Travel

When we walk in faith, each breath is a prayer

Steve · November 2, 2017 · 6 Comments

Doe Mtn — Doe Mountain Trailhead, near Sedona, AZ. SJG photo.

“The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing — to reach the Mountain, to find the place where all the beauty came from.” – C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces

Over the past four days visiting the beautiful red rock country surrounding Sedona, Arizona, Sue and I have taken a hike each day. It’s easy to do here, for there are trailheads at the end of just about every road and many, many hikes of varying lengths and difficulty from which to choose. So, whether you are occasional enthusiasts like us looking for “easy to moderate” trails, or more experienced (and fit!) folks looking for something much more challenging, Sedona is a wonderful place to put one foot in front of the other and take a hike.

On the Road: San Francisco de Assisi Mission Church, Ranchos de Taos, New Mexico

Steve · August 28, 2015 · 6 Comments

church1 — San Francisco de Assisi Mission Church, SJG photo.

Before even leaving for our trip to New Mexico, I knew one of our stops would be the majestic and oft-photographed San Francisco de Assisi Mission Church just outside of Taos. My good friend and mentor Fred Volkmann had shared his photos with me years ago, and I later learned that the mission church has been the subject of paintings by Georgia O’Keeffe and photos by Ansel Adams and Paul Strand, among countless others.

Construction on this adobe masterpiece began around the time of the American Revolution and was completed in 1815 by Franciscan missionaries in honor of their founder and patron, St. Francis of Assisi. Like all mission churches, it held a dual purpose. It was both a place of worship and served as protection from attack, in this case from Comanches. Today, it continues to serve as a parish church in the Santa Fe Diocese and is listed as a National Historic Landmark and designated as a World Heritage Site.

church2 — San Francisco de Assisi Mission Church, SJG photo.

And like all churches of its era, this is a sanctuary built (and rebuilt) by hand. Spanish colonists moved to the area in the mid-18^th century from the larger settlement of the Taos Pueblo (unfortunately closed during our visit) and found fertile land for wheat and corn. They built their adobe homes from mud and straw around a central plaza to create community and for protection. The church, with its massive flowing buttresses and bell towers, occupies a place of importance and inspiration on the plaza. A thick adobe wall encircles the church and its small cemetery and forecourt.

The church remains in great condition, thanks to the continuing efforts of the parishioners, who have lovingly and authentically repaired and rebuilt it over the years. In fact, citizens, parishioners and visitors come together for two weeks every other year to re-mud the exterior, a job that can only be done by hand and with the knowledge that they are maintaining a spiritual and cultural home for generations to come.

francis — St. Francis, looking in. SJG photo.

For all the advances of modern society and advanced building techniques and materials, the sight of this old adobe church basking and baking in the New Mexico sun was a reminder that the works of our hands, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, are meant for the service of others and for the glory of God.

[Thanks to the National Park Service website for historical information.]

Today’s Word: Vestige

Steve · September 5, 2014 · 6 Comments

Hay1 — Hay field off Ballard Branch, near Weaverville, NC. SJG photo.

St. Bonaventure wrote that all of creation is the fingerprint and the footprint of the Divine One (vestigia Dei). By definition, this “vestige” is a small reminder, a trace of something that is no longer present. So if “all creation” is a vestige of the Creator, how big, indeed, must that Divine One be? Huge. Beyond comprehension and without bounds or the ability to be possessed.

So is it any wonder we are left speechless and in awe when confronted with the grandeur of the natural world? For somewhere deep inside we know this world is merely God’s calling card, God’s way of reminding us that — although seemingly out of sight — the Divine is nevertheless as present as the rain on our nose, the sound of the stream in our ears, the smell of the rose and the taste of the fruit of the vine. And while our churches give us sacraments — visible signs of the divine in the forms of water, wine, bread, oil, hands — the world around us is an ever-living, ever-moving, ever-changing sacrament of our never-changing, ever-present God.

I spent last week in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, and I can’t shake the vision of stone and tree, stream and fog, mountain and valley. I still groan in wonder when I think of the view from the top of Grandfather Mountain or the early morning veiled hay field that snatched my breath away. It was the view, yes, but it was really the glimpse that got me.

Ask yourself in silence: What in nature beckons me to see God? Where is the sacred in my life?

Today’s Word: Bee-loud

Steve · August 28, 2014 · 11 Comments

My favorite poem by the Irish poet William Butler Yeats, The Lake Isle of Innisfree, begins with these four lines:

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;
Nine bean rows will I have there, a hive for the honeybee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

glade — Craggy Gardens Bald, NC. SJG photo.

