Desert Pilgrimage Journal
Brian C. Taylor
Winter 2002
Bluff, Utah — January 16
St. Christopher’s Episcopal Church is a collection of low stone buildings, the trailer where Bishop Steven and Catherine Plummer live, and a teepee-shaped chapel, which was unfortunately designed to look “Indian” this way by some visiting church volunteers some time ago. Dirt everywhere, packed hard in places where trucks circle around, Steven and Cathy’s big wooly sheep wandering about with at least a dozen wild-looking cats, a few trees, lots of tumbleweed and high sandstone cliffs rising up directly behind the buildings. The mission is in the San Juan River valley, framed by mesas on both sides.
In 1943 Fr. Baxter Liebler and his wife came here with family money, and built this mission complex with school, vicarage, clinic, and church, at a time when there was no pavement, few cars, no social services. The Navajo lived then as they always had. Over the years Liebler would leave for extended periods to raise money among his friends and contacts back home, one time speaking 38 times in two months for this purpose. Once a thriving community center, the local people used to be picked up in Jeeps and brought in for worship, education, and healthcare. Now the only activity is when a few of them come on their own for Sunday Eucharist, and the many who come daily for the good well water at the pump. It has the feeling of a ghost town where a few survivors still live.
Fr. Ian Corbett is my host, a gentle, intelligent, compassionate, meticulous, talkative (lonely, I suspect) and very hospitable Brit. He has been Vicar here only since the summer. But he’s had many years experience, as he put it, “serving indigenous people in remote places” like Saskatchewan and Lesotho, where he ran a seminary and secretly worked with the African National Congress of South Africa, receiving political refugees from over the border. The Dine language is very hard to learn, he says, not like the languages he’s mastered elsewhere. You can repeat after a native speaker a two-syllable word 10 times, making it sound (you think) exactly like what you hear, and the Navajo will giggle and shake their head every time, telling you that you’ve just said 10 different things.
Ian says he comes to these remote lands and cultures because he “likes the people.” Something about his story of struggling with a large busy parish in Manchester England tells me he knows where he needs to be. An old newspaper picture of him is on his desk, as a young curate in England in the early ‘70's, very long hair and beard, dressed in cassock, leading through the streets a group of protesters who are carrying a mock coffin with the name of a theatre company on it.
Yesterday I took a long hike up on the mesa. The easiest way to the top was by following the arroyo, occasionally clambering up rocks and pushing through brush. A small rivulet trickled along, and as I neared the top I suddenly was aware that upstream it had dried up, and found myself following a dry arroyo. Tracing my steps backward, I located the spot, hidden by bushes and a tree, where the water pooled up out of the depths of the earth. I laughed.
This land seems so inhospitable until you pay close attention and find the sources of life. There’s something so appealing, so true to life, about having to look for these places, instead of having easy water, shade, soft leafy forest floor, and abundance flowing all around you. I imagine that the prophets of Israel who went into the desert “wilderness” spent a fair amount of time in the wadis, like arroyo stream beds here, where there was water, trees, shade, animals, life. If they hadn’t, they would’ve died.
Heading south of Bluff towards Medicine Hat this morning, I turned off the pavement into The Valley of the Gods, which Ian advised me not to do, since the road was rumored to be bad. But with a name like that, how could I resist? The truck easily handled the washboard roller-coaster road, and 15 miles later I found myself surrounded by huge red formations, sticking up like so many petrified deities (although Steven tells me that the source of the name is not Native, but white). All alone with a clear blue sky, a flat, massive, valley floor, and multi-colored mesas miles away, encircling the monuments. I sat there with the other stones, not a soul in sight for hours, complete silence and stillness. Well, not complete: there were the crows, the wind in my ears, and the occasional jet. I felt like an ant, whose tiny life - with all its concerns and hopes - only mattered as much as any one of the other billions of temporary little things in this vast world.
Later, driving the loop road around to Blanding, I passed through land that seemed, from time to time, ridiculous, impossible, almost like a cartoon. Huge, long, bumpy spines of the earth, layers of history thrust upward at strange angles. You can see the earth here. You can see how it was made. Having no regard for anything in its way, the earth like a giant just rolls over, sticks its elbow out, and creates a ridge, boulders scattering off everywhere. Big, lumpy, smooth dough-like shapes, hundreds of feet high and four miles long. Carved stone archways. His hands have molded the dry land. It’s a geological opera.
