The hills around us are striped with hiking trails, so I woke in the darkness and went to them, in the death of the small hours, to find Christ.

When I came to CL I bore the complaints and regrets of a life lived in unawareness. On my back, I carried a sack filled with a litany of accusations against God. Where had He been, all the years of my searching? Where, in a world of preference, was the sign that I was preferred? On this morning I turned my back to the world, set my foot to the mountain and said, at least for a while, goodbye to all that.

I could only see a few feet before me in the moonless night, but that was how I wanted it. I needed only the crunch of the dirt to know where I was headed. At the top of this trail I would turn back and see the city laid out before me. I would present my question to God. Why did I have to stumble through the darkness to end up here? But to do that, I would need one more thing. A friend from School of Community and I have gone to a meditation class at church a few times. In the silence, you repeat a mantra. ‘Maranatha.’ It is the Aramaic for “Come, Lord Jesus.” Again and again. Your mind empties. The gears slow, and hopefully, if only for a moment, stop.

The mantra would be the funicular bringing myself to God and God to me. I would repeat it on my way and finally deliver my anger to the face itself. But the mountain had demands of its own. Ten minutes after I began, I couldn’t form a syllable for the sake of panting. The mantra vanished. And then the thoughts of my past. An unscrolled jeremiad whipped away in the pre-dawn wind. Every thought of what I had loved and lost, of what I had desired and never had, all my searching in the back alleys of humanity for the face of Christ… there was nothing left but placing one foot in front of the other. I could do nothing else.

Finally I made it to the top. The sun still had not risen, and before me was not an altar to place my questions, but the vast littoral plain of the city, frosted with uneven fog, afire with the light of a thousand votive candles to itself. So this was it. Just as in life, I had searched the world of God, and found nothing but isolation. I sat justified in my emptiness. The only sound the lull of the circle of ocean beneath me. I was still breathing hard. And beneath the attar of sagebrush and salt air I caught something else: my own radiant vanity.

The sky pinked gradually and as the light banked closer it blew out the lights of the city and set the needle to the birdsong. Where the light met the darkness I looked out and thought, who was I to summon Christ to myself, atop the world. Who was I to summon who was already there? Had I even come to the mountain or had Christ put the mountain beneath me to empty myself to myself, if only for a moment? I looked down at the city and realized what I had left behind. His face was down there. With everything I shunned and left behind in a thousand ways, a thousand times. In the interstitials between the sins and perversions of my life. God was in the very place I had escaped to find Him.

The journey to truth is not up a hill in the darkness. It is in the people before us. I recorded this for myself, to write the theory out of my life and feel the grain of reality beneath it. I share it because others have walked this path before and will walk it after. I’m not sure what obligatory scène à faire comes next. For now, I will make my way down and back into the world again. There is an assembly today and we will go to lunch together afterwards. And that is a start.

JA, Los Angeles, CA