On Saturday mornings I read the newsletter. But with the attention span of a goldfish, reading is fractured by multiple diversions. I gaze out the window quite a lot, up at the sky, but also, more usefully, at the BBC news. Sometimes, there’s a thread running throughout such seemingly disparate activities. 

Today I read an article about Indian mountaineer Dorje Morup, whose body lies in the death zone close to the summit of Mount Everest, orange oxygen bottles scattered nearby (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cz05xn35xj7o). He’s not alone up there. Everest hoards hundreds of bodies, holds them close in the cold, thin air, including two fellow climbers from the same expedition, whereabouts unknown after 30 years. 

Wikipedia tells me that there’s an area below Everest’s peak that’s so strewn with corpses in their brightly coloured mountaineering clothes that it has become known as ‘Rainbow Valley’. I picture this in my mind’s eye, a climbers’ purgatory, apparel shredded by the purifying wind, fluttering like prayer flags. The dead serve as a warning to even the most experienced of climbers as they pass by on their way to and from the summit, a reminder that the weather is the jealous guardian of places where we are not made to be, that your luck can run out in a second. Some bodies have come to serve as trail markers, given nicknames like ‘Sleeping Beauty’, labels that objectify, that keep their fate at a distance from the living. Dorje Morup is known as ‘Green Boots’. He is in the news today because a recovery is planned, itself a highly risky venture for all concerned, and our prayers are with them for that. 

Everest’s death zone breaks through the here-and-now like the tip of an iceberg, an outcrop where only the past exists. The living may move through and return, but every fatality puts down his or her marker in time. For Dorje Morup it’s frozen into the snow of 1996 (climate change permitting). With each passing day, the gap widens between their present and ours, so much to catch up on but no possibility to share. If they do manage to recover Dorje Morup and return him to his family, he is no longer ‘Green Boots’ but becomes once more of the tangible present, a dignified resolution, a husband and father at peace. 

In this week’s second reading for The Assumption [1 Corinthians 15:20-27], St Paul focusses on the defeat of death and on the certainty of the resurrection. It is often said that each day is a gift, but surely each day with others is something much greater still, the loss at parting magnified. For those who believe in salvation, the promise of eternal life is the greatest gift of all: in eternity, time, by definition, means nothing, it cannot keep us apart; relationships and bonds mean everything. 

Colin Davey