“Little mercies are the earth- worms that loosen the rock- hard soil in your garden; the laughter we hear coming from a playground; and a second chance at anything. With practice, all of us can grow grateful hearts.”


– Lynn Coulter, author of Little Mercies: Celebrating God’s Everyday Grace and Goodness


sacred camouflaged in the profane.”


God in the Wilderness Raised in a devoutly Jewish family and ordained at the prestigious Hebrew Union College, Jamie Korngold was following a fairly typical rabbinical path in the 1990s. She presided over Saturday services at an ornate syna- gogue in Calgary, where she lead a large congregation in songs, chants and readings. Still, she often found herself thinking about the people who weren’t there. “No matter how great my sermons were, I knew I wasn’t going to reach beyond the pulpit,” she recalls, noting that 70 percent of Jews are not affiliated with a traditional congregation. “I needed to meet the people where they are.”


Today, she has no synagogue at all. Instead, through her rapidly grow- ing Boulder, Colorado-based Adventure Rabbi program, she leads brief Shab- bat services at a mountaintop warm- ing house at the Copper Mountain ski resort, before spending “a holy day” carving turns on powder-filled slopes with her congregants. For the Jewish New Year, she leads them on a hike to a mountain top, where they unroll a giant Torah and toss snow into a rushing stream to bid farewell to past mistakes and welcome new beginnings. At Passover, they—like their Biblical ancestors—gather in the desert, where


she tells the story of the Jewish Exodus from Egypt during their hike to a strik- ing red-rock arch in Moab, Utah. “It was an experience like none that I had ever had,” says Lori Ropa, 45, a lifelong Jew who attended an Ad- venture Rabbi Rosh Hashanah retreat with her husband, a Christian. “The op- portunity to have a peaceful connection with God and with myself amidst all of that beauty really creates an intense ex- perience for me,” says Ropa, who now attends Korngold’s services regularly. “I go because I want to be there, not because I feel I need to.” Korngold’s God in the Wilderness: Rediscovering the Spirituality of the Great Outdoors, includes a reminder that Moses had to hike across the desert and climb a mountain to receive the Ten Commandments. “The physical ex- ertion of the desert climb, coupled with the stark desert beauty, helped Moses to arrive spiritually and emotionally in a place beyond internal chatter—a place often called awe,” she writes, suggesting that, regardless of one’s faith, the very act of experiencing awe (for example, over a beautiful sunrise or the life cycle of a tree in the yard) con- nects us with something bigger. “So, you spend much of your day in a cubicle… Get a spider plant, and watch the miracle of its growth on top of your file cabinet,” Korngold advises. “Change your route to work so that you can drive through a park.”


The Sacred Track


For 58-year-old Warren Kay, Ph.D., a track coach and religious studies pro- fessor at Merrimack College, in Boston, the act of running represents a move- able sanctuary where mental clutter falls away and time seems to bend to allow him to connect with himself and his higher power. Kay, author of Running: The Sacred


Art, believes that, “Running is the new yoga,” and notes that spiritual traditions have embraced running as a sacred vessel for centuries. In the village of Mount Hiei, Japan, members of a small Buddhist sect, known as the Marathon Monks, engage in a grueling, seven-year challenge in which seekers run as many as 50 miles a day in 100-day blocks in pursuit of enlightenment. In Tibet, the


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