Why Climbing Mt. Everest Can Be Dangerous: Part I

As a life-long Latter-day-Saint, I have spent what amounts to years studying and meditating on the subject of ascent to God.  Now in my late winter years, I have come to worry about what I will call the “quantitative view of exaltation.”

Let me begin by saying that the “children of Christ” I have met in this life seem in little danger of resting on their laurels, of saying what TS Eliot has a character mutter, “now that’s over and done.”  No, the woman of Christ leans into the wagon wheel, her strength often greater than her priesthood man [or often even stronger when there is no man at all] beside her.  Those who listened to King Benjamin’s conference address, “had no more inclination to sin.”  They were a safe bet in the Kingdom.

We must remember as we struggle to ascend our individual Everest, we move at different paces.  Some of us seem to have better equipment; sometimes better guides; stronger lungs; strong enough, in fact, to “ascend” without oxygen:  A rare phenomenon.  As God’s children, we are all on the same spiritual Everest.  The rule on earth’s Everest, however, is “everyone for himself.  If you fall or fail, you die alone.”

When disaster struck the Mountain Madness climbing team and clients in 1996, a sudden storm, miscommunication and terrible mistakes left 8 men frozen to death on Everest.  “The Mother is mad,” warned the sherpas, who fretted about the land-fill that sacred ground is becoming.  Some clients had even crossed over the threshold and committed “squiggly squiggly.”  The Mother Mountain does not tolerate irreverence or just plain risk-taking, a form of mockery.

So, we ask, “how do I Summit?”  The answer is shocking.  No one summits alone.  No calling, no diploma, no amount of church work or hours of toil will lift us there.  And everyone will summit!  Yes, some of us don’t get very far and freeze up towards the top.

  

Some of us barely make base camp, which is, after all, 20,000 feet in the air.  My friends Kitsi and Bobby Hacken hiked to base camp.  She was suddenly struck down with altitude sickness.  Altitude sneaks up on a climber, killing brain cells, leaving one disoriented, upside down, thinking oxygen bottles are empty when they are full, etc.  Kitsi is lucky to be alive.  This autumn they are back in Nepal, anxious to give it another try.

And what of those who never even make it to Nepal?  The young missionary, killed in a car wreck in Santiago; the overzealous Laurel who swims out too far in San Diego Bay; the child born just long enough to seize a dozen gulps of air; the Brazilian street child who wanders through life, living out of garbage cans; the African children’s army full of 8-year olds who can shoot an AK-47... and then quietly cry all night for his raped and murdered mother.  Or let us remember the aged, imprisoned, the walking moribund.  Those whose lives, who minds and bodies hover in a kind of state of paralysis.  Do they count?  Where on Everest are they?  Camp 4?  Nepal?

Let me end with a delicate, even sacred concept.  Is our obsession with longevity driven by a notion that we need to live until 80 or our lives “don’t count?”  We make covenants which promise us eternal life. “Oh death, where is Thy sting?”  Living until 80 or a 100 or having at least 5 children are simply a function of our culture.  When I was growing up, people wanted to reach 72.

Now medical science has contrived ways of extending longevity—but not for free.  85% of what you’ll spend on doctors and medicine, you will spend those last five years of "life."  And what about those glossy AARP covers?  Yes, a couple in their 70s, tanned, sinewy, powered by tennis in the morning, martinis in the afternoon and, of course, at night, Viagra, the wondrous elixir of our new century.

Few people past 70 enjoy that embellished AARP world.  Quality dies but the body “lives.”  If we believe in the covenants we've made, why not get on with the Other World we spend so much time talking about, worrying about, sacrificing for?  “If ye are prepared, ye shall not fear.”

The real secret has been there all the time:  Grace.  “For with grace I can do all things.”  No grace; no summit.  Doug Hansen, who failed to summit in ’95 with the Mountain Madness team, was able to summit the second time in '96.  He was too late, however, to descend.  He called his pregnant wife to say good-bye. 

Perhaps, stretching our analogy an inch, he believed too much in himself and not enough in One who promises victory at the top.