Canoeing the Mountains
“Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.” John 12: 23-24.
The Alban Weekly from Duke Divinity school this week interviews Tod Bolsinger, professor at Fuller Theological Seminary, about what he means by the title of his recent book, Canoeing the Mountains: Christian Leadership in Uncharted Territory.
Bolsinger gives us an amazing metaphor for so many of our transition experiences in life. He tells the story of the journey of Lewis and Clark who thought when they reached the continental divide that they would find a river to travel directly to the Pacific Ocean. Instead, they met the Rocky Mountains. They didn’t survive by trying to canoe the mountain. They didn’t let this obstacle stop their objective. They had to adapt, and their source of wisdom was not part of their hierarchy or the privileged. The wisdom coms from a teenager, a nursing mother, a Native American who had been kidnapped as a child. “She wasn’t in unfamiliar terrain; she was going home.”
I think what Bolsinger is trying to tell our churches can apply to much of our own life. We have so much to learn from people who know what it is like to reach the top of a mountain with a canoe in hand and become survivors of what seems at the time like an unsurmountable task. They have a sense of a GPS calling them back home. Immigrants, people of color, women have had to adapt to overwhelming situations have much to teach us. More and more we are called to listen to their stories.
Bolsinger reminds us that transformation most often comes from loss, and those who do not have power may be the ones who are our experts in loss. They have been trained in survival and wilderness experiences.
Lewis and Clark had to take direction from a young Indian mother. Bolsinger reminds us this is giving up power so that something much greater can be birthed. This also is a basic premise in recovery programs.
The canoe metaphor may speak directly to our individual life transitions. What mountains on our journey have we reached where we are trying to cross with a canoe, an energy that was useful at one time in our life, but is not the energy we need now? What does it mean for us to listen more carefully to survivors, survivors in our own world and survivor parts of our inner world who can teach us the next pathway?
“Tod Bolsinger: What does it mean to stop canoeing the mountains?” Faith and Leadership, Alban at Duke Divinity School, alban@div.duke.edu, August 13, 2018.
Joanna joannaseibert.com