My right fingertips latch the small, ear-shaped hold like a vise, and there my body hovers for one slow second, the left toe of my climbing shoe pasted in a tiny divot in the rock, right foot flung out behind me.
Don’t let go!
The crowd behind me goes wild—my husband Brian, our friends Paul and April, and all four kids, ages 2 to 10. No one expected this, because I’d never stuck the move the other billion times I’d tried it.
“Yeah, Jen! Get your foot on!” April called.
Right foot back on, left foot up, right foot off, I stab the crimpy pinch at the lip of the steep section.
Right foot up, left foot off, I chuck myself up and right to the sharp mountain-shaped hold.
Left foot high, right foot off, I pop up to the small, flat edge on the now-vertical face and barely snag it.
Brian: “Yes, Jen! Come on!”
I’m climbing like the climber I’ve always wanted to be—audacious, unhesitant, powerful. I’m elated.
“Big hold coming up, Jen! Do it!” Paul said.
I suck in cool, dusty air and lower slightly out of my desperate lock-off so I can properly launch.
April: “Get it!”
Ivan, the toddler: “Go, Brian-Jen! Go, Brian-Jen!”
My two boys: “Come on, Mommy!”
Last hard move, Jen.
I lean my head back a smidgen and, using my neck to create momentum ex nihilo, I snap my shoulders in, and my right hand fires up and grabs the jug—perfectly.
Everyone: “Yeah!”
I match hands there and let out a strangled squeal. Only a few more easy moves to the top of the boulder. Everyone on the ground is still yelling and laughing, but all I can hear is my own panting breath, possibly mingled with the roaring of angels.
I continue to climb until my hands are on the flat top, then throw a foot up and press my body over the edge. Once standing, I turn around to look down at my people. I’m laughing, crying, whooping, and they are cheering, clapping, and jumping around.
I’m overwhelmed. I sit down, hug my knees, and bow my head while the desert sun warms my back and shoulders, like gentle hands. Is this what Eric Liddell meant when he said, in Chariots of Fire, “When I run, I feel [God’s] pleasure”?
I’ve loved rock climbing since I first tried it over 30 years ago. Though it is play, I take it very seriously. I’m in my 50s and still climb often, paying close attention to my body: its grappling with gravity, its strengths and weaknesses, its training and rest. I become completely absorbed in small segments of nature, a series of imperfections on a cliff face or large boulder, concentrating on how the rock looks and feels so I can reach the top.
For the first few years, I climbed all the time, indoors and outdoors, and got strong quickly. But as a young adult, though a Christian from a very young age, I didn’t connect the pleasure I felt when climbing with God. I believed my enjoyment in it was separate from anything spiritual, possibly even sinful, because I went climbing outside most weekends instead of going to church. I worried that God might want to take climbing away from me because it was an idol stealing my attention.
That Eric Liddell quote had teased my imagination since the 1980s, but I didn’t know what about me could please God aside from going to church, obeying, and repenting. I didn’t know what his pleasure felt like, even when doing those acceptable things. I mostly saw God as wrathful and disappointed in me—I feared him but didn’t at all understand what it meant to “love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength” (Deut. 6:5).
That confusion and angst is probably why my relationship with climbing was distorted too: It was the sole focus of my life for a few years. I may have been obsessed, a little bit addicted. I clutched it too tightly.
Yet God did not take it away from me. Gradually, naturally even, my priorities changed and shifted, and eventually, I loosened my desperate grasp on climbing and made more space for other things, including life with God.
Even so, I still assumed these two parts of my life were disconnected. Then, one day 14 years ago, someone asked me if I knew that God delighted in me.
No way, I wanted to respond. But this point-blank question put a spotlight on my deformed view of God. I began to wonder what specifically God saw when he looked at me. Maybe he considered my love of climbing good. Maybe I was called to do it for some reason.
More recently, I read about the theology of play. This too has poked holes in my erroneous notion that God was disappointed in me and my love of the play of climbing. What if God’s work of creation itself is playful? God chose to create out of joy and desire, not out of a sense of obligation, and he called it good. This is very like how we think about play. And what if play is part of human nature and a way to interact with God?
“To give [running] up,” the Liddell line continues, “would be to hold [God] in contempt.” This play is fun, he says, but “not just fun,” and not at odds with the missionary work of the real-life Liddell.
If God is playful, then I delight him when I play—and when I play, I learn to delight in him.
Hugo Rahner, author of Man at Play, wrote of the playing God “who through this creative pouring out of himself makes it possible for the creature to understand him in the wonderful play of his works; who has made for us children’s toys out of the bright and variegated forms of his world wherewith to educate us … for things unseen and eternal things which are real and earnest.”
Did God give me rock climbing to teach me to love him? Yes way.
related
Rahner defined play as “a human activity which engages of necessity both soul and body” and “the process whereby the spirit ‘plays itself into’ the body of which it is a part.” It satisfies, he said, a “deep-seated longing for a free, unfettered, eager harmony between body and soul.”
Climbing allows me to experience at least a hint of this harmony. These moments are jubilant, a gift from the Father of Lights (James 1:17). They point me to him. They are fleeting, few and far between. They happen when I’m climbing near the limit of my ability.
Which brings us back to the beginning, the 60 seconds or so it took me to do—or “send,” as us climbers like to say—the hardest boulder problem I’ve ever done.
Completing those five difficult moves without falling was the result of years of training and several annual trips to that one climbing area in West Texas. Everything clicked in those few seconds: gravity, weather, my mind and body’s strength and energy. My self-consciousness fell away, and God revealed a bit of himself to me. I felt God’s pleasure.
It was as if I could hear God say, “I have summoned you by name; you are mine” (Isa. 43:1)—his own “Yes, Jen!” I was overwhelmed by his love, and my whole self responded in kind. I learned a bit more what it means to love the Lord with all my heart, soul, and strength.
Over these 30 years, the Lord, like a gentle potter, has slowly formed me to “seek [him] while he may be found” (55:6). He has trained my desires to align more closely with his own. Rock climbing has helped me, as Rahner proposed, “to understand [God] in the wonderful play of his works.” I’m tangibly reminded of his love as my “spirit ‘plays itself into’ the body of which it is a part.”
And since I have an inkling of what God’s pleasure feels like, I spend a lot more of my time looking for it in other places. I know I will find him in the community and sacraments at church, so I go. He’s near when I spend time daily in prayer, so I sit. He’s close by when I do the works of service to others he’s given me to do, so I do them. And so long as I’m still physically able and have the time, I’ll keep on climbing.
Jen Hemphill is a writer from Pittsburgh finishing up a memoir about rock climbing and motherhood. She writes at Pull-ups in the Basementon Substack.
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