I always loved the sense of silence, stillness and peace that Yeats paints for us in this poem, but it wasn’t until yesterday that I was really aware of what it might be like to live in a bee-loud glade. Yesterday we hiked Craggy Gardens Trail, a path right off the Blue Ridge Parkway in North Carolina, which promised a trail to “craggy flats through a high mountain Rhododendron bald.” I had never been surrounded by the bone-like Rhododendron before, and I became mesmerized by the bare branches clawing their way skyward, seemingly dead and yet holding life in the glossy leaves at the end of their limbs. Perhaps another word for another day…

rhodo — Rhododendron in Blue Ridge Mountains, NC. SJG photo.

When we arrived at the top and walked out onto the bald of the hill, I found myself virtually encircled by bees busy doing what bees do, not caring a buzz that I was tramping through their livelihood. But the sound! It took me a few seconds to realize that the roar in my ears was the chorus of the workers. Going about their life and livelihood, I wondered if they knew the sound they made. Yeats’ words immediately surfaced and I smiled. Bee-loud glad indeed. He knew. He knew because he paid attention, as I was doing now.

So often we don’t act because we don’t think we make a difference, as if one voice doesn’t matter, as if the buzz that comes off of our lives is insignificant. But that mindset negates the power of community — of people who put their heads down and work and get the job done, of singers who lift one voice and form a chorus, of worshippers who gather around a common table and form one body in Christ. That’s the buzz of our lives, the bee-loud glade of our existence. We are not made to be alone.

Ask yourself in silence: When do I feel insignificant? When do I feel alive and part of something larger than myself?

Today’s Word: Landscape

Steve · August 25, 2014 · 2 Comments

Linville Falls, NC. SJG photo.

“Geography is simply a visible form of theology.”
– Jon D. Levenson

I’m traveling this week through the Appalachian and Blue Ridge Mountains of eastern Tennessee and western North Carolina. At the same time, I’m reading my new friend Belden Lane’s book (The Solace of Fierce Landscapes: Exploring Desert and Mountain Spirituality [Oxford Press]) on the power of landscape in our spiritual lives. Belden’s book takes an especially close look at the rough and barren landscapes of the American southwest and Israel. He is drawn to these mountains and deserts (the word toou in the Coptic language stands for both mountains and deserts, I learned) just as the early church desert fathers drew inspiration from the via negativa, the negative or opposite way of thinking that uses no analogies for God since they are all “ultimately inadequate.”

In the negative space of the deserts and mountains, we come to find God and ourselves for what God and we are not. Belden writes: “Only at the periphery of our lives, where we and our understanding of God alike are undone, can we understand bewilderment as occasioning another way of knowing.”

It’s a beautiful, insightful, ancient way of thinking about God, and I have felt that sense of nothingness and yet everything important standing among the red rocks and dry earth of Sedona, Arizona. And yet, here I stand in the opposite of all that, in the resplendent and verdant ridges and valleys of the Appalachians. So where is God in all this green and fecundity, in these rivers and streams and orchards and fields? God is here, too, of course.

Belden’s book and his other writings have opened my eyes to the role that landscape plays in our spiritual lives, in the ways that we see and sense the sacred all around us. Again, he writes: “[Landscape] plays a central role in constructing human subjectivity, including the way one envisions the holy. The place where we live tells us who we are — how we relate to other people, to the larger world around us, even to God.”

view2 — Blue Ridge Mountains, North Carolina. SJG photo.

I don’t live here — I’m just visiting for a week — and yet this larger world around me is so big that I cannot take it all in, cannot begin to fathom the Creator and the extent of the creation. And yet I know it to be true, feel it to be truth at the center of my being. I need this landscape like I need the air that I breathe, like I need sacred scripture and the community of others and the bread and wine offered on the table of thanksgiving.

There’s nothing magical about these mountains, just as there is nothing magical in the toou of Belden’s book. We find God when we open ourselves to God, in that place where we allow ourselves to be empty enough to allow God to enter and be present. God, as Belden writes, “cannot be had.” And as the unknown author of the Cloud of Unknowing once wrote: “God is a desert to be entered and loved, never an object to be grasped or understood.”

Wherever we are, whatever our landscape, at our core we must not be possessors of God and faith but rather empty vessels, ready to receive the flowing love of an incomprehensible God.

Ask yourself in silence: What landscape speaks to me of God? Why?