On the Sea of Cortez
Brian C. Taylor
March 2006
I entered my retreat through a graveyard. Just south of Santa Ana, about two hours south of the Nogales border, on the road to Hermosillo. Tooling along at sunrise between two mountain ranges, the sky all pink, orange, yellow, blue, and gray, I glimpsed one of those familiar Mexican wonderlands, abounding in white crosses and painted statues and plastic flowers. I thought about stopping, but instantaneously decided against it. Gotta keep driving, gotta get there. A moment later something inside asked Are you in some kind of hurry? Stepped on the brake, made a U-turn, pulled the truck into the dirt lot and got out.
Walking around, my attention was caught first by a young man’s grave; he was a teenager, I think. The monument was big, with a dicho I couldn’t translate, La Virgen (of course), two churchy spires reaching up, each topped off with a fat little trumpet-playing brass cherub. Jesus above all, eyes to heaven, arms out in the oremus position that sometimes looks like he’s shrugging his shoulders and saying Uh, I dunno...And in the middle, bigger than Jesus, even bigger than La Virgen, was a rooster, that proud and virile symbol of resurrection.
In English we call these places graveyards, depicting a mere drab yard of graves. Or slightly more human, a cemetery, from the Greek koimeterion: dormitory, or place where people are asleep. In Spanish, it is a camposanto: a campground for saints! The other name is panteón, a pantheon of all the gods or holy ones.
One doesn’t have to wait for the all-night candlelit family picnics on Dia de los Muertos; anytime, you can feel the vibrancy of the saints through the plastic flowers, the painted Virgen, the bloody face of the crucified Christ, and the rooster. It is a lively place where tears and resurrections happen. In fact, when referring to the dead, they say el está muerto, using the temporary or transitional form of the verb “to be,” instead of ser, which would infer a permanent state of being. The saints are not completely dead. It’s like the wizard in Princess Bride who said of the seemingly expired hero He’s only a little bit dead!
The camposanto is also a place of poverty and desolation. At least a third of the graves were simple mounds of dirt and rock, no markers, no cross, nothing. Just a little hill of death. In one place, a forlorn metal cross lay flat on the ground. A plaque in the center of it used to say something (maybe Isabel Dolores, beloved mother, precious child of God, and amazing cook with the voice of an angel). But the writing was long faded away and the cross was lying there as if it had been knocked over by the wind and rain and tripped over by dozens of visitors who knew nothing of Isabel Dolores. Where is her grave? Is she even remembered by anyone alive today?
Billions of us have come and gone on this earth. We’re birthed out of our mothers’ bodies, and we are swallowed up by the earth. Everything about us – our accomplishments, our sins, our friends and families – slowly retreats into time until even the words on our markers fade away. Nothing left here. We’re gone.
For a moment, I was crushed, desolate. What is the point of it all? And yet in this sunrise, with this immense sadness, surrounded by the santos, I begin to come down to earth, becoming just a simple man again, to my great relief. Remember you are dust, and to dust you shall return.
This last 9 months or so I’ve had to tool along the highway, no time to stop for anything. The question Shall I be a bishop? hung around every single day like an attractive but menacing stranger who suggests Greatness and Influence but who also threatens to take away everything and everyone we love. My associate moved towards retirement, then gone, with double the ministry activity and human concern now landing in my lap; a needle-in-the-haystack search for a new associate; and transitioning to new office staff. Susanna had her first year of retirement, a wonderful thing but a big change nonetheless. We started a new phase of parish discernment with a consultant and an eventual capital campaign. 3-4 new vocations to ordained ministry. And more Important Things I can’t even remember now as I gaze at the blue-green water.
Stress manifested itself physically: insomnia, exhaustion, aching muscles, headaches, worry, sometimes a metallic taste in my mouth. I left town with a cold, feeling stretched way too thin, right on the edge of something bad.
So Mexico beckoned, and I came. The saints’ campground at dawn, so lively and so sad – like much of this country – halted my restless momentum. At least it began to do so. Every day another onion-skin layer of stress sloughs off and I feel a little more of my simple humanity. In the long periods of silence and solitude, my residual worrisome thoughts seem more and more absurd. My new mantra in contemplation is surprisingly profound and effective: Don’t worry; be happy.
I wake up to the sound of the surf outside my window as the sun rises. I make coffee, do a psalm in Spanish, the readings in English, the Padre Nuestro, spoken prayers, and then meditation. Breakfast, then a few chores – at Zen sesshin it’s called samu, work meditation – or a walk on the beach. Filiberto comes by, sometimes with his 18-month old son Jesus Martín, and we talk only in Spanish for an hour or so. Noonday prayers, more meditation, lunch, and a couple of hours of study and practice in my Spanish grammar book. Some writing. The pelicans comically dive-bomb for fish, small schools of dolphins arc playfully through the bay, the seagulls squawk on and on. The surf gently whooshes in and out of my consciousness with endless constancy, and the flat horizon stretches out into infinity. An Evensong walk at sunset – so often spectacular here - then dinner, then reading some Mexican history, and bed at “Kino Midnight”: 9pm. The persistent waves rock me to sleep. My dreams become memorable again. One day begins to blur into another. The mad demands of chronos fall away; the eternal now of kairos time is all.
There are quite a few retired Americans here. I want to be a little connected to the ex-pat community, but fortunately there’s lots of space to not be connected too. There’s a club with dues and officers and a funky desert golf course and a newsletter and a rescue team. Lots of them rotate from place to place every night for cocktails. They take walks together every morning, join together for book-reading groups and “movie night,” and celebrate American holidays.
Many of them are quite aware of the poverty in Old Kino. They fund projects like Familias Unidas, which gives vouchers for building materials so that those who live in tarpaper shacks can construct a cement house. They pay it back slowly, and friends and family help build. They’re required to go to meetings regularly to learn about how to save and manage money, and they’re supposed to help one another build.
We went on a tour this morning, with about 75 other gringos. In and out of six homes that are in various stages of building – always next to the old house with dirt floors, exposed electrical wiring, leaky roofs, a water tap at the edge of the property, no protection from the mosquitos or the blazing heat in the summer. It’s good for us Americans to go on this tour once a year, as they do, to see how most of the people of the world (including the folks who clean their houses) live. And to give money. Someone told me that unlike many places in Mexico, the locals here are really friendly to Americans. Perhaps it is because of projects like these where the privileged do something for the underprivileged, with whom they are actually in relationship.
But a few of them don’t even try to speak Spanish; it seems like a point of pride. Not even Gracias when the food comes: “Thanks. Got any ketchup?” Mexicans are simply a kind of vast staff all around them, filling this country merely in order to fix their car, their air conditioner, their food. They’re living in an American theme park: Mexicoland! I talked to a guy today who has lived here year-round for 16 years, married to a Mexican. He was trying to help me with a telephone problem but he couldn’t understand a simple recorded phone message that came on. He didn’t even try. I asked him You don’t speak Spanish? His response: Why bother? I was speechless.
Obviously it’s easy to start feeling very superior. But then as I described this to Fili, he laughed kindly and said el pecado es la penitencia. The sin is the punishment. Consequences. Karma. De verdad. God doesn’t have to punish us. The loneliness, stress, bitterness, chaos, or isolation that results from our sin is always penitence enough. I’m humbled by Fili’s generous, wise, and good-natured perspective on the ugly American, and by extension, the Mexican perspective on life.
La Virgen de Guadalupe watches over us all, standing above our casita across the street, partway up the hill in back of us. She is large, tiled into a shrine that is festooned with Christmas lights, paper flowers, white paint all over the ground, a prayer bench and altar, used votive candles, and scratched sayings left by lovers, graffiti punks and supplicants. She gazes serenely over the town, the sea. At night, the glowing bulbs that surround her - in the red, white, and green of the Mexican flag - seem to float suspended in mid-air. A big white cross tops the hill. Once in awhile, throughout the day, pilgrims park, walk up to visit La Virgen, kneel and say their prayers, then come down again. I go up now and then to say hello, to see things from her perspective, if I can.
Mi compradre Francis took me up to a secret shrine to La Virgen in a small cave up in the hills here. Someone painted her image long ago on the rock wall, and once in a while someone clambers up the rocks to leave their ofrendas: pesos, little statues of saints, candles, and their supplications. You never see them; you just notice the signs that they had been there praying. I went one morning before dawn, and together Mary and I watched the sun rise over the distant mountains, painting everything orange as it came up over the Sonoran desert and the Sea of Cortéz. La Virgen shone like the Transfiguration. Coyotes scampered around in the dirt below; beetles, lizards and bees came to life in the warmth of the new day.
Shrines, hilltop crosses, roadside memorials, and truckstop capillas are everywhere throughout the Mexican countryside. The one that stands out from the drive down here was a lovely thing above a godawful scene. Down below, in the middle of a lonely stretch of desert highway, a tire-repair shop of blackened tin. The proprietor’s shack with a dirt floor, tacked together with boards and tarpaper. Scrawny chickens pecking at nothing, and even scrawnier dogs, with open sores and haunted eyes. Reigning over all this mess was a beautiful rock-painting of La Guadalupana, with white rocks leading the pilgrim up the trail.
The paradox is that poor disheveled Mexico, with La Virgen, with the chapels and hilltop crosses, the dilapidated cathedrals and dusty churches with birds flying through them, is rich. And we are so poor. The last are first, and the first are last.
Earl Shorris, author of The Life and Times of Mexico, (W.W. Norton, 2004, p. 11) , says the great distinction between the United States and Mexico at the beginning of the twenty-first century is that there is no country more concerned with religion than Mexico and no country more concerned with money than the United States.
