The Bridge of Sighs

Extending halfway across a ravine at the far eastern edge of a narrow trail meandering its way through a dense deciduous wood is a small plank bridge. It overlooks groupings of birches and oaks and maples and sycamores, their branches, now stripped of their garments of leaves, forming a thin canopy for the carpet of fallen leaves and limbs below, thin enough for the autumn light from an angled sun to gather in strips and rays here and there scattered across the forest floor.

It stops suddenly as if in mid-construction, but its finished railings and wooden support beams suggest that its intention was to bring a traveler to an end of the trail in as dramatic and poignant a way as is possible here in the shadow of the Ozarks. It is not elevated, but the descending ground beneath gives it a feel of crossing over a body of water or a gorge, and looking down you expect to see a surging river overflowing its banks. Instead, you see scattered piles of leaves, twigs, some small scrub bushes, and innumerable trunks of trees, briars, short stalky weeds, and, if your eyes follow the sloping land far enough into the horizon, the opposite side of the valley.

The Bridge to Nowhere. That’s what they call it.

I call it the Bridge of Sighs.

I’ve followed this trail to its end, and I’m standing now on the bridge looking out into the wilds of creation. There is nothing tame about the wilderness beyond the railings, nor predictable. But there is something veiled, something secret, something hidden.

It’s hidden by the shadows that creep over the rolling hills and in the barren branches just overhead. The wind kicking up the cold soil hints of it. The sun spilling light into crevices in the valley tells of it. The sky, having turned that ocean-deep, cloudless blue with the burgeoning loss of summer’s warmth – so deep, in fact, that you feel as if you could almost dive into it and be lost forever in its immensity – speaks of this something hidden like the waves on a beach break with a certain mystery of the push and pull of currents cloaked within the water’s depths. There are whispers here, haunting whispers – sighs – of something just behind and beyond what I can see, something narrated by all my eyes take in, and all they do not.

A gust catches in the branches like the heart in my throat and a couple of remaining leaves abandon their dwelling in the canopy and migrate slowly toward the ground.

Five months ago I walked these same steps and stood at this same spot on the bridge, but the air I breathed was much different then. It was full, moist, warm, like a lover’s breath, and the humid breeze kicking up through the foliage her kiss. I remember barely able to see the ground through the thick greens and reds and browns of forest life. Small animals scurried underneath me, and I felt the gaze of larger ones off in the distance. Sounds of wings and chirps and wind filled the forest.

But those images are hard to recapture now, the memories have somehow faded through shorter days and longer shadows. So much has waned, so much has been hidden. The trees like skeletons seem to groan now, shivering in their bark, stretching for the sun’s shelter, their long branches like arms reaching in the ache.

These woods are not old. They are, in fact, remains of an abandoned military training camp from some half-century ago, now taking over the landscape. But they feel old, ancient even. And if it is not them, then it is what comes through them that is old and timeless. That hint, that tinge of longing, that pang of ache, that hidden something – it is old. Old and full of wisdom.

I have always felt like the wilderness expanse gives room for my heart to come out, to stand and breathe the free air, to rise to its true –or truer—height and stretch its arms and yawn in its awakening. Something has been hidden in me for a long time, from a time more ancient, I think, than the age of the secrets these lands have to reveal, something echoed in these aching wildlands, something whispered of here. My heart, too, groans and awaits being clothed in its full and radiant and living glory.

Much of what happens when the Kingdom comes is turn the world on its head and shake it up until it no longer resembles it at all. In reality, it is the world that is a poor reflection of the Kingdom of God, not the other way around, a reflection marred badly by the gravity of the fall. In this Kingdom that Jesus came to announce, it is the one who has reaped that gets to sow (Matthew 13:23). It is the one who has much that will get more (Matthew 25:29). It is the last that will be first (Matthew 19:30). It is the poor that will have limitless real estate (Matthew 5:3). It is in dying that we will have life – real life (Matthew 16:25). It is through being held back that we will be released (Romans 8:22-23).

The forest is in a very real sense growing old. Its hair is falling out as leaves from trees, and the same trees’ branches are like the cold, frail extremities of an old body, too easily broken. Color has faded to pale. The breath is faint, the pulse is weak. The only way I can be out here this day on the bridge looking into this dying forest and my heart not break is that I know it will return to full bloom. It has, every year. The life will come back, and it will be all the more glorious for having been gone. The greens and reds, the black earth, the flowers bursting forth, the robins and caterpillars and bobcats – they will return. What is now hidden will yet be revealed.

And the glory to be revealed at season’s change is only a hint, still yet only a whisper of what is to come. It is being held back until we are ready with it to be set loose in the age to come. That memory, too, is weak, and the images faded. But they are being restored. I close my eyes, and stretch my cramped muscles, and imagine when the dam bursts and all is released into our full and true natures.

The wind has turned a bit colder, so I bundle my jacket a bit against its biting force. One more glance toward the trees, and then I turn to head back along the winding path, my heart pregnant with expectant hope and anticipation with what awaits.