Anasazi cliff dwellings all over the place, little ant people scurrying into their caves, gathering corn, clinging close to streams, worshiping their Creator, surrounded by the endless, ever-changing drama of earth and sky. On the radio, wild, timeless Navajo chant and drum followed by the Back Street Boys and Lee Ann Womack, then announcements about the high school car wash.
Over dinner Bishop Steven and Cathy spoke of prejudice here. Restaurant workers in Farmington who ignore their existence (I wonder how they’d respond if they knew he is a bishop; What’s a bishop? they’d probably ask), or clerks who accuse their grandchildren of trying to steal when they briefly play with toys in the supermarket. An old woman in a nursing home who came as a lawyer to Bluff in the ‘60's to defend Indian land rights and got her effigy burned by whites. Cathy, as a child, having to walk 3 miles in the early morning to the school-bus which took them to Blanding, 30 miles away, then being scolded in class in the afternoons for being tired. And Steven, of course, being taken off to the Albuquerque Indian School as a child, punished for speaking Navajo.
Over breakfast at the Turquoise Café the next morning I asked him my stupid question about the effect of this land on his faith (stupid because it’s like asking a fish what the effect of water is upon him...but then Steven has lived elsewhere, so he can reflect a little more objectively). He said that he likes being able to see everything. That it’s easier to see that, like Moses who was commanded to take off his shoes because he was on holy ground, that everywhere here is holy. Holiness in every rock and bush, in every mesa. When he’s driving in his car (which is a lot) he doesn’t put the radio on; he just prays, starting each trip with a prayer of protection and blessing, that he might think good thoughts and not bad ones, that the Spirit will guide and teach him, that he will be kept in harmony. Then he looks out at the open space and imagines how these formations were made.
Monument Valley looms up ahead, whole mountains without graduated foothills. Just punched up straight, their stratified inner core like bones revealed for all the world to see. A soft skirt of rubble around the base of each. Around the sturdy blocks of rectangular mountain, fragile almost wispy tendrils stretch up to the heavens in supplication. It’s not only holy, its electric, vibrating with Spirit. The stillness here is hardly static; it’s alive, trembling with energy. Over breakfast in the Bluff café, Steven and Cathy laughed about how people come here and ask “how can you stand to live in this God-forsaken land?”
Tucson, Arizona — January 18
I’m in culture shock. After the gentleness of red dirt and quiet people, I abruptly entered the world of freeways, white people, money, shops, fast food, art galleries, traffic, malls, movies, clothes, stress, pop music...Flagstaff, Sedona, then Phoenix, now Tucson. I live this way too, but I can see from this perspective (as when I come out of backpacking) how most of what we call life is a layered construction on top of real life: land, relationships, animals, basic food, time, physical work, weather. Not that the layering is bad; it just seems extra, not the stuff of life itself.
I got a familiar, creepy feeling when I drove through Sedona. Didn’t even stop. I’d seen it too many times. Like Carmel, Santa Fe, San Francisco, much of Manhattan, Palo Alto, Santa Barbara, Breckenridge, much of Denver, there is something tragic and dangerous that happens to a beautiful place when too much money gets in: a superficial, materialistic idolatry which promises a fulfillment that it will never deliver. It’s so seductive; the land is beautiful, the food is exquisite, the clothes are perfect, the art is wonderful, the cars are shiny, the coffee is the best, the entertainment is creative, the architecture is just right, life is comfortable and delightful....but the core is hollow. What really matters is pushed aside by an aggressive, grasping pursuit of the wrong thing. It’s an expensive deflection into illusion, and the result is that people become lost.
And that which is worthless is highly prized by everyone (Ps. 12:8), including me.
Benedict said that all of a monk’s life should be a continual Lent. Similarly, every Christian is always called to some kind of simplicity, renunciation, fasting, humility, poverty, some kind of inner desert. Why? Because these things are holy or noble in themselves, or because we get spiritual points for self-inflicted misery? No, because they keep us centered in life itself, rather than constantly being distracted by an illusory idolatry that looks in the wrong places for what only God can give. Because if we don’t practice some kind of self-denial, if we give ourselves everything we want, we’ll get lost. We’ll mistake what is layered on top of life for the real thing. We’ll stay on the surface, never knowing the depths. Dazzled by “the world, the flesh and the devil,” we’ll become blind to God. Blessed are the poor in spirit, the meek, the humble, those who thirst, the pure in heart; for they will see God.
And so I am very relieved to get back into the desert, where the wide open spaces clear all the clutter out, where you can see, where things are simpler and more real. The schedule of this place gives me, as silent retreat always do, some initial anxiety. Two hours of contemplation, two offices, a Eucharist, three meals, and that’s it. Long chunks of time in between: 8am-noon, 1-4pm, 6-9pm. Nothing. Just be. (Well, there are my books, this computer, and hikes to take...) As much as I’m attracted to the desert silence, it’s also a bit fearsome. It will always be. The fear of God is the beginning of wisdom (Ps. 111:10). So let’s begin again, in fear.
Oh, yes, and then there was also, in Florence on the way down here, St. Anthony’s in the Desert, a Greek Orthodox Monastery. Like Holy Transfiguration in Brookline, MA, where I was for a week last year, they too are Mt. Athos-influenced contemplatives. They’re also like Transfiguration in their own cultural and religious ghetto, a whole created world out there among the Saguaro cactus in the desert: 21 very serious, bearded monks bustling about in cassocks and long hair tucked up into stovepipe hats, Greek language and food, passionate study of the miracle stories of obscure saints, chant, incense, kissing icons and bishop’s rings, gorgeous candle-lit liturgy in the middle of the night, beautifully ornate, domed buildings, lush gardens and fountains, and a very rigid theology that always results in a certain look they give you with raised eyebrow as they ask Are you Orthodox?
They’re in their own little world, and seem quite removed from everything around them, like a jewel in a bubble. What they’ve created is a heady and very narrow, supercharged environment, which must have the effect of providing tremendous support for what is no doubt a difficult life completely dedicated to prayer. More power to them. But somehow I was much more spiritually edified by the friendly, easy banter and delicious burrito at L & B’s in funky old Florence, and glad that I changed my mind and decided not to take part of my retreat at St. Anthony’s. Been there, done that: being dutifully, warmly received and yet also condescendingly tolerated as the guest heretic who tragically has no idea just how lost he really is.
Tucson, Arizona — January 21
The Desert House of Prayer is a contemplative retreat place run by the Redemptorist order for those who want relatively unstructured quiet time in hermitages. A small group made up of a nun, a priest, and two lay women maintain a simple schedule, any part of which you can join in on: two contemplative sits from 6-7am, Morning Prayer and Eucharist, breakfast, lunch, two more sits from 4-5pm, Evening Prayer, dinner. Silence is kept at all times, except over dinner.
Across the road is the other part of their operation, Picture Rocks Retreat Center, housing up to 80 people who come for various conferences and retreats, including Zen sesshins led by the Roman Catholic priest and Zen roshi Pat Hawk, who is in residence there. This week teachers of the Diamond Sangha Zen tradition (which was initiated by Roshi Richard Baker in Hawaii and to which Hawk belongs) have gathered from around the world for their annual meeting.
My hermitage is a small house with big windows all around that keep me opened to the surrounding desert. I have a fireplace, a double bed, a bathroom, a small sitting porch, and a kitchenette. Quite luxurious, in a simple way.
Into the far distance extends the amazingly flat desert floor, with mountain ranges that rise up suddenly, resembling exactly what they call them here: islands in the sky. The effect is very much like what you see at New Camaldoli in Big Sur, or Mt. Calvary in Santa Barbara, where you’re high enough up on a mountainside so that when the fog is underneath you, perfectly flat and stretching into eternity, nearby mountains stick up abruptly out of the whiteness. Only here it’s all green and brown. We’re in the foothills of one of these sky islands, so we can see quite a distance and catch marvelous sunrises and sunsets. Cold nights and mornings, warm days.
The Sonoran desert here has huge comical Saguaro cactus whose arms gesture either straight up or in strangely human curves, as if they’re caught in a pose in the middle of a solo dance. Then there’s plenty of other cactus as well, including prickly pear, barrel, hedgehog, teddy bear, fishhook, and cholla. These are filled in by shrubs: creosote, mesquite, ironwood, palo verde, and ocotillo. Coyotes, roadrunners and javelinas (big ugly/cute boar-like collared peccaries) have wandered past my window, and there are gila monsters, tortoises, rattlers, mice, kangaroo rats, quail, doves, cardinals, woodpeckers, owls, hawks, and rabbits in abundance.
The overall impact is a place teeming with a variety of life and yet harsh and impenetrable unless you’re on pathways, in order to avoid all the cactus and lava rock. Imagine all this at 110% or above, which it frequently is from May through September. A little scary for those of us who are used to sandstone and cooler, softer deserts gently covered with chamisa, sage, and piñon. (I was surprised to find out that other than its southern part, New Mexico is not considered part of the four North American desert regions - too much rainfall! ) Yesterday hiking in Saguaro National Park - not only keeping to paths but watching my step very carefully as I went - I wondered how scantily-clad Indians on foot (or even men on horses) ever made it through this tough gauntlet without being pierced, bitten, burned, dehydrated, and shredded to bits.
