Let Us Go to That Country Where Dwells the Beloved

The servant Kabîr sings: "O Sadhu! finish your buying and selling, have done with your good and your bad: for there are no markets and no shops in the land to which you go."

                                                                                              —Kabîr, Song LXXIII, tr. Rabindranath Tagore

Desert and Mountains

I have lived most of my life surrounded by the Chihuahuan Desert and spent time in all the great deserts of the Western U.S.  I immediately learned to love the desert upon encountering it as a child.  My love only grew as I learned to understand its diversity, its synergies, and its connections to the biomes bordering it: the relict forests (that retreated to the cooler, wetter slopes and tops of great, rugged mountains as the basins became dry and hot after the last ice ages), the riparian zones created by rivers and streams that came down from the mountains and cut through the arid landscape, and the great grasslands with their reliable patterns of rainfall, which gradually replaced the true desert at its norther-and-easterly limits.  In the desert itself, the rain was fickle, but essential. Each year the landscape would be shaped by the unpredictable patterns of precipitation.  Spotty rains of the monsoon season would create floods in one place and leave others untouched.

I saw the ways in which plants and animals adapted to living in a land of scarce water; and how, if left undisturbed, the desert that sustained them always remained a land of inexhaustible variety.  As a child, I marveled at the strangeness of the devil’s claw seed pods, which seemed like objects from another planet--or perhaps they truly were the devil’s claws.  I would look out on the desert in spring, or after the rains, and see a million flowers that had opened in an instant, many for only one short day or night.  I was full of awe, tinged with a sense of disbelief, at the sheer size of the vine that produced a melon known as the buffalo gourd.  The vine would grow impossibly fast, adding meters of grey-green foliage almost overnight.  And by the end of its season, nothing would be left but tangled, dead tendrils and bright yellow little gourds with an odd smell.  I remember learning about the tiny yucca moths, the only insects that could fertilize the yucca—the desert lily—with its great clusters of white flowers, and I remember examining dried yucca pods in the fall and finding the remnants of seeds eaten by the moths’ larvae, who always left some intact so that the collaboration between yucca and moth could continue.

I knew all of this was magical, but also fragile: that a single bulldozer was capable of leveling acres of desert for some new development, that cactus poached from a site or region might not return in my lifetime, and that a clear-cut relict forest would be gone forever.  I also knew that a grave where the ancestors slept could not be restored once it was desecrated, plundered for artifacts.  Tire tracks didn’t disappear in an arid landscape, and overgrazing reduced areas of biological diversity to mere sand dunes dotted with half-buried mesquite bushes.

I learned that nature is sacred: that the mountains are sacred, the rocks are sacred, the desert woodrat’s ungainly nest is sacred, and that each life is precious and necessary for the well-being all.

Judge Not

The French writer Léon Bloy wrote something like, “The friends of Jesus see all around them the modern Christians, and it is thus that they are able to picture hell.” (Quatre ans de captivité à Cochons-sur-Marne)  So many people who claim to be Christian have no trouble ignoring the simple command that Jesus repeated over and over, forcefully and unambiguously: do not judge.  They get worked up over what other people are doing—usually things that Jesus, in fact, didn’t seem particularly concerned about—but think this command doesn’t apply to them.  Instead of following Jesus’ example, his words: “Father forgive them,” “Neither do I condemn you,” “Judge not,” “Do not condemn,” “I did not come to judge the world,” etc. etc., they are always the ones to “cast the first stone,” and to act like it is their personal religious duty to do so.  What is the source of this perversity that drives people to disregard so clear a command, and become so invincibly self-righteous?  Jesus preached love.  Where does all the hate come from?  No one was more about mercy, forgiveness, and not judging others than Jesus.  He reserved his harsh words for hypocrites, for those who thought they were better than everyone else, because he knew that no one had the right to condemn another.  Yet so many Christians refuse to acknowledge this basic message—and seem to have no trouble preaching its exact opposite!

The Cosmic Dance

When we are alone on a starlit night, when by chance we see the migrating birds in autumn descending on a grove of junipers to rest and eat; when we see children in a moment when they are really children, when we know love in our own hearts; or when, like the Japanese poet, Basho, we hear an old frog land in a quiet pond with a solitary splash—at such times the awakening, the turning inside out of all values, the "newness," the emptiness and the purity of vision that make themselves evident, all these provide a glimpse of the cosmic dance.

                                                                                     —Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation

Spring

As I walked past a sandstone bungalow in the incomparable light of spring, I thought of a friend who had lived there.  A fig tree grew outside the front bedroom window, but he—my friend—would never see it again.  He’d died during the previous winter in another city, far, far from this place.  One day, I, too, would no longer be able to stand before this golden sandstone house, this fig tree.  The house would still stand, and perhaps the tree, the orange and purple wildflowers in the yard would return, the spring sun would bathe them in its incomparable light, but someone else would observe it all; someone who, in all likelihood, would know nothing of either me or my friend.

