Small in the Face of Mystery

My daughter Siri and her boyfriend Neal are traveling the world. This last week I talked with them on Skype about their recent kayaking trip to the fiords on the northern island of New Zealand. 

They have been in many extraordinary surroundings, but something about this experience got Neal talking,“ We were in these small boats on this large body of water, looking up to the enormous and vast green cliffs of the fiord. I realized I was only looking at a small part of something quite far-reaching. I felt so insignificant.” He said it with awe and a sense of joy.

I remember a fellow pilgrim on a hike to Mount of the Holy Cross saying those words, ”There are different ways of being insignificant. Go to a mall or ride the subway in New York and you feel insignificant in the face of all these people rushing to something. I do not like that kind of insignificance. However, I do seek the insignificance the mountains call me to. When I gaze at a mountain range or spend my day hiking, I realize how small I am and how small the burdens are that I carry.”

Currently I am reading Take this Bread by Sara Miles. She describes her powerful experience of receiving communion bread for the first time. She cannot seem to articulate her experience to anyone who can understand until she finds a friend, who she says,

“deeply understood the 'relief' of finding yourself to be small in the face of mystery”.

“The ‘relief’ of finding yourself to be small in the face of mystery”…this is what I would call “Grace." 

Kari Reiquam

Love, Suffering, Beauty

Tiger Trout (Salmo trutta X Salvelinus fontinalis) caught in the Uintas and then released.

Photo by Jeffrey Louden

Many years ago I read in a Salt Lake Tribune article that there are three things which move us toward conversion: love, beauty and suffering. I grew up in the West and at an early age fell in love with the land, the landscape, and then the world. Some think that part of the maturation of faith and the church is to nurture this love, to develop and deepen a theology that is centered on being here, loving this place and its peoples, its creatures, its ecosystems. We are converted by the beauty of the world, by its many landscapes, by the suffering it experiences and in which, if we are fortunate, we participate as we move toward redemption for the whole world.

"When your beloved Son came among us, the waters of the river welcomed him, the heavens opened to greet his arrival, the animals of the wilderness drew near as his companions....."   Evangelical Lutheran Worship, p. 81

Jeffrey Louden

Discovering the Holy, in Place

I begin with a personal experience…

It started on a day most miserable. I received a phone call from the doctor that I did not want and scared me to death. I had cancer and I needed surgery.

I had always wondered what people do when they get bad news. What did I do? My mind went into chaos, I was agitated and full of angry energy. I felt penned in and confined by the house. My husband suggested that we get in the car and drive and so we did. We wandered for a time, ate a hamburger and then took the highway from Dillon to Kremmling. We took the turnoff to Ute Pass and headed up to the top of the hill.

We parked at the top, got out of the car and stood looking at the Gore Mountain Range, spread before our eyes in all of its glory. We stood there in silence for a very long time.

The mountains might as well have had microphones that day. They spoke to me of the largeness of life. I tried to breathe in their depth and their breadth as I’m sure I heard them shouting, “IT’S NOT ALL ABOUT YOU! IT’S NOT ALL ABOUT YOU!”.

From the confines of my fear, they called out a more spacious view…

It was a relief and a joy to open up and see, to hear and trust.

After some time, all the pieces shattered within me seemed to come together again. I had a sense of being made whole.

“We can do this.” I said to my husband. We got in the car and went home.

Kari Reiquam

Landscapes of Faith + Rocky Mountain Synod Assembly + ELCA + April 26-28, 2012

The Northern Uintas near Kings Peak + August 2011

As we prepare for the April 2012 assembly of our church, we would like to invite you to join us in conversation by sharing pictures, stories, questions and videos about your and our “landscape of faith”. This can be an exterior landscape, i.e. where you live, worship and work, or an interior landscape, i.e. how you live, worship and work in relationship to your place, your geography, your community, your interior formation in faith.


Each week we will offer you an opportunity to prepare for the assembly through a photograph, a story, a quote, a prayer, a specific practice, a question to ponder, all to invite you in to this assembly topic. Your responses will be posted and we hope thus to begin a conversation amongst us all. Pastor Kari Reiquam and I will moderate the discussion and offer the questions, photos, art and quotes to move the conversation along. We look forward to your posts, your ideas, your resources and your interest.


We are fortunate to live in a “place” of incredible beauty and variety with deserts, cities, high plains, mountains, vast open spaces. Our landscape is also marked by great challenges, by the damages we ourselves have inflicted upon the creation. Landscape beckons us to the ways of God.  All these invite us to ask, how is God present (or absent) in our landscape? To what are we called? To use Walter Brueggeman’s language, “Are we landed?”


We look forward to hearing from you.


Pastor Kari Reiquam
Pastor Jeffrey Louden


www.rmselca.org
Synod Assembly Planning