To Love What Is

This was more than 25 years ago. I was serving in Yuma and Akron, Colorado, out on the eastern plains. With a group of other clergy from the front range I was traveling home from a pastors’ conference in Kansas. We were driving north on US 385 from Burlington to Wray, which goes through some beautiful, rugged, terribly scarred hill country. I looked out the window of the van: sandy ravines carved out by high winds from dust-bowl days in the 1930s, or earlier, still so barely held on to low green shrubs, cottonwoods, yucca. 

I sighed: “I love this country.”

One of the other pastors said, almost before I got the words out, “The church needs men like you.” He said it so fast I almost recoiled … but he’s right. And not just the church needs men and women who care for this tough, dry, beautiful and unforgiving country: this world needs people who love this country simply because it is what it is.

It is not benign. A woman who must have been in her mid-eighties told me of using a garden hoe to kill a rattlesnake coiled up between her and her child’s stroller one summer morning on the farm she lived on with her husband. Another woman told of using damp handkerchiefs to to cover the faces of her babies while they slept, in order that they wouldn’t suffocate from fine dust that would blow into the best-sealed house: which hers was not. Take a look at West of Last Chance, with texts by Kent Haruf and pictures by Peter Brown, if you want other glimpses of the plains and their history.

But I do love the eastern Colorado sand-hills. After living away from them for twenty-five years I found I still love them as much when I watched the sun go down over them in July 2011 as I did in July 1982, when I saw them for the first time. Maybe even more: because more than ever I see them as a place with a hard and terrible beauty and grace: but a place nonetheless, of a beauty and grace which endures, and in which one also encounters God.

Bruce Allen Heggen teaches in the Writing Program of the Department of English of the University of Delaware, Newark, DE, where he also serves as pastor of the Lutheran Campus Ministry.  From 1982-1987 he served as pastor of New Hope Lutheran Church, Yuma, Colorado, and of Peace Lutheran Church, Akron, Colorado.