Money is so tawdry; La Virgen, reigning over all, is so soulful. Give me that old-time religion any day.
There is no paradise, at least in this life. After several illumined days, a stingray dragged me into the dark side. Everyone says they’re around in the shallow water resting in the sun, but not to worry. Just shuffle your feet as you walk; they’ll zoom away from their sandy siesta. Besides, you can see them. Right.
The first time I decided to walk into the water, I was vigilant as can be, shuffling away, moving slowly, watching very carefully, hoping to take a little dip (and also avoid the stinging jellyfish, by the way). Within a minute I felt a little nudge of something alive in the water and BOOM a sting ray nailed the top of my foot, then darted away. The pain began immediately.
Lurching out of the water, I stumbled up the beach, bleeding. The pain grew quickly until it reached a level barely below vomiting and fainting. It stayed there. For three hours I moaned, sweated, cried, cursed, and couldn’t get my mind to comprehend the unwavering intensity of this pain. Francis brought me to the clinic, the doctor made sure that nothing of the stinger was left in the wound, shot me with an anesthetic (which worked for about 5 minutes), prescribed some worthless painkillers (extra-strength Tylenol?), and sent me home to soak the foot in very hot water, the only thing that helps. After 3-4 hours, the pain became manageable. Tequila certainly helped. 5 days later, I’m still limping with a swollen foot.
Meanwhile, this little trauma had the effect of outfitting me with crap-colored glasses through which I temporarily saw everything around me. Suddenly the innocent family who came to the beach for the evening and cranked up their car stereo next door at 10pm became sinister. I wonder If I can’t even swim in the ocean, what is the point of ever being here? The desert behind me is filled with rattlesnakes. Scorpions cover the walls in my dark bedroom, silently dropping into the bed as I try to go to sleep. The waters in front of our casita are being overfished and polluted with chemicals from the shrimp farms. I’m reading Mexican history, and this country begins to look hopelessly ugly, lost, and incompetent.
There is no place that does not have a dark side. Even – or especially – the mind. Just sit in silence for a little while, and every sin, every dark impulse known to humanity will eventually manifest itself. Creation is dangerous and life can be cruel. Society does its worst again and again. This is the human condition, the reality of life, Original Sin.
The spiritual life is not about the pursuit of a permanent state of bliss. If it is, we will always be disappointed. Some stingray will come along and zap us back into reality. It’s about walking through this journey and greeting whatever bliss or pain rises up to meet us along the way. Listening to John Hiatt last night, he sang about the impermanence of circumstance and mood: Some people call it depression; I call it a song. Sometimes it’s a pretty dark song, but no song lasts forever.
Over the last nine months I’ve taken a hard look at where I’ve been and where I’m going in my life and my vocation as a priest. In looking at the office of a bishop, there was a certain appeal to jumping in over my head, working with lots of creative, busy people and going to the next level of church accomplishments.
Even though I made the decision not to stand for election, I remained in this mind-set, and just transferred it to a sense of renewed activity in the parish. Instead of doing great new things as a bishop, I’d move to the next level of parish development: a capital campaign, a start-up mission congregation, new vocations and programs, a new book, etc. I saw my continuing personal and professional growth being defined by somewhat external measurements. Was this a last-ditch attempt to stave off my fear of aging? If I just keep moving fast enough, maybe I won’t rot!
But the reality is, I’m tired of being slightly anxious, over-busy, and always in a little hurry. I’m tired of juggling too many balls in the air. I’m ready to move out of what the Hindus call the householder phase of life where one expends all one’s energy building up a home, a family, a career. I’m ready for the next phase.
Here in this earthy, human place I’m reminded – again – that my “next level” may have nothing to do with more accomplishments. It’s now about greater simplicity: simplicity of presence and clarity of heart and mind, where full attention can be given to the task or person at hand. Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.
Rabbi Kushner says that the most important quality for a clergy person is to be a non-anxious presence in community. The image of an elder in a traditionally-religious village comes to mind, a wise old man. Someone who walks the talk, who slows down enough to enjoy God in the ordinary, someone who ponders and teaches and counsels and leads others from a lived internal reality, someone who is less concerned about what we get done than how we move together through life.
As we move forward with a young associate priest and the dozens of energetic and capable lay leaders we’ve got, I’m praying that my role can shift a bit. I’ll still take creative initiative and pay attention to detail, and I’m sure that I’ll help lead our parish to new accomplishments. But I hope to let others be the more ambitious ones. I hope to not push as hard as I’ve been pushing, to be more patient as things unfold in their own time.
The “next level?” It’s not up. It’s down into the heart. It’s becoming more fully committed to life, to God’s wondrous presence in all. This too is a kind of ambition: a clarity of purpose, a holy desire. This was my ofrenda to La Virgen up in the cave at sunrise: that this pilgrimage be a fulcrum, tipping me down into greater purity of heart. I want to see God.