Love is the Highest Reality

Novalis wrote: Das sind glückliche Leute, die überall Gott vernehmen, überall Gott finden, diese Leute sind eigentlich religiös.  (These are happy people who hear God everywhere, find God everywhere; these are actually religious people.)  To find God in all persons, all things, all circumstances of life, in an unending dialog of love.  Wer Gott einmal suchen will, der findet ihn überall.  (Whoever wants to seek God, finds him everywhere.) 

Once, in a dream, I was walking toward the door of a house that I had never visited before, across a red stone yard, and I was suddenly filled with an overwhelming desire to have nothing in me but God, to finally be rid of everything that wasn’t God.  The dream stayed in my memory as a great inspiration, a great hope, and a great reminder of my deepest desire.  Novalis also said: Glauben ist Empfindung des Erwachens und Wirkens und Sinnens in einer andern Welt.  (Faith is the sensation of awakening and working and being in another world.)  Not just looking at this world differently—but being in another world.

“How I Spent My Summer Vacation”

I remember being twelve and going to Vacation Bible School on the military base near our home. My father had lost an eye during a brief stint in the army, long before I was born, and received a disability retirement, though he was in fact the least disabled (or soldierly) person I ever met. The disability retirement meant that he and his dependents continued to have full military privileges, a state of affairs my siblings and I took advantage of in every possible way. We swam at the base pool, went to the movies at the base theater, shopped at the base stores, and used the base library, which featured a remarkably comprehensive collection of children’s books. Eligibility for participation in the base’s Bible School was another perk of being a dependent. Like most of the kids who showed up for it, we went mainly for the freebies handed out daily, including beach balls, Frisbees, reusable water bottles, tee shirts, Nerf balls, and, of course, Bibles. Those of us who lasted long enough even ended up with windbreakers and pup tents. (Years later, I knew a woman who had been a chaplain’s assistant in the army. She put together a huge buffet of donated food for the opening of a new campus ministry center at the local university, and when I complemented her on the quality of the feast—not to mention the door prizes—she told me, “The one thing I learned in my time with the military was that if you want to pack an event, you have to give away free stuff.”)

     We would be picked up by a bus at Center Chapel and transported to a collection of unused barracks deep inside the base, rather dilapidated wooden buildings painted pale yellow on the outside and gray on the inside. Each building was furnished with cafeteria tables and metal chairs. The buildings also held an assortment of coffee cans filled with sand and labeled “butts only,” which we, the kids, found very amusing. On the wall near the drinking fountain in each building was a gadget that looked like a soap dispenser packed with shiny salt tablets. For a couple of days, I was strangely and stupidly happy to have unlimited access to the tablets, even though I had no idea why someone would actually want to consume such a thing.

     We were assigned to the different buildings according to our ages. This meant that I couldn’t just hang out with my siblings. If I wanted to score a freebie, I would have to mingle. The Bible School was a joint effort by chaplains of different denominations, and perhaps for that reason there was little actual studying of the Bible. We spent most of the day singing folk songs and doing arts and crafts or having “rap sessions” about drugs and drinking, dating, bullying, and the like. I had been raised, both at home and at school, in my own faith tradition, but the army was a pragmatically non-sectarian institution. I remember how the chapels on base could be quickly altered to accommodate the different denominations that used them. Every Sunday, after Catholic mass, the Reformation was symbolically reenacted in a matter of minutes.

     At the Fort Bliss Vacation Bible School, I found myself surrounded by kids of many faiths, who struggled with the same issues and fears and hopes that I did. There was a girl who had been in an inpatient drug treatment facility when she was only eleven. A boy whose mom was an army nurse and whose dad was doing life in prison. And there was Andy (not his real name), a pastor’s son who had lived in Guam and Korea and with whom I remained friends until his dad was transferred to the Presidio a few years later. He was an incorrigible prankster and a talented and fiercely competitive baseball player. When it came to picking teams, he was always the first one chosen. Baseball brought a special stability and purpose to his otherwise unsettled, peripatetic “army brat” life. But as I got to know him better, I discovered that in spite of his athletic prowess, he often seemed lonely, lost, and rather alienated, overwhelmed by feelings that neither his family nor baseball could fix. All of that didn’t necessarily make him a better friend, but it did mean he was someone you could be honest and authentic around. He understood inner pain.

     The chaplains who led our discussions were predominantly young, and, unlike Andy’s dad, were not career soldiers. They were surprisingly open-minded, even when it came to difficult issues like the morality of killing for one’s country, and they tended to have more than a little healthy skepticism about unquestioning obedience to authority. In the midst of the ugly, impersonal military barracks and the avid queuing for freebies, I experienced a real sense of community (though I didn’t put a name to it at the time), and I also gained a new openness toward kids and adults of other faiths.

     By the end of it, my knowledge of the Bible was not appreciably greater—and I was already pretty knowledgeable on the subject, as it was—but I had made new friends, and created plenty of artwork that my parents could proudly display, and ended up with lots of free stuff, though most of it turned out to be rather shoddily made and, unlike the friendships, didn’t survive the summer.