“The Lower Cathedral Wash Trail is not a particularly strenuous or technical trail – it’s just complicated,” the reviewer wrote.
A couple days ago, Connor and I hiked the Lower Cathedral Wash Trail near Marble Canyon, Arizona. The hike starts out as walk into what is essentially a large ditch carved by water and wind into rock and sandstone. It’s easy-going as red and gray rock walls arise on either side of you. There are some mud-slicks to avoid, but really it is all good until it gets, well, complicated.
All of the sudden you reach this drop-off spot, and you can no longer continue to walk on the same level you’ve been walking. You have to climb down deeper into the wash to move on. We arrived at this place just as the group ahead of us was giving up and turning back. They had circled all around the edge of the drop-off and hadn’t found a reasonable spot to climb down (and to climb up out of on the return trip). We knew there had to be a way, so we too walked along the edge on both sides, looking for a way down into the wash that could also be a way up. Just as we were about to turn back in disappointment, we saw the cairn.
The cairn was subtle, just one smaller rock stacked upon a larger one. It had been laid there by someone who had made their way along this path before us. Close to the cairn was a way down that looked rather more frightening than it actually was and provided a reliable way out.
And so we went on, navigating the increasingly complicated layers of the trench, our eyes searching for cairns marking the spots where we would have to climb down or up to a higher ledge or cross over to the other wall in order to move on. Sometimes we would choose our own path, but whenever things got truly complicated and there seemed to be no safe way forward, we gave thanks for little piles of rocks carefully placed by those who had gone before us.
This Sunday at St. James’, we will celebrate Milestone Sunday, giving thanks for all of our graduates and those marking other sorts of transitions in their lives.
As a kid, I will admit that I took these sorts of milestones and rites of passage for granted. I was certainly pleased to receive any congratulatory cards with cash inside, but, other people had graduated from middle school before me. I was not blazing a new trail, so what was the big deal?
In our common life at St. James’, we do indeed celebrate the trailblazers, those who made a way when there seemed to have been no way, people like Thurgood Marshall, Alexander Crummell, Absalom Jones, Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Founders of St. James’. However, we also take a moment to pause on Milestone Sunday to mark those moments of passage and transition from one phase or pathway to another. We set down markers in these places of transition, not because nobody has ever been there before, but because they have. And there they have found good and solid ground to stand upon and sure ways to venture out into new territory.
This Sunday, as we celebrate graduates, retirees, new parents, and others, I give thanks for the paths that have led you here, and I pray that God will bless you on the road ahead.
Rev. Eileen
