Pilgrimages of the Soul

All journeys are voyages of discovery, and all journeys are pilgrimages of the soul. Each hill crested reveals terrain that is new, never before seen, which expands the consciousness. All journeys reveal how much we do not know, even as we gather new insights and experiences. All journeys reveal how much we treasure home.


Bishop Allan Bjornberg
Rocky Mountain Synod, ELCA

photo by Kent Mueller

One Reason for this Blog Series

Zion National Park on the Sunday of the Transfiguration 

near the Courtyard of the Patriarchs, February 19, 2012

Photograph by Jeffrey Louden

One of the reasons for this blog series is simply to be in conversation about landscapes and faith, about what they mean (or don't mean) for us literally or metaphorically or both. Its also to be imagining our own landscape of faith, and the landscape of the church, in particular the Lutheran church. Probably most of us know that the landscape of life has changed, even drastically. As we discern the nature of the landscape, we can agree to disagree about things. We can ask wild questions. We can listen to each other. We can seek to orient (to know which way is East) ourselves in this changing world. Will you join the conversation?

Jeffrey Louden 

Placed in Creation

I remember the summer time visits with my grandparents. They lived in northern Montana where they raised cattle and grew wheat.

My grandparents would travel once a week in the car to the nearest town. My brother and I would sit in the back seat and look out at the fields for the hour-long trip. The trip seemed endless, as we traveled dirt roads and a bumpy highway. It appeared to us that there was “nothing” to look at.

       
But it was not that way for my grandparents. We would listen in on their conversations in the front seat. 

 “Say, Floyd’s crop looks good this year,”

 “Don’t think Irving planted soon enough,”

 “Look at the weeds on that place! Terrible what its come to since Joe left.”

It seemed to me and to my brother that the conversation was always the same. We would look at each other, roll our eyes in our heads and grin…what was to talk about? It was just dirt and grass and field after field to us. Boring!

They knew every inch of that ground, however, and they paid attention to it. For them, it was sacred place.

The sacred wasn’t something unusual or astounding to them. The sacred was familiar ground, the land and life that sustained them. Sacred was something they knew and had known each and every day for months and years on end. Sacred was what they  commented on… repeatedly! Sacred was the place that called them into fidelity; they had to tend it or they would lose it. It called them into fidelity with each other and with their neighbors because they needed each other in order to receive the life the earth offered.

I know there is no ‘going back’ to the life they knew, not for me anyway. But I wonder how I can find that deep connection to place and people.  What ways can I pay attention, come to know, and be faithful so that I may find my place in the world?

My grandparents helped me see that certain places invite us into fidelity; they call us to tend to them. Certain places get our attention. We keep looking at them, we forever comment on their existence. My grandparents helped me look for the sacred place right before my eyes.

Kari Reiquam

The Great Gallery

The Great Gallery
Horseshoe Canyon, Canyonlands National Park

© Jeffrey Louden

The early Mormon settlers called this the Holy Ghost panel. But we have no idea what the artists called it, only that they put it in a beautiful place, far from the Colorado River, on a south facing wall in a remote canyon on the Colorado Plateau. Estimates for its age vary from 1500 to 4000 years ago. 

Great art and great landscapes go together. We are blessed to live in such a wondrous place.  As we prepare for the synod assembly and the election of a new Bishop and bidding farewell to Bishop Allan, is it too much to invoke the "holy Ghost" to be with us as the landscape of our church changes, to invoke the spirit to help us discern our path and our witness?  So we do. So we do.

          Jeffrey Louden 

Out of the pieces, a new creation

by Marty Stortz

Augsburg College

Dr. Stortz is the keynote presenter at our upcoming Rocky Mountain Synod Assembly, April 26-28, in Colorado Springs.

Mt. Kilimanjaro hadn’t been on my bucket list.  It was a time in my life when the mere thought of bucket lists turned my stomach.  I had lost my husband to brain cancer the year before, and the whole concept of a bucket list seemed a luxury that had cruelly passed me by.  I was broken, in pieces, and quite literally, list-less.

So when a friend invited me to join his climbing party, I shrugged -- listlessly – and said: “Why not?”  One morning a few months later, I found myself at the base of the mountain.  We climbed through the rainforest, steamy and close with the calls of strange birds.

There was evening and there was morning, a second day.  

We climbed through the alpine meadow, filled with scrub trees green against red volcanic rock. 
There was evening and there was morning, a third day.  

We climbed above the tree line, into a zone where plants hugged the ground, bursting with color from every crevass and cranny, and we learned the hearty species that survive altitude and intense swings in temperature. 

There was evening and there was morning, a fourth day.  

