"The Return to Cold Mountain."

Rev. Dr. Morris Hudgins.
January 23, 2000.

Introduction
Today's sermon has been through several stages and rewrites. I first read Cold Mountain in 1997. When I arrived in Cincinnati I preached a sermon on the book at St. John's. Some of you asked me to preach on the book at Northern Hills. I decided this sermon should be given, not on a summer day, but in the dead of winter, when the snow has covered the ground, and people need an inspiring message to help them get through the season.

Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier is my favorite book of the 1990s. I will not tell you the whole story this morning, especially the climax, but I will discuss the theme of this well written book. I will say this about the ending. Sharon Dittmar, minister at First Church, and former Interim Minister at Northern Hills, loved the book but hated the ending. She hated the ending so much she rewrote it.

For those who like their stories "happily every after" this conclusion may not please you. I will only say the ending if not the epilogue was real for the times. It was the Civil War. It was not a "happily ever after" period of history.

As it turns out I am told after the author wrote this book, he was not happy with it. His wife passed it on to another author who told him to quit his job as Professor of English at North Carolina State and keep writing. This book is going to make him famous. He took her advice and is now writing instead of teaching.

Since the book has been out for some time, I will say that I felt the last scene before the epilogue is another memorable scene. This movie has to be made into a film and if you leave off the epilogue the scene before it makes for a good ending. Enough on the ending, let's talk about the story.

The Story
Cold Mountain is a universal story about returning home after an exile. I have a feeling many in this room have been on this journey. The New York Times describes the book as an "odyssey." The Christian Science Monitor calls the book "a wonderfully convincing portrait of two people living through a period of hardship, uncertainty and dislocation." Not many of us have experienced the type of hardships faced during the Civil War, but most know the feeling of uncertainty and dislocation. We are living in such a period of history. For many of us, we don't know what is coming tomorrow or where we will be a year from now.

Allow me to tell the broad story of Cold Mountain. Cold Mountain is the story about a man, Inman, who was injured in the battle of Petersburg, and a woman, Ada, with whom he fell in love before the war. During his recovery he returns to his home, Cold Mountain, North Carolina, to be with Ada. The book is about their trials during this trip home.

Cold Mountain is also a book about lost faith because of the hatefulness of life—men warring against each other, stealing from families so they can go on warring. You might ask, "Why the title?" The answer is found in a poignant paragraph about Inman's faith. Here is a man deeply wounded, physically and spiritually. What is he going to do? Can he believe in God in the midst of such devastation? Is there a God, a heaven? Here is his answer:

Cold Mountain . . .soared in his mind as a place where all his scattered forces might gather. Inman did not consider himself to be a superstitious person, but he did believe that there is a world invisible to us. He no longer thought of that world as heaven, nor did he still think that we get to go there when we die. Those teachings had been burned away. But he could not abide by a universe composed only of what he could see, especially when it was so frequently foul. So he held to the idea of another world, a better place, and he figured he might as well consider Cold Mountain to be the location of it as anywhere. (p. 17)

To get to Cold Mountain Inman had to overcome many trials. He faced death, darkness and evil. Yes, there is evil. The most evil character in the book is a preacher who chooses to kill a young girl because he got her pregnant. He was going to bury her when Inman happened upon his crime. It was all Inman could do to keep from killing this evil man. But he didn't and though he hated the man he treated him as a person of dignity which he was not.

This novel is the story of a man who has lost his faith during the war and is returning home to find that faith. When he finds it he says he will not let it go. His life is so full of despair. One of his encounters on his trip home is with Sara, an eighteen year old who has lost her husband, after he seeds her a child. Sara has faith in Inman enough to share her bed but asks him not to touch her. What an act of faith. He follows her request. Still he cannot sleep. Frazier writes:

What little sleep he did get was troubled by dreams that emanated from the quilt top. The beasts of it chased after him in a dark wood, and there was not place one for sanctuary no matter where he turned. All the world of that dark realm gathered dire and intent against lone him, and everything about it was grey and black, but for teeth and claws as white as the moon. (p. 245)

You may get the feeling that Cold Mountain is a depressing book about loss of faith and a lot of killing. That is true. It is also a book about faith and love. Even in the midst of war there are moments of love and tenderness. Yes, we see killings. But we also see as my colleague, Barbara Cooke calls it, "An Abiding Sense of Goodness." You have to look closely at our world to find that sense of goodness.

What is this abiding sense of goodness? I will describe three possible ways to see this reality—what some might call God—the beauty and wonder of nature, the love between people, and the hopes and dreams for the future.

Harmony of Nature
First, is the harmonious existence within nature. Yes, there is chaos, evil, estrangement, pain and death. But beneath all of this is a harmonious existence, a reality, pulling for us, wanting us to succeed. Nature exemplifies this harmony, this beauty, this wonder-ful existence.

So where do we find that abiding sense of goodness? For Frazier and Inman and Ruby and Ada it is in the beauty and wonder of nature. So after Frazier tells of his shame of fighting in this war Inman,

. . .looked at the berries and the birds and had felt cheered by them happy they had waited for him to come to his senses, even though he feared himself deeply at variance with such elements of the harmonious. (p. 218)

As Darwin wrote in his journal in 1839 and Frazier quotes in the prelude to his novel:

It is difficult to believe in the dreadful but quiet war of organic beings, going on in the peaceful woods and smiling fields.

Goodness is all through nature, in the flowing stream, on the mountain top, in the falling snow. It is in the beauty of the sunrise and in the peace of sunset. As Wendell Berry writes:

When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.

I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief. I come into the presence of still water. And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light. For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

Yes, in nature we find an abiding sense of goodness.

Love—A Companion Voice
Second, goodness is found between loving people. One of the most memorable scenes in Cold Mountain is the story about Inman's arrival home and his meeting with Ada. The war years changed them both. Their meeting is not like either had planned. Inman thought:

Four years gone warring, but back now on home ground and I'm no better than a rank stranger here. A wandering pilgrim in my own place. Such is the price I'll pay for the past four years. Firearms standing between me and everything I want. (p. 321).

Evidently, Ada recognized his nervousness. She wanted to make him feel at home again.

As they walked, Ada talked to Inman in the voice she had heard (her friend) Ruby use to speak to the horse when it was nervous. The words did not much matter. You could say anything. Speculate in the most common way on the weather or recite lines from "The Ancient Mariner," it was all the same. All that was needed was a calming tone, the easement of a companion voice. Frazier is a wonderful writer with a gift for the English language. I love that phrase.

What we find in this book is a woman who loses her father but then gains faith in herself as the story goes on and a man who loses faith because of the horrors of war—both are in need of the easement of a companion voice. Early in the book Inman writes a letter to Ada which tells us how the war changed him. He writes:

I am coming home one way or another, and I do not know how things might stand between us. I first thought to tell in this letter what I have done and seen so that you might judge me before I return. But I decided it would need a page as broad as the blue sky to write that tale, and I have not the will or the energy. Do you recall that night before Christmas four years ago when I took you in my lap in the kitchen by the stove and you told me you would forever like to sit there and rest your head on my shoulder? Now it is a bitter surety in my heart that if you knew what I have seen and done, it would make you fear to do such again. (p. 17)

The return to Cold Mountain is Inman's innate drive to overcome that fear. After fighting he wants to find love again. All through this book we see love: We see it between Ada and Ruby, between Ada and Inman, between Inman and several of the people he encountered on his trip home.

Inman also encounters a goatwoman—a woman who lives with goats. Frazier describes their encounter:

He looked her in the eyes and was surprised to find that they were wells of kindness despite all her hard talk. Not a soul he had met in some time drew him out as this goatwoman did, and so he told her what was in his heart. The shame he felt now to think of his zeal in sixty-one to go off and fight the downtrodden mill workers of the Federal army, men so ignorant it took many lessons to convince them to load their cartridges ball foremost. These were the foes, so numberless that not even their own government put much value to them. They just ran them at you for years on end, and there seemed no shortage. You could kill them down until you grew heartsick and they would still keep ranking up to march southward. (p. 218)

This is the kind of internal agony Inman is fighting on the way to Cold Mountain. As he concludes:

War took a man out of that circle of regular life and made a season of its own, not much dependent on anything else. He had not been immune to its pull. But sooner or later you get awful tired and just plain sick of watching people killing one another for every kind of reason at all, using whatever implements fall to hand. (p. 218)

Inman overcomes his doubt and his despair to love even the unlovable—he even had compassion for the vile preacher. The goatwoman had compassion for Inman, this stranger that could just as easily steal all she had. Knowing this she still took him in.

