In Turkey, I reflected on water.
In Brazil, I reflected on the wind.
In Paraguay, I reflected on fire, and I promised that I would complete the cycle, and talk about earth.
So today I can write about the earth, specifically the desert.
A couple days ago, I chose (or it was chosen for me) to come to Arizona. The choice involved coming to the desert, to a Benedictine Monastery by the name of Holy Trinity. If you have downloaded Google Earth onto your computer, you can view my pictorial of the monastery by clicking here.
The stories of the importance of the desert are numerous in the Bible. The Israelites cross through the desert to enter into the Holy Land. John the Baptist came as a voice crying out in the desert. Jesus entered the desert for forty days where he was tempted. I began to wonder “What was so important about desert?”
I woke up for Morning Prayer and left the room that the Benedictines have given me to stay. There was a chair sitting outside the door and it had accumulated water during the night. The water had frozen, and was ice.
“I thought this was the desert! Why is there ice outside my door?” I exclaimed. “Is this what is so special about the desert? You can never be certain about your expectations?”
After I said that, I realized what my task for the day would be. I would ask the desert, the earth itself, what made it so special. Encountering the land has been so remarkably invaluable to me during this pilgrimage. From the moment I stepped foot in Gross Fullen, Germany, I learned that the earth actually tells you what you need to know about a culture. That is why a visitation to an actual place is so important.
Next to Holy Trinity Monastery is a dry river bed known as the San Pedro River. It once was a large waterway, flowing from Mexico into the United States. In 1887, an earthquake hit the area, and it opened up a fault across the river, creating fissures underground that drained the once marshy land. Now same river flows, but underground, and the river bed is dry, save for a few small, creek-like areas that curve to and fro in the old river bed.
As I began walking down the river, I looked behind me and noticed in the desert sand that I was leaving footprints. All around me as well were footprints of other travelers, dogs, deer, birds, and cattle. So I asked the footprints, “Are you what is special about the desert, the fact that my impression is left here so I can see where I have been?”
The footprints responded, “We are just reminders, but we will vanish and the desert will still be here. We are temporary at best, and are only formed because the soft sand is moved. Ask the sand if you want to know.”
So I stooped down to touch the sand, and rubbing the gritty coolness through my fingers, I asked, “Sand? You are abundant in this desert, omnipresent. Are you what make the desert special?”
The sand responded, “You have misjudged my character. I am old. I have been here for time that you could never comprehend. I am the descendants of mountains, and have worked for centuries at wearing down other mountains as well. I move where I am told by the wind and the water, but I have no power of my own. Listless, I passively wait to see the future, and what life will spring from the dry vessel I am. That’s it. If you want to seek what makes the desert special, ask the life that grows in it.”
So I went to the thorn bush, to the cactus, and to the cocklebur. I said, “Please. I know you well. When I come close to you, you scratch my skin, inconvenience my stride. You protect your life with pricks of pain for those who come to close. Are you what make the desert special?”
“We are not.” They replied. “You have confused our selfishness for asceticism. The only wisdom in our harshness is our own protection. We are callous so that we can live, but there is no charity in the emulation of our character, better you seek the wisdom of the sun.”
So I looked up, and with hand clasped to my brow, I asked the sun, “You bring the unbearable heat of the day. The rays which bounce light in all directions. You ravish the weak, and drive them away. Are you what I am seeking in this land? Are you what make the desert special?”
The sun replied, “You small man. Do you forget that I light the whole world? In sunsets you praised me. In the valleys you heralded my gift to the life giving fruits, now in the desert you curse me? Why do you question me? What you are seeking is down there.”
I looked around, but I found absence. There was nothing else to ask. So I began to walk back to the monastery.
Several months ago, I was in the north of Arizona, on my way to Orange County California. I wrote something that still rings in my heart, “We go to the desert, to learn how to see.” So why was today a failure? Why had I not seen what I needed to see?
Without knowing, I had walked down another trail to the monastery, and soon I was in a cool shaded groove, where the pine needles make a gentle bed on top of the soft sand. I stopped, and I looked up.
I have been in some of the greatest cathedrals in the world, the sanctuaries that clutch human breath in the rapture-moment of imagination’s awe. And now I was here. The dying trees that once grew next to the now dry riverbed leaned toward one another in symmetrically cascading arches, as grand as I have ever seen in any cathedral. The thick, dry thorn bushes climbed the trunks around the trees, permitting only the purest glistening of light off the yellow-white sand to penetrate. It was as striking as any stained glass window I have ever seen. The high embankment that was once the river bank neatly formed a nave, and the brown texture of broken twigs created decorative floor patterns to rival the most fanciful of mosaics.
This was nature’s cathedral. This was the earth’s self made sanctuary.
I think it was more beautiful than the man-made cathedrals that I have seen, but then I realized there was a purpose to that. The man-made sanctuaries are built to magnify the glory of God, not be the glory of God.
This was the glory of God.
What makes the earth special is not the footprints, not the sand, not the plants, not any one element you can name, but the way in which they have been brought together in a symphony-panorama that is a sanctuary, most prized by its creator. It is not that God lives in the desert, or the forest, or the wilderness, and is absent in the cathedrals of humanity. These things are never either/or. But for us to truly enjoy the presence of the dwelling of God in the sanctuaries we have built for God, we need to recognize the sanctuaries that God has built for God’s self, and take instruction from the great architect of them all.