My hosts are wonderfully kind and solicitous, and yet invisible. It feels like a small and happy family, with Father Paul as the dad, welcoming visitors into their home and giving them plenty of space. A few locals are regulars at Sunday supper, which is especially festive. They create an atmosphere of freedom within silence and a basic structure of liturgy and meals, so that you can sink into whatever place God wants to take you.
Other than just keeping silence and opening to this marvelous and vast desert sea, I’m reading and making notes with two very inspiring Anglican books on parish priesthood by Arthur Middleton (a scholar and Rector of St. Nicholas, Boldon, England since 1979) and Michael Ramsey (former Archbishop of Canterbury). Both are pleading for a shift from a priestly identity found in functionalism, activity and management to one that is rooted in prayer and the search for holiness of life; study of the eternal truths of scripture and doctrine, and integration of them into the everyday reality of personal and parish life; and loving care, spiritual guidance, and intercession for the people we are charged to serve and lead.
Arthur Middleton:
Priests are effective not by what they do, but by how they live.
They must be able to communicate a living wisdom of God.
George Herbert:
We live in an age that hath more need of good examples, than precepts.
F.D. Maurice:
We have been dosing people with religion when what they want is not that but the living God.
Michael Ramsey:
We are called to be with God with the people on our heart.Our study need not be vast in extent but deep in integrity, not in order that we may be erudite but in order that we may be simple. It is those whose studies are shallow who are confused and confusing.
All of this requires balancing time for prayer, study and reflection with the daily, practical, busy, incarnational activity of family, parish work and pastoral care. There is no substitute for this kind of time. In a world running itself ragged with activity and duty, maintaining this balance is like swimming upstream. Support for the effort is crucial, which I am very blessed to have.
My other books are on the traditionally strong link between key Anglicans and the early patristic contemplative/theological sources, which has been called an appeal to antiquity. These Anglican divines were those influential people who lived at distinct times when the Church of England had to define (and redefine) itself. They did so first, during the Reformation, in response to the Church of Rome’s cluttered medieval scholasticism and distorted popular piety, also avoiding the path of those Continental Reformers who looked to “the plain meaning of scripture alone.” Later on, they worked to regain a catholic, sacramental view when others in the Church of England were turning to evangelicalism and Puritanism.
Living in periods of Anglican history when our very identity stood at a crossroads, the divines looked back to the Christian Church’s original crossroads, during the first 4 centuries, when the patristic theologians of prayer worked to define Christian identity. These early Fathers did so by holding theological doctrine and biblical story as the foundational truth of our faith, and inviting this truth to transform us as we integrate it into our lives, by God’s grace, with passion, prayer and imagination. Anglican divines believed that their task was to reach back beyond the medieval abuses and arid scholasticism of the Roman Church to the earlier days, and recapture something of the patristic mind: which is neither “afraid to reason nor ashamed to adore” (from the Bishop of London’s foreword to Middleton’s book).
Middleton says that Anglicans are currently divided between reactionary, literal evangelicalism on the one hand, politically-correct liberalism on the other, and sentimental, vague pietism in the middle. We’re therefore in another period of our history when once again we need to appeal to antiquity, to define ourselves as other Anglicans have at previous historical crossroads. We need, like the Divines before us, to rediscover our traditionally Anglican third way that is grounded in the patristic approach.
Regarding this approach, as Middleton says, the Anglican Divines followed Gregory of Nyssa, Augustine, Athanasius, John Chrysostom, Gregory of Nazianzus and others in the ancient path of theologia:
A tradition of wisdom and spirit, a contemplative theology in which heart and mind are united - the thirst of the intellect and the drive of the spirit - a quest that reaches beyond the intellectual into the realm of the imagination, intuition and wholeness. Such exploration of a fundamental experience of God, available to anyone, implies that [as the 4thC Evagrius said] the one who prays is a theologian and the theologian is one who prays.
And my entertainment at night? The wonderfully vivid Great River: the Rio Grande in North American History, for which author Paul Horgan won the Pulitzer in 1955. It helps me picture the old everyday world and long drama of human life in this land.
Cave Creek, Arizona — January 28
The Desert House of Prayer was a good place to be; plenty of time and space without any practical duties regarding food, travel, decisions...just a simple routine for prayer, study, and walks. In being around the staff, I saw clearly in them that something which is always discernable about a person whose life is given to faith and prayer. A gentle openness, unconditional kindness, simplicity, humor, freedom of spirit and a sense of being comfortable with oneself in the world. Familiar fruits of the one Spirit, seen as a common character, found in many distinct, individual forms. God transforms us into Christ’s likeness if we keep giving ourselves over.
Susanna came for a weekend with me at a Tucson bed & breakfast, out of town near the House of Prayer. It was good to come out of my solitude into companionship, to be able to talk with her what it’s been like, for other than this journal, it’s all been internal and intensely focused (which is good, because too much expression of “what it’s like” can disperse it). It was also good to be able to do with her some of what I’m doing. Walking through the Arizona Sonora Desert Museum, we saw in a condensed and up-close form all that this wonderland has. Driving out on the sunny road, windows open, radio on. But the highlight was coming upon a large funeral Mass at San Xavier del Bac for one Teresa de Jesus Montoya.
San Xavier Mission was one of many missions in northern New Spain begun by Fr. Kino, a Jesuit, in 1692. The Franciscans (who took over after the Jesuits were kicked out of Mexico) built the present building in 1778. It is a huge, brilliantly-white, domed, Moorish building with a baroque Spanish/Mexican painted interior. It takes your breath away out there in the middle of the desert plain, framed by deep turquoise sky and mountains in the distance. It’s on the reservation of the Tohona O’odham Indians (formerly called Papago).
The Mass was packed with children, proud men in ponytails, shades and biker vests and beautiful women in their best dresses; the Franciscans were wise, loving and simple (as always), the Mass was a good way for us to worship with the gathered Church in this place, and Maria Teresa de Jesus was obviously a beloved matriarch.
The land itself is full of ghosts. Geronimo surrendered for the Apaches outside of Douglas, in the vast grasslands near Mexico. Endicott Peabody, a Cambridge (England) graduate, came in 1882 as a seminarian to Tombstone by stagecoach from Episcopal Theological Seminary (Cambridge, MA), fundraising in saloons (with revolver in pocket) among the likes of prostitutes, Doc Holliday and the Earp brothers (yes, they gave money), in order to build St. Paul’s, where I attended Sunday Eucharist with about 20 locals. Endicott later started the Groton School, one of the most prestigious Episcopal prep schools, outside of Boston, and was headmaster for over 40 years - he returned to Tombstone in 1941 to tell stories. Pancho Villa brought the chaos of the Revolution over this largely imaginary border into Columbus NM (where he’s got a state park named for him). Miners, prospectors, adventurers, trappers, traders, native people trying to hold on to their land and ways, Spanish tortilla-makers and corrupt Governors. Mexicans now crossing over for work and what they hope will be a better life. Barkeepers, ranchers, preachers and waitresses, so many mothers and children and hard-working fathers...all these ghosts are still visible out here in the desert, unlike many places where the shiny, seductive, distracted fullness of modern life has pushed them out.
And the land. I’m gradually sinking into it. Each new phase of this pilgrimage is a step down. A few days in Navajoland, blasted awake by the serenely massive, divinely-energized sandstone cliffs and monuments, then a quiet hermitage routine of prayer, study, and walks among the cactus and wildlife of the Sonoran, and now back into the truck, whizzing through expanses of planet earth, the warm desert air blowing through the open window and my stupidly smiling brain. Finally camping, now fully in the land, feeling the wind and the warmth and the cold, physically vulnerable in it and spiritually fed by it. And time, silence, stillness, freedom, solitude...enough time to sit and stare at the full moon slowly and majestically coming up over the rock canyon walls, enough time for all the daily offices, enough freedom to not know where I’m going until the Spirit moves me at a highway intersection, enough silence to be able to listen to the wind whispering through the oaks and pines in this canyon, enough solitude to sometimes feel anxious and a little lost for no reason, then found again. And again.
Presidio, Texas — January 29
In Columbus NM, I stayed at Pancho Villa State Park, mostly so I could investigate my grandfather’s involvement here in the punitive expedition following Villa’s 1916 raid on the town. Lowe Abeel McClure was a West Point grad, a 1st Lieutenant in 1916 (later Colonel). The eyewitness history book Chasing Villa says that he was with the 16th Infantry, under General John Pershing and (then) Lieutenant George Patton, alongside the 10th Infantry, all African-American (whom the book praises highly for their fortitude). They encamped in this blowy, dusty town and took off after Villa, 500 miles south, past Chihuahua, riding horses and schlepping their 1915 Ford trucks (a little like mine) through the mud, doing reconnaissance with a newfangled “Air Force” consisting of a few biplanes. I drank a toast to Lowe and Pancho with mescal con guisano, downing the worm.