This is the message of this book. We all see the evil in the world. You don't have to fight in a war to see "the dreadful but quiet war of organic beings." It is all around us— in the 14 year old boy in Paducah, Kentucky, or the middle aged man in Orlando, or the drug dealer in Cincinnati. It is all around us, this dreadful but quiet war of organic beings.

There is much room for doubt and despair. There is so much violence in our world. I encourage you to find that abiding sense of goodness that is also there. May you find it in the eyes of a small child. May you find it in the touch of a loved one, or the sound of their voice though it be a thousand miles away. May you find it in the feeling of "irrational exuberance" as you approach life anew.

Hopes and Dreams
There is another reason to believe in goodness. Goodness is found in our hopes and dreams for the future. As we see in this book, Cold Mountain, oftentimes these dreams are not realized. But we must live life as if we can fulfill our dreams. This is what Cold Mountain is all about. It is the place of our dreams and hopes. Cold Mountain is the place where hope is created.

God, that abiding sense of goodness, may be a spark of hope in your heart. Inman even in his despair felt that spark. As he met Ada he overcame that feeling of estrangement and thought of the future to be measured by the growth of green poplar wood in which they found a flint left by people of an earlier time who also had hopes and dreams. This scene caused Inman to think of a future scene:

He and Ada bent, grey as ash, bringing children to the tree in some metallic future world, the dominant features of which he could not even imagine. (p. 338)

The children,

. . .will see the flint blade as if it had been conjured up. A little piece of art with a clear purpose is how Inman pictured it. And though Ada could not fully envision that distant time, she could imagine the amazement on little faces. (p. 338)

That abiding sense of goodness in this case is the love of two people— the safe haven they would provide for one another and the dreams they would create together. Frazier writes:

With the snow piling up outside, the warm dry cabin hidden in its fold of the mountains felt like a safe haven indeed, though it had not been such for the people who had lived there. Soldiers had found them and made the cabin trailhead to a path of exile, loss, and death. But for a while that night, it was a place that held within its walls no pain nor even a vague memory collection of pain. (p. 342)

I return to the conclusion of the story, that scene that could have been the end of the story. This ending seems to bring together all the themes I have mentioned: the goal of peace and tranquility during war time, the beauty and peacefulness of nature, the importance of relationship, the most of all the need we all have for hopes and dreams for the future. It goes like this:

An observer situated up on the brow of the ridge would have looked down on a still, distant tableau in the winter woods. A creek, remnants of snow. A wooded glade, secluded from the generality of mankind. A pair of lovers. The man reclined with his head in the woman's lap. She, looking down into his eyes, smoothing back the hair from his brow. He, reaching an arm awkwardly around to hold her at the soft part of her hip. Both touching each other with great intimacy. A scene of such quiet and peace that the observer on the ridge could avouch to it later in such a way as might lead those of glad temperaments to imagine some conceivable history where long decades of happy union stretched before the two on the ground.

Maybe some would prefer this book would have ended here. Others may prefer another ending altogether. I can only say, if so, do as Sharon did and rewrite the story. That is your choice.

In closing, my prayer for you is that you will find in the midst of exile, loss and death, a place where there is no pain, not even a vague memory collection of pain. May you find an abiding sense of goodness in the heart of another, in a good deed, an act of kindness, a feeling of hope where there was once despair.

Think of Inman and Ada fighting for survival. Think of the homeless, the sick, the imprisoned who are looking for some goodness in their life. Be a companion voice. May goodness abide in us, in you and me, this winter season. Some may even see God in that abiding sense of goodness. Blessed be and Amen.