Robert Farrar Capon

Robert Farrar Capon

"Our pride drives us to establish our own righteousness. We strive all our life to see ourselves as keepers of rules we cannot keep, as loyal subjects of laws under which we can only be judged outlaws. Yet so deep is our need to derive our identity from our own self-respect – so profound our conviction that unless we watch our step, the watchbird will take away our name – that we will spend a lifetime trying to do the impossible rather than, for even one carefree minute, consent to having it done for us by someone else." Robert Farrar Capon

I know this is not a PCT/hiking post, but if you are curious about this specific PCT thru-hiker, you need to know this. One of my favorite authors is Robert Farrar Capon. He passed away in September of 2013, at the age of 88. He wrote 27 books, most of which are focused on theology and the theme of grace, but his other passion was cooking and he wrote several cook books as well. I was introduced to Capon in college and immediately fell in love with his writing. It was his book on the outrage of God's grace that forced me to see that I had not truly experienced God's grace and that most of my life I had been living on the bus fumes of religion and my own righteousness rather than in the pure air of God's grace and the freedom it offers. Just getting the book is a story in itself, and as soon as it arrived, I began reading. After finishing it the first time I was angry...how can he say that? How can he make it sound so easy-so cheap? The second time I read it I was scared...what if he's right? What if God really is that in love with us? And after reading it a third time, in less than a month, I remember waking my wife up in the middle of the night, in our first year of marriage, and with tears in my eyes telling her: "God loves me! And it's even better than that. He likes me too! He doesn't just love me because He has to; He likes me and has invited me to the party." GOD loves me. God LOVES me. God loves ME!

Have you experienced God's grace?

"The life of grace is not an effort on our part to achieve a goal we set ourselves. It is a continually renewed attempt simply to believe that someone else has done all the achieving that is needed and to live in relationship with that person, whether we achieve or not. If that doesn't seem like much to you, you're right: it isn't. And, as a matter of fact, the life of grace is even less than that. It's not even our life at all, but the life of that Someone Else rising like a tide in the ruins of our death.” Robert Farrar Capon

That someone else is Jesus. Just say His name. He is there and He is listening.