I am in the mountains, the ups and downs aren’t too severe. And of course the weather could always clear later in the day. I convince myself that there is nothing wrong with this picture.

Bob Peoples, one of the most renowned mountain men in the south, has shuttled me to route 421 which intersects the Appalachian Trail fourteen miles south of Damascus Virginia. One reason for doing big miles now is that I have been trying to get to Damascus for over a year, but every time I set foot on the trail some obstacle is placed in my way. Last April, it was the flu and in November it was extreme cold and snow. So doing these miles makes sense to me because when I get done later in the day I will have almost reached my goal.

I start out with the hope of covering about three miles each hour which is a moderately fast pace, but the map profile indicates only slight elevation gain and loss. If I am able to maintain this pace I will finish before 5 PM. However, the map does not indicate 30 MPH winds sweeping relentlessly across the mountain ridges, nor does it show snow drifts accumulating to almost a foot.

And the plan does not allow for blizzard conditions worsening throughout the day. I had envisioned a clear path, but the snow comes hurling at me from every angle; after three arduous hours, I had covered a disappointing seven miles. With fifteen miles to go, I had no choice but to forge on.

Occasionally a north bound hiker would emerge out of the snow. We would stop and trade information and then quickly go our separate ways because without movement, the cold began to penetrate through the layers of gear. The real benefit of meeting another hiker, though, was to have their snow tracks point the way forward. Eventually the wind would erase most traces of their presence, but I appreciated the help while it lasted.

By 7:30PM I arrived at Vandeventer Shelter about three thousand feet above Watauga Lake. By that late hour the storm had relinquished its firm grip; occasionally, the full moon would peer out from behind passing clouds. Lights flickered around the lake pointing the way to warmth and safety. A few hikers were inside their tents near the shelter, but they did not bother to emerge, nor did I bother to stick around. The clock had become my greatest enemy as I still had over four miles of steep downs before reaching my car. So off I went, moving as fast as I could. The curtain of dusk descended slowly, but by 8:30 it was night. I lost the trail one time but quickly retraced my steps, found the right way and headed down. And at 9:00 I finally reached my car, and with it, I reached warmth, safety and a way back to a place to spend the night and a very long and sweet sleep.

Pirates at the Gate

I am not sure which is worse: the Somali Pirates holding world commerce up for random or the grey flannelled political class in Washington ripping down the paneled doors of the Treasury to pillage for profit. Perhaps one of our friends at Disney can produce a sequel to their wildly successful series which they might call "The Pirates of the Potomac."

The Green Eyed Monster

Jealousy is the stepchild of anger. They are related through the passion of hatred, but whereas anger often has a specific object as the focal point, jealousy is built on doubt, suspicion and fear. The fury generated by jealousy is often the product of inference, suggestion or doubt, such as the suspicion of betrayal by a loved one. With jealousy, the hurt often begins not with a specific action but within the mind of a person plagued by an imagined offense.

When the seed of doubt is planted, then it is watered and nurtured by an overheated imagination and soon what was merely the appearance of a wrong becomes a whole cause for war. Many marriages have shattered because of jealousy; much suffering has resulted from imagined slights and betrayals fed not by knowledge, but rather by the mere suspicion of a wrong.

Apparitions

I spent last weekend in Denver at an independent publisher conference. Though I was a speaker, I had an opportunity to sit in on a two hour writing seminar lead by Anne Randolph, an excellent writing coach. Anne led us through three exercises and the first was to write for five minutes starting with the word “unfamiliar.” Here is what I came up with:

Unfamiliar faces crowd the confined space of the stalled car. No one speaks. We are strangers, riding toward our individual destinations. We have unexpectedly paused and the sudden silence causes unease. The faces are impenetrable masks, revealing nothing of the complicated stories lying below the surface. Eyes avoid eyes and some peer out the darkened windows toward grey, soot packed walls that encase us here. Then relief: The train jolts into action and moves forward, slowly resuming speed and carrying each one of us on our singular journey toward an assignation that will add yet another chapter to each of our fragmentary books.

Ezra Pound is the father of this short piece of writing. In college I had memorized a two line poem he had written early in the 20th Century. It goes like this: “The apparition of these faces in a crowd/pedals on a wet black bough.”