I. Lonely People

"Lonely People" by Langston Hughes:
Lonely people
In the lonely night
Grab a lonely dream
And hold it tight.
Lonely people
In the lonely day
Work to salt
Their dream away.
Lonely people.

Inman rose and dressed in his new clothes...Then he strapped on his packs and went to the tall window and looked out. It was the dark of the new moon. Ribbons of fog moved low on the ground though the sky was clear overhead. He set his foot on the sill and stepped out the window.[1]

Most of the rest of the book chronicles Inman's desperate, lonely trip home. All the way he is hunted by the Home Guard, marauding hooligans charged with rounding up Confederate deserters to send back to the front. Brutal encounters with the Guard and others mark his endless journey home--almost every step of the way. Oh, a few times he is helped by compassionate strangers, but not very often. For the most part, he is isolated, alienated and utterly alone, traveling off the road in the dark of night to avoid trouble. Day after day, night after night blend together in a monotonous fog of grinding danger and crushing loneliness.

Somewhere deep inside him, the dream of home and hearth and peace and love feeds him like an umbilical cord feeds a fetus. It's all he has.[2]

II. Carolina Cabin

"Carolina Cabin" by Langston Hughes:
There's hanging moss
And holly
And tall straight pine
About this little cabin
In the wood.
Inside
A crackling fire,
Warm red wine,
And youth and life
And laughter
That is good.
Outside
The world is gloomy,
The winds of winter cold,
As down the road
A wand'ring poet
Must roam.
But here there's peace
And laughter
And love's old story told
Where two people
Make a home.

Inman's long odyssey ends when at last he reaches the snow-blanketed Southern Blue Ridge Mountains. He is back in his homeland. Somehow he tracks Ada, her friend Ruby and Ruby's badly wounded father in the mountains. Also fleeing from violence and horror, they are staying in a village of abandoned Cherokee cabins, its people long since driven onto the Trail of Tears. The cabins are made out of chestnut logs, peeled and notched and lapped. It's roofed with shingles and curls of chestnut bark...Grey lichen grows on the cabin logs and dried stalks of horseweed and pigweed and fleabane rise from the snow in the doorways. The cabins, hidden in the fold of a mountain, provide a safe place for Ruby's father either to heal or to die. But when Ada first discovers the abandoned village, it seems like the lonesomest place on earth.

Ada and Inman are reunited not far from the cabins while Ada is out hunting for turkey. It is not the romantic reunion either envisioned: unable to see each other in the blinding snow, they stand a duel-length apart pointing guns at each other. Only slowly do they realize who each other is and lower their guns.

Though they are there only long enough for Ruby's father to recover and Inman to gain some strength and all of them to figure out what to do next, and though the tragic fate of the earlier Cherokee inhabitants foreshadows more trouble ahead, the old cabins miraculously become a home. There, in these long deserted cabins, a crackling fire again warms human inhabitants. Quiet conversations and laughter that is good and lovemaking melt the frozen hearts of Inman and Ada as "love's old story" is again told. The "lonesomest place on earth" becomes ever so briefly a place of warmth and love and connection--just as it was long ago for the Cherokee families. The world outside is still gloomy and the winds of winter cold, but there is warmth on the inside. Ada and Inman are home.

III. Heart

"Heart" by Langston Hughes
Pierrot
Took his heart
And hung it
On a wayside wall.
He said, "Look,
Passersby,
Here is my heart!"
But no one was curious.
No one cared at all
That there hung Pierrot's heart
That there hung Pierrot's heart
On the public wall.
So Pierrot
Took his heart
And hid it far away.
Now people wonder
Where his heart is
Today.

All the tortuous way home, Inman desperately wants to disburden himself of his crushing loneliness. But he fears that the war and the terrible brutality he experienced on the long journey home has left him broken, broken beyond redemption.