We climbed out of realm of vegetation entirely, entering the fierce landscape of the summit itself. Here there was nothing but scree, searing sun, and shards of sharp fragments of lava. It looked for all in the world like we’d stumbled into a giants’ kitchen. Maybe there had been an earthquake or a violent domestic argument, but something traumatic had happened. The ground looked littered with shards of red-clay pottery – and little else. Here, a once perfect bowl, angrily smashed into pieces; there, a pitcher, broken beyond repair; up ahead, a plate, dashed into fragments.  

There was evening – 

— and at midnight we made the final ascent.  And by that time, like the landscape we ourselves were in pieces, shattered by exhaustion, thin air, and the cold. The only thing that kept me going was the pull of the hundreds of hikers in front of us, the push of the hundreds from behind. Broken as we were, together we snaked up the mountain like something alive, our headlamps steady shards of light in an inky darkness.  

There was the rest of that evening and there was morning, a fifth day

And as that day dawned, we stood at the summit and surveyed the wreckage we’d spent the night climbing through. As I looked at the earth’s curvature gently falling around us, I remember thinking: this whole mountain is one huge mound of broken pieces, shards from something else. And yet, there it was, Africa’s “Shining Mountain,” the highest peak on the continent. Out of these pieces, a new creation.

And that wasn’t the only high point of the trip, though it certainly scored in terms of elevation. The following week we visited the school a member of our climbing party had started in his native village outside of Iringa in central Tanzania. We lost a tire to a pot-hole on the way there, but when we finally arrived, students stood at attention in their classrooms in faded green uniforms to greet us. 

Their green jackets and pleated skirts looked worn, but clean, relics from another century. Their desks and chairs looked vaguely familiar, kind of like the ones I’d used when I’d been in grade school. Broken and badly in need of repair, they done hard service for at least that long. The names on the back of the chairs told a story: Anderson, Jenson, Carlson. Those weren’t Tanzanian names. Later the principal proudly explained that the furniture, the uniforms, even the schoolbooks had all been donated by a MN non-profit – hence the names. Like the mountain, the school had been built on shards, cast-off pieces from somewhere else. 

And yet, there it was, in so many ways more magnificent than Kilimanjaro, a school at the end of a red dirt road, the only opportunity for education beyond third grade for miles around.  Out of these pieces, a new creation.

These images stuck with me, broken as I was, like scraps of an insistent rhyme that at first I could neither shake nor completely make out. But then I started to hear it everywhere: breaking and remaking, breaking and remaking. Out of the pieces, a new creation.

You catch the rhyme in the story of the first creation.  Let’s be frank: there’s a lot of breakage involved.  For anything to happen, the smooth stone of matter, which was “without form and void,” had to be shattered, rather like the aftermath of the domestic argument we imagined on Mt. Kilimanjaro. Light is broken apart from darkness, day from night, the heavens from the land and the seas, sun from moon and all stars – the stars themselves, like headlamps, shards of light in an inky darkness.  And at the end of each day, God looks at all these broken and repurposed pieces of creation – and blesses them:  “God saw that it was good....God saw that it was very good.”   

There is evening and there is morning, another day.  And then we come upon the creation of Eve, itself a story of breaking and remaking, because the only way to get Eve is to break Adam apart, break Adam open, break into Adam.  From his bone and from his flesh, literally, from pieces of his body, Eve comes forth, the second human.  

Out of the pieces, a new creation.

Backgrounded by the soundtrack of breaking and remaking, another story of creation makes a different kind of sense. This is the story of the creation of the disciples, which now seems a lot like the story of the first creation, at least when Matthew rolls the camera, because if you listen to Jesus’ first public sermon, he’s surrounded by wreckage.  He makes his recruitment speech to a broken bunch of people:

“Blessed are the poor in spirit...

“Blessed are those who mourn...

“Blessed are the meek....

“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness....”

These are people who’ve been broken into pieces by the world’s ways – and yet these are precisely the people whom Jesus blesses and refashions into his disciples.  Jesus calls – not by command – but by blessing.   

Out of the pieces, a new creation.

Jesus seems to have done a pretty good job of this new creation, because by the close of Matthew’s Gospel (25:31-46), these disciples, broken, blessed, and repurposed, have become a new creation: giving food to the hungry, drink to the thirsty, clothes to the naked, comfort to the sick and imprisoned.  What I love about this is that these once-shattered disciples are shocked by their own makeovers!  They barely recognize themselves – or Jesus: “When was it that we saw you hungry and gave you food, or thirsty and gave you something to drink?”   But these blessed pieces have become a blessing to others, without even knowing it.  

Out of these pieces, a new creation.

And should this surprise us? Because the central practices of this broken band of disciples today,  bound together by duct tape, piano wire, and a fair helping of grace, they are all practices of breaking and making.  Look at the Lord’s Supper: you take a nice loaf of bread perfectly round – and tear it into pieces.  These pieces nourish a new creation. Look at the rite of baptism, where you take an infant, break it away from the arms of its family of origin, adopt it into a new family, the family of the faithful, and give it a new name “Child of God.”  It’s shