Mount St. Mary’s is a hero-making institution
A quest is built into its name
To climb the mountain is to launch an adventure
To win a fair maiden is a moral test
To get the gold is to go into the dark as fighters go
Unlike other universities the Mount is structured like a crucible
At the dizzy height of the college experience a crisis looms
Embedded in the elevation of the mountain is an invitation to climb
A quest is a question that must be answered with our heels
In my life I’ve met only a handful of people who are truly good at turning a daily dawdle into a gainful ascent
Getting lost is a step in the right direction
To hazard the quarries and canyons of the Catoctins is to enshrine sure footedness – a certain self-understanding
Savor a boundless view
Sip from a mountain stream
Watch spirits ascending in the morning mist over monuments to a saving Mother and Child
Made for wayfarers, the Mount campus is fourteen hundred acres of deep woods, hidden heights, and dark, meandering trails
Four years is not enough to plumb the mysteries of Emmitsburg
On the mountain we range and ramble
We travel light
To unlock its bounty we pursue a fool’s errand
We refuse to become tools of our tools
So we put them down and walk empty-handed into the unknown
A romp through the woods rouses the hero within
On an amble up the mountain we aim high
At its peak we see out far and in deep
At Mount St. Mary’s we practice Thoreau’s “art of walking”
With so much room for wandering, we sprout a sixth sense
We read the landscape with our legs
We pursue Thoreau’s “genius for sauntering”
We become a “Sainte-Terrer”
A Saint of the Terrain
A holy “saunterer” like the heroes that have hiked the holy hill before us to a peak that’s not printed on a map
Epic places never are
John Dubois, Elizabeth Seton, Stanley Rother
We walk in the footsteps of heroes, saints, and martyrs
And if we ramble rightly we can reach the Holy Land itself at the summit of that insurmountable height
What is a Mountaineer but a risk-taker compelled to aim at high peaks for the point of testing the nerve
Strangers to the sitting and over-stimulation of cities, sons and daughters of the Mount stand ready to embrace the physical hardship of a harrowing ascent
Indoors we wither
Killed by convenience
Starved of adventure
To scale a soaring summit is to embrace a wilderness Rite of Passage
To climb inside a cave is to experience a Darkness Retreat
To return from the mountaintop is to have glimpsed the divine law
Out-of-doors in the sun and the wild we practice spiritual autophagy
Shedding self-delusion with each stride we find our direction in each stray turn, lost canyon, and trackless depth
Like in stories of old we negotiate difficult terrain to probe our spiritual fitness
Jesus walked
He never went for a carriage ride
He never sat in the climate control of a classroom
Jesus walked
He walked and fasted
Walked and prayed
And he reached the mountaintop
Wise men know that walking leads to worship, that wonder awakens a philosophical mood, and that in wandering we stumble into truths unfamiliar to the stationary and sedate
At Mount St. Mary’s we have the Church in the Woods
Better to get there by foot
Climbing from the Terrace to the Grotto there are 119 steps
In wandering we worship
In worship we wonder
We ponder the unaccounted years of Christ
We marvel at such wasted time; such opportunity cost
From age 12 to 30 the Savior of the World went on an unsupervised walkabout
To scholars Christ’s “Lost Years” are a Biblical conundrum
But that missing link was not a parental misstep or a lost chance
It was an instance of family leave, an excused absence from the work of saving the world to delight in family matters
Jesus, Mary, and Joseph are the Holy Family
At the Mount we say the “family” saved the “Church”
On Mary’s Mountain school is preparation for a happy home
In the hands of great storytellers a walk in the woods turns a domestic excursion into a supernatural encounter
American tall tales abound with this archetype
Young Goodman Brown bid his wife farewell to take a midnight stroll in a dark forest
Along the way he met a serpent who stole his faith
Rip Van Winkle hiked a hill to escape the demands of domestic routine
Waking 20 years later he learned a lesson about wasting time and injuring eternity
Whether it be Washington Irving or Nathaniel Hawthorne the woods are filled with peril and possibility
On Mary’s Mountain a golden virgin is the author of a hero’s tale where doubts are defeated, duty is fulfilled, and dragons crouch in dark corners dubbed with hidden gold
At the pinnacle of Mary’s Mountain a winning warrior queen stands with her foot on the head of a serpent
In the Book of Revelation the hero-making Mother of God confronts a loathsome lizard at the end of time
By the Bible’s last book a garden snake has morphed into a cosmic dragon
Offering prayers powerful enough to overcome the darkest dread the Blessed Mother makes heroes from the rare earth of an Emmitsburg mountain
When brave knights gather on the edge of the unknown they aim their lances at the darkest part of the wood
The darkest part of the wood is always the cave
At the Mount we have the National Shrine Grotto
We have a deep forest and a dark cave
A fair maiden and a deadly dragon
A glimpse of Eden and an apocalyptic sign
Summoning the courage to enter the dragon’s lair, alone, we are alert to the fear that the deadliest foe lurks within
Proximity to Mary’s Mountain awakens an instinct to defend
On the highest peak the Mother of God guards an innocent child from a green-eyed dragon
She saves her son so that he can save the world
At Mount St. Mary’s, a golden virgin points out our path – the purpose of life is to be a hero
Seizing upon dragon-slaying, storytellers have long-used battles with monsters to excite cultural renewal
Defending the innocent from reptilian predators is how heroes are made and civilizations reborn
A successor to the dragon quests of old, a trek to the National Shrine Grotto is the university’s ultimate final examination
Dark caves are a hero’s dare
At the Mount we are not lost in a dark wood
We hunt for dragons to slay
At the end of our walking we return to where we started, in the company of a saving Mother and Child, who endure in eternity, declaring the surest sense of direction