Ada is sitting next to the fireplace; Ruby and her dad are in another cabin. Inman sits behind Ada, puts his arms on her shoulders. "I'm ruined beyond repair, is what I fear," he tells Ada. "And if so, in time we'd both be wretched and bitter." What will happen if he opens himself up to Ada? he wonders. The pain, piled high within, will come cascading out. What if she can't handle it? What if she flees? Or worse, what if his pain overwhelms and destroys her, too? He contemplates walking out of the cabin, leaving Ada and leaving hope forever.

Ada shifts and turns and looks at him. He had unbuttoned his collar in the warmth, and there was the white wound at his neck. She sees other wounds in the look of his face and in his eyes, which would not quite meet hers.

She turns back around. What she thinks is that cures of all sorts exist in the natural world. Its every nook and cranny apparently lay filled with psychic and restorative to bind up rents from the outside. Even the most hidden root or web serve some use. And there is also spirit rising from within to knit sturdy scar over the backsides of wounds. Either way, though, you have to work at it, and they'd both fail if you doubted them too much.

Finally, without looking at him, she says, "I know people can be mended. Not all, and some more immediately than others. But some can be. I don't see why not you."

"Why not me?" Inman says, as if to test the thought.

IV. In Time of Silver Rain

"In Time of Silver Rain" by Langston Hughes
In time of silver rain
The earth
Puts forth new life again,
Green grasses grow
And flowers lift their heads,
And over all the plain
The wonder spreads of life,
Of life,
Of life!
In time of silver rain
The butterflies
Lift silken wings
To catch a rainbow cry,
And trees put forth
New leaves to sing
In joy beneath the sky
As down the roadway
Passing boys and girls
Go singing, too,
In time of silver rain
In time of silver rain
When spring
And life
Are new.

My first year of divinity school was one of the hardest of my life. Leaving the nurturing web of my college community and the beauty of coastal Maine, a place I loved, I moved to the seemingly endless asphalt of Chicago's South side. And I jumped into the non-community that is the University of Chicago, a place one friend later described as a "monastery--only without the sense of community." As the gray winter settled in around the gray buildings, I spiraled down and down and down. Lonely, disconnected from a place and people I loved, unsure about my career, feeling like I was in a hostile world, I can now see that I was depressed.

Haltingly, uncertainly, I reached out for help here and there. Most of my efforts felt rebuffed: how could other people, lost in their own loneliness, reach back? At times I felt like Pierrot, my heart either out on the public wall or hidden away even from myself.

And then spring came. One person I reached out to for help took my hand in hers--a person I have now been married to for eleven years. Other friendships came to life and I began to feel again the webs of community around me. As the earth put forth new life--you see, even in the big city there are glorious glimpses of the earth--as the green grasses grew and the flowers lifted their heads and the butterflies lifted silken wings to catch a rainbow cry and trees put forth new leaves to sing in joy beneath the sky, the wonder of life began to spread in my heart and soul again. I recognized anew that this world of ours is a field of incredible wonder and beauty. And slowly, accompanied by friends and the Spirit of Life that lives within and between us, I found myself home once again.

The journey I took from Maine to Chicago, from community to loneliness and isolation and depression, then back again to community, was a whole lot less dramatic and brutal than Inman's. But Inman's journey is a powerful metaphor for me. Cold Mountain strikes a chord with so many others and me because at some level deep within, in some way, the contours of the story are familiar. Inman travels from pain and loneliness and despair toward wholeness. That is a human journey, common at one time or another to just about all of us.

I have faith now that the spring will come. And when it does in all its glory, there's nothing to but sing in praise and thanks.

Words in introduction to Hymn #1: "May Nothing Evil Cross This Door"

Copyright 2000 by Roger B. Bertschausen. All rights reserved.

[1]Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1997), p. 19. Many direct quotations from Cold Mountain are interwoven into the text through the rest of the sermon.
[2] At the conclusion of each section of the sermon, Cynthia Stiehl sang the words of the Langston Hughes poem, set to music by Jean Berger. The four poems by Langston Hughes are from Fields of Wonder.