I picture my grandfather chasing after laughing Mexican revolutionaries - who were much too quick on horseback to be caught by gringos lumbering after them with all their gear - through this hard, alien land, foraging for food and water as they encountered Northern Mexican haciendas and towns, exchanging gunfire now and then with revolutionaries or banditos or even federales. Mules carried the gas for their combustion engines; a good metaphor for this last effort of the US Cavalry, just beginning to enter the modern age. An expensive, dangerous, and unsuccessful punitive run to catch or kill an international outlaw in his own impossible terrain, an effort which accomplished only the training of troops and refinement of new technology for a war to come. Sound familiar?
Today I drove as close to the border as I could: hiway 9 through NM to Santa Teresa, through El Paso, Van Horn, Marfa. My attention kept being drawn to the south, across the Rio Grande and into Mexico. Some of the roads were empty, with one or two cars an hour passing the other way. Old ranches, deserted houses, little tiendas, and a feeling that the border here is blurry indeed. Presidio is dusty, 83%, and like Columbus and Santa Teresa, most of the signs and conversation are in Spanish, and when you walk into a store they look you over to try to figure out whether to say hi or buenas tardes. Most of the time they say the latter to me. Sometimes there is no English at all. Feels good. I’ve got to get back to Mexico.
I’m enjoying the small towns as I dip in and out of them, but it is the land that opens my heart. Ever since the fall when I began thinking about my retreat/study time this winter, I felt a pull towards the desert, and yet never quite knowing the reason for going. As I’ve moved through this time and space, in and out of towns, cities, open land, and long drives, I keep feeling an indescribable longing that is only satisfied when I get out in the desert again. Towns and cities, traffic and commercial activity make me feel claustrophobic and alienated. Out on the earth, with 50 miles of nothing between me and the Mexican mountains but mesquite and nothing above but blue sky, I feel relief.
Sometimes I wonder what the hell I think I’m doing, driving down lonely back roads and sitting around in these big empty spaces, with no reason or structure. Once in awhile I feel anxious that somehow the emptiness is going to turn on me, that I’ve made a huge mistake coming out here, or that I’m wasting time that the parish and my family has generously given me. Then sometimes I spend a little time in town, poking through junk stores or historical museums, perhaps just to give myself a sense of purpose, but I know I’m just faking it.
A little voice keeps beckoning me to trust, to go back into the emptiness, back outside, away from people, back into the open desert. Once I go, the anxiety fades and the relief returns, and I know I can count on the sense of calling I’ve felt all along, without having to know its purpose or intended result. It’s as if when I felt called to come out here I was given a prescription for an illness I didn’t even know I had, and when I came, the medicine itself kept compelling me to take it. As if your body craved Vitamin D and you find that it just feels good to sit in the sun. I still don’t know why I’m here. I only know that I need to be, and that it is doing something to me that I somehow knew I needed. Mother Sandra talks about getting “re-energized” spiritually in certain special places.
I think that this is what a pilgrimage is. Years ago, for an unknown reason, I felt pulled to go to Medjugorje Yugoslavia and visit the site where the Virgin Mary is appearing. I didn’t know why, and I’m not even sure what happened there, really, except that God did something there to pull me closer. Pilgrims have always gone on physical journeys as a way of affecting an internal journey into God: the travel, sometimes arduous, becoming the means by which a parallel spiritual process can be at work at the same time.
If this is what a pilgrimage is, then a life of faith is simply a whole series of these invitations into what - we don’t know - that are accompanied by a sense that we need to go there for our soul’s sake. If when we do it we feel that we’ve come home in the landscape of our heart, and if it leads to predictable fruits of the Spirit such as an increase in love, then the divine call was authentic, even if its initial purpose and eventual result remain a mystery to us. Faith is the trust that we can believe that sense of rightness that pulls us, we can also believe the relief that comes when we go there, and afterwards we can believe that it has done what God intended, even if we can’t see it.
Seek the Lord while he wills to be found; call upon him when he draws near... For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor your ways my ways, says the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts. For as rain and snow fall from the heavens, and return not again, but water the earth, bringing forth life and giving growth, seed for sowing and bread for eating, So is my word that goes forth from my mouth; it will not return to me empty; But it will accomplish that which I have purposed, and prosper in that for which I sent it.The 2nd Song of Isaiah (Ch. 55), from Morning Prayer
Big Bend, Texas — February 3
This is what I came out here for. Here is the magnet that has been pulling me all these miles. It is the end of the road.
There are lots of places one can go for solitude, for silence, and for a sense of spaciousness. But this is different. It’s some 40 miles by 30 miles of open desert preserve, huge craggy rock mountains and buttes separated by wide sweeping plains and mesas; fantastic swirling shapes of lumpy volcanic flow and colorful layered sediment, long dry-wash arroyos, badlands, and beds of ancient seas; ever-present swooping hawks and crows, knife-blade 1700-ft. deep river canyons, big blue sunny skies, fiery orange, red, and violet sunsets, and brilliant crowds of stars unhindered by light pollution.
What’s unique, perhaps, about this place of desert solitude and spaciousness is that all of this severe beauty is held in the most profound and utter silence and stillness. It’s all visible at once. The winter light is absolutely clear, so that everything stands out in relief, super-real. It’s all arrestingly Now, all alive and yet perfectly at rest. Wind, birds and bugs make a little sound and movement now and then, but their activity, being natural to the landscape, only seems to amplify the electricity of the Now. It is impossible to describe. The effect is at once scary, holy, intimidating, beautiful, and peaceful.
It’s like walking into contemplative prayer itself. The outer world here is a giant physical version of those moments when you are completely awake and without thought, just being right here right now, still and empty, at peace and eternal. As such it has the effective force, every time I look up, of pulling me down into that internal place of empty availability to God. It’s as if the giant face of God were constantly peering in through your windows all day long, impossible to ignore, quietly saying, as you try to go about your business, Are you here? Don’t forget. Look this way. I can’t imagine how unrelenting all this must feel at 120% in the summer. Way too much presence.
Any place of natural purity can feel this way, of course, but we don’t necessarily quiet down enough to perceive it. The ocean is vast and alive, but we’re often lost in thought when we’re there. The woods are still, gentle, and subtle, but where is our mind? Fussing with our pack, our book, our plan for the day, our binoculars, our snacks. This desert wouldn’t seem so profound to me if I were similarly occupied. I’ve been lowered a few notches recently, so I’m ready and able. As Pat Hawk - the RC priest and Zen roshi in residence at Picture Rocks Retreat Center in Tucson, across from the Desert House of Prayer - replied when I asked him about the effect of desert life on his sense of God: I find that I pretty much find it wherever I am. True, but some places for me are more attention-grabbing than others.
I’m an hour off the pavement down a rough dirt road, and can’t see any sign of human life anywhere, because they mostly stick to the central Basin where there’s a store, RV hookups, and whatnot. No visible roads, not even aircraft overhead, since this isn’t on a flight pattern. Looking off into the distance, it’s not too hard to imagine this as primaeval, with dinosaurs lumbering around. Except that back then, this was tropical. Before that, it was all under the sea. I can easily picture that, too. I found a fossil next to my truck, the concentric swirls of a large shell.
In my truck, at this “primitive campsite” (just a spot where cactus is cleared away) it’s the same as backpacking, only without most of the work of hiking, setting up camp, etc. I wake, sit up, read Morning Prayer, get out of bed, make coffee, and sit down. Some time later (who knows when) I have a bowl of cereal, then I sit down. My chair becomes a strong magnet; I’m held in place as I gaze out at the All. A little walk, some reading, then I sit down. I find that I can’t get up. Some time later, Noonday Office, lunch. Go for a hike, read, make some notes, sit still again. Evening Prayer up on the mesa, singing to God in the sunset, 50 miles of desert and mountain in every direction joining in. Dinner, then cold, dark, back in bed, reading with battery light, Compline. Lying there gazing up at the stars. Sleep. No sound, no movement, just This. All the time, unceasing.
Later, I spend two days taking day hikes, about 6 miles each day. I climb a mountain and look down past the rugged cliffs, to the cascading mesas below that disappear into infinity; I hike to a spring, impossibly bubbling out of the dry rock, producing lush greenery; I walk into the sacred, hushed, cathedral-like Santa Elena gorge that forms two towering cliffs only 50 feet apart but 1700 feet above the green Rio Grande (which is mostly Rio Concha water from Mexico, the Rio Grande having been drained out far north of here by irrigation).
In all of these hikes that take me out into the land, away from every human contact, I find myself having to sit down, again and again, and be still. I pray for the Spirit, open my heart, and then I become completely still, straining the ears and the eyes to hear and to see, becoming like one of the rocks, yearning for God in all...then everything around me and within me stops...and begins to come to life in a new way. The usual, illusory separation of my body and mind from everything around me melts and we’re all in the Spirit in a kind of suspended but lively eternity. It’s as if the energy of light in all matter around me is waiting for me to turn my quiet attention to it, and then it turns itself on. But I know it’s always on; I’m just usually too busy to notice.
In Vladimir Lassky’s book The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, which I’ve been reading, he says the same thing about the Transfiguration of Christ: that Christ didn’t change on Mt. Tabor- his disciples did. He’s always the light of the world. In that moment Peter, James, and John were just given the grace to see who he really is. It was their Transfiguration, not Jesus’.
Since I’m doing this several times a day, it becomes easier to drop down into this place of attention each time I do it. It’s as if everything that prevents me from being present to God and grateful for this moment stops, just like that, and then something else starts, a kind of peaceful, grateful, loving, electric expectancy, where the Spirit animates everything, including me, all together. And rather than being a fleeting moment that’s here and gone, it stays until I decide it’s time to get up again, and even then remains, although less intensely.
I think there really is something cumulative about prayer. The intensity and accessibility of what I’m talking about during this pilgrimage is only here because I’ve dedicated these weeks to prayer, and I’m choosing, again and again every day, to turn away from anything that would entertain or stimulate me otherwise. It has been helpful for me to be alone, out in the desert, but I know that this is also possible in every circumstance of life. As we give ourselves over to prayer more and more, God’s presence is more accessible. It’s cumulative.
St. Seraphim of Sarov was asked if there was anything lacking in today’s world that would prevent people from lives of holiness like those of ancient times, and he said Only one thing: a firm resolve. But what I’ve learned is that a firm resolve isn’t a big emotional commitment we finally, really make. It’s a firm resolve in the moment, and always available to us. It’s a choice to open the heart to God, to invite the Spirit into our daily difficulties, to give thanks as we drive the car, to ask for God’s help to love the next person we see, to take a moment and stop, like I do here in the desert, to really listen, look, and feel our desire for God and our appreciation for life. The more we do this, the more God responds, and the more the world comes alive with Spirit. Prayer is cumulative.
Pat Hawk is right. The desert is like any other external stimulus: a church building, a retreat, a backpacking trip, a prayer group. They’re all there to awaken us to a way of being in life, so that we can “pretty much find it wherever we are.” For me, it has to do with seeking the desert within, wherever I am, so that I can remember to stop and sink down into that place I know now more fully, where everything is animated by the Spirit, all together at once, perfectly still and completely energized. Then I know just how small I am, and how grateful I am just to be alive. And I am more likely to be present to others as needed, less cluttered by anything that would hinder the Spirit’s unconditional love.
A pilgrimage is an ancient Christian discipline whereby the pilgrim undertakes an external journey as a kind of sacrament: an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace. Rambling around for these weeks, looking for places that would fill the longing inside, I’ve really been rambling my awareness towards a certain place inside where God wanted me to be. On pilgrimage, one makes a sacrifice of time, effort, and sometimes hardship, and uses the travel not for curiosity or entertainment, but as a dedicated oblation. It is a prayerful offering of one’s very self, putting oneself completely in God’s hands, in trust and faith. Any genuine result of this oblation—discernable to us or not—is up to the Spirit, and is given in response to our faithful self-offering.
This is my pilgrimage: the unmistakable but inexplicable call into the desert I’ve felt for months, the feeling that I had arrived at the end of the road in Big Bend, the obvious support of this environment for the Spirit’s purposes, the natural way in which something inside was awakened here.
Before and during this pilgrimage, different people have expressed, only half jokingly, the fantasy that somehow I’ll allow myself to be permanently called away into solitude and silence. My mother told me “don’t do a Bishop Pike out there.” Susanna reminds me when I call that I live in a family, and tells others that I’m “becoming invisible.” The office staff says they “hope I come back.” What they’re telling me is that God has given me a particular life in family, parish ministry, and with friends, and that as much as I enjoy retreats, don’t forget where you’re really called to live. I don’t, not for a minute.
This desert retreat is not some sort of better, more spiritual reality that stands in contrast to a more “worldly” life. This pilgrimage is only a vivid reminder of the desert within, which I carry with me at all times. That internal desert is my desire for God, my availability, self-oblation and resolve. It is the willingness to stop, listen, and watch for the Spirit. It is the movement, by grace, into humility, gratitude, and love.
This I can do anywhere, anytime. I’ve just strengthened that capacity within me during these weeks. I’ve been exercising my spiritual heart muscle at the desert gym. Now it’s time to go use it again. Early on, I prayed that God would more fully implant this desert land - where I live and which I love - into my heart. At the time, I didn’t even know what I was asking, but I remember asking it. So be it. Time to go home.