Anyway, as I'm walking along in these glorious high mountains on a wonderful cool blue September day, this pair of images, cross and child, is stirring something up. I'm imagining Jesus walking along with his friends in real time between talking about a cross and lifting up a child.
You remember, when he talked about the cross, Peter got it all wrong and got scalded by Jesus' sharp response. Maybe Jesus has been considering how to give Peter a new way to see what it means to lay down a familiar life in order to pick up a fresh one.
The as-yet-cluelessness of Jesus's friends may have convinced him he needed another image of what life in God and life in the world can be.
Later that day at dinner, he picks up a child. Maybe he's thinking, Ah, here's the perfect icon. Somewhere here, between the lifting up of a cross and the growing up of a child, is how this all works.
As I'm hiking along, I'm looking at that child too. I'm looking back 55 years or so, remembering what it was like to be 5. Wow, what a lot of possibilities there are. I'm short--but I'm gonna grow. I can't read but I have no doubt that I'll learn. My brothers kick my butt at sports and everything else but I know at some point that will change. As children we just have a natural confidence in GROWING UP.
This came as a strong and helpful realization. I decided to quit working on the sermon and let it work on me for awhile.
I looked down and saw beautiful things growing--ground cedar, lichen, blueberry bushes. Then looked up. Wow!
3 hawks were maybe 70 feet up and to my right. Not sure I'd ever seen 3 hawks at the same time.
Wait! Not 3 but 7.
No--10!
Oh my God, not 10, more! I looked back northeast, following the ridge line. Lots more--heading right at me.
I kept counting. 23, 37, 60.... Got to 92 and started noticing that as they got ahead of me, up nearer the crest of Black Balsam, they stopped flapping and started gliding.
Maybe soaring is a better word. Groups of them circling and rising, using updrafts of warmer air--thermals--to gain altitude, going higher and higher and higher and then aiming southwest again, wings extended, not flapping, just coasting on toward their destination. Coasting--at 40 mph or more.
I learned later that these hawks, Broadwinged Hawks, use the Appalachian ridgeline as their highway to their winter home in South America. They pass through our area around the last 2 weeks of September. Their rising up and circling is called kettling: apparently a long time ago it reminded somebody of how ingredients in soup rise up in a boiling kettle.
The last hawk finally flew by. I'm guessing the whole process didn't take much longer than 7 or 8 minutes. Counting with all the concentration I could muster, I got to 188. 188 hawks in 7 or 8 minutes.
As I walked on, my blood, my energy seemed to be rising up and soaring too. What a thrill to see something so beautiful, rare, and wonderful--and yet somehow also so usual and predictable--been going on years, centuries, maybe millennia. I just had never known about it or witnessed it.
---
Hiking on for 5 or 10 minutes I met a guy coming toward me. We both were grinning from ear to ear. Can't remember which of us asked first, "Did you see all those hawks!" We stopped and rather breathlessly did our best to name what it was we'd just seen and how amazing it was to have been there to witness it. We talked about birds, hawks, what we'd seen here before. Neither of us had a clue what kind of hawk this was. Both of us planned to go home and Google 'hawk migration in North Carolina!'
A little later he told me that the trail we were on was his family's favorite hike. That he was from Cincinnati--but had come to North Carolina alone this year. He said, "Actually, it's my father's favorite hike." Then he paused and seemed to be considering what to say next.
"We buried my father 2 weeks ago. Today, I'm hiking for him."
I nodded. Felt something rising up in me again. Not completely different from how I felt as a witness to the migration of Broadwinged Hawks. I surely felt blessed to be a witness of something special, important in this moment too. Couldn't help my eyes misting up. I smiled, looking for words.
"Well," I offered, "may the hike, this day, be all it can be."
He nodded, eyes bright, a little irony in his smile.
"Thank you."
Then he turned on his heel and strode off NE, the direction the hawks had come from.
And I went my way, looking down, looking up, looking deep, looking right in front of me all the while overflowing with a sense that life is full of possibility.
---
Almost back to the car I looked up again and saw one lone hawk. Smaller than the others; probably a teenager. Had to have been 30 minutes since his group had sailed on. He seemed to be laboring, flapping hard. But then he found a thermal. Up and up he spiraled. Up and up and up. Finally he pulled his wings in tight like a falcon and shot off southwest like an arrow.
