pastor prayers

Jemez Mountains

From librarianmer’s photo stream, because our rule is that the camera goes with the kid, and this trip didn’t include the kid.

Ever since I attended New Mexico Girl’s State, and especially since I moved away from New Mexico 12 years ago, when I return and take in the landscape I start to sing the state song in my head. Which is a problem for many reasons, including a natural aversion to state or national songs of any kind as well as an inability to remember more than the first three lines of this particular one. And of course the chorus. Always, the chorus.
There I was last weekend, riding through the desert (my horse with no name an Avis rental car, apologies to Mr. Young) to arrive in the only landscape that has ever captivated me and made me certain there is a meaning and purpose to this existence that is magical, eternal, and unknowable to mere mortals. New Mexico is where I go to be home, not just in the sense that I know people there and have a personal history there, but where I go to be reminded of my place in the order of things — or the disorder of things, as the case may be.

There is nothing that can match the sense of being surrounded by the mountains and mesas, the sky that stretches forever and carries every expression in the weather it brings, the tenacious animals that make their homes amid the mesquite and sagebrush. I sat on a rock early one morning deep in the Jemez Mountains and stared down into the valley, felt the crisp sun on my face and arms and the pink glow that rose from the light landing on the orange earth dotted with bushes, and, further up, Ponderosa Pine. I was overcome with an urge to throw myself into the valley, to be enveloped by its beauty, washed clean by the daily thunderstorms, healed by the effusive hot springs, consumed by the very life of the place. I imagined being held by the earth, swallowed by her and held on her tongue for a time before being spit out (too bitter to be kept for long), renewed. I wanted the land to want me as much as I wanted it: passionately, irrationally, adoringly.

But truly the thing that has always been most calming about this landscape to me is its indifference. The magnitude of its existence, the sense of time before time and long after my time makes it a trustworthy place to leave the struggles and the celebrations of my own life. Death can be held here, and finds company with people who have mourned it in many cultures, through wars and droughts and blizzards and floods, with many gods and One True God. Life, too, is precious and always worthy of note. The people are gentle with each other, strangers, because everyone has a sense of being a stranger here. There is no mistaking that there is something much larger than yourself that determines the fate of your existence; the illusion of personal invincibility is not one that can last in this landscape.

I’m so grateful for my brief reunion with the god of open skies and hard rains, of eternal mountains and cool streams of living water. My heart is welling with thanks and praise to the people who have been my sustenance in that landscape, who I have carried in my heart just as I have saved the earth from Santuario de Chimayo on my prayer altar during these many years away.

O fair New Mexico, I love I love you so.

Originally uploaded by ParsaSilva

A couple of weeks ago, we joined the Universalist Church of Essex on their annual sunset cruise around Cape Ann. It’s the best church fundraiser I’ve ever attended.

I’ve been reading Nathaniel Philbrick’s Mayflower this summer, so as we soaked in the beauty of the landscape — the craggy inlets, the green, green marshes, the twists and turns as the land and sea do their intimate dance — I couldn’t help but think about the folks who arrived on these shores by sea and the wonder and terror and disorientation of it all. Whatever history’s judgment of them, they were folks looking for a way to be faithful, a way to live their lives fully and abundantly, and they were willing to risk their lives for it. Riding the choppy waters, listening to tunes played by the resident church D.J. on the upper deck, I was grateful to have this relaxing, fun tour through a place that for so many people was fraught with peril. Our religious forbearers, we owe them a lot.

And I wondered at what risks I am willing to take to live this faith, ill-defined as it is theologically, oddball as it is in our cultural landscape. I’m not talking live on a stinky ship with a hundred other people, no water for months, and no guarantee of help on the other side kind of risky. Thank god some faithful, brave or desperate (or all three) folks already did that. I beseech the ancestors for the wisdom to discern how to live this faith in the face of that which might crush it, to believe that there is a purpose and a meaning that is worth danger of reprisal, or being outcast, or just plain seeming weird. I pray that I can find a ways to listen so that the call of that great spirit, the spirit of the sea and the earth and the sky that meet and mingle on this coast might be more audible than the rush of the clock and the list of things to do and the pressure to be all, know all, do all, that conspire to do the work of stifling the soul and keeping life too small, justice too far, forgiveness too empty and love too saccharine to be compelling. May the beacon of the eternal light be in all our sights as we navigate the waters of faith. And may it offer us the challenge of honesty, a balm of healing, and the promise of love eternal and enveloping.