Going to School Church

“First Church of the Higher Elevations: Mountains, Prayer, and Presence” By Peter Anderson (Ghost Road Press, 2005, 180 pages, $15.95, paperback. ISBN: 0-9760729-4-7). Reviewed by Kurt Caswell

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When I picked up Peter Anderson’s book, “First Church of the Higher Elevations,” I prayed that he would not preach to me. I didn’t want to hear that my sins condemned me and that seeking God was my one path to salvation. I just wanted to read good prose about mountain adventures. By the time I finished the book, my attitude had oriented itself in the opposite direction. Enough of these mountains, I thought. Tell me more about how to find God.

Anderson’s remedy is in the union of mountains and spirit. For him there is no separation, no difference between the high peaks of the world and the elevation of the soul. In this pursuit, he is a gentle teacher. I never felt any pressure or evangelistic guiltmaking while reading his book.

Anderson, who is Mountain Gazette’s poetry editor (consider that a disclaimer), claims his Quaker heritage and his formal religious studies, sure enough, but his book is an exploration of his own spiritual path. It is not a how-to guide. He invites the reader along as a companion only, as a friend. If readers feel a stirring in their own soul, it comes not from Anderson, but from within.

The chapters in the book are independent, well-crafted personal essays about people and mountain places in the American West, especially Utah, New Mexico and Colorado, but they are seamlessly organized, each chapter building on the themes of the one before it. To read the book is to make one journey. My favorite chapter is “On the Hermit’s Trail.” Indeed, I like it more than the title essay.

Anderson follows the story of Giovanni Maria Augustini, the son of a prosperous Italian family who lived out his life in solitude in a cave in the 1860s on Hermit Peak in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains.With a friend, Anderson makes a pilgrimage to the modest cave where Augustini lived. The questions he seeks to answer about the hermit are the same questions he posits for himself: “How does one find one’s true self?” and “What does it mean to live a life of prayer?” and “How can we find a firm foundation on which to build our lives?” But readers should expect no answers. Anderson quotes Rilke to affirm that a life is lived by questions, and such living may arrive one distant day at something like answers. But don’t count on it. As Anderson gazes on Augustini’s cave, I secretly wished him to stay and take up the vacancy left by the mountain hermit, offering his readers another mystic to believe in.

I love the way Anderson uses passages and verses by other poet-seekers like himself. In addition to Rilke, he quotes John Muir, Han Shan, Carl Jung, Wendell Berry, and stretches into Jimi Hendrix, B.B. King, Jerry Garcia. One bothersome error: I’m pretty sure Han Shan was a Chinese poet, not Japanese, as Anderson claims.

Anderson’s writing is clear and direct, but sometimes his sentences hover just above the ground. In places I had to search for solid footing, and often found none. Just how does one “fold the awareness of his own aloneness into the warmth of the passing moment?” And yet, the words are justified. When it comes to matters of the spirit, it is often the language itself that falls short, not the poet.

The book’s ending is just right. In the final scene, Anderson goes out walking with his young daughter, Rosalea. Firmly grounded in the business of fathering, Anderson asks Rosalea where she thinks a few passing vultures are headed. Now it is the child’s turn to embark on a spiritual path. She responds: “to school church,” and then explains, “where your dreams go when you close your eyes.” Here is the steady wisdom of Anderson’s book, and sage advice for any reader: Pay attention to the places where the body and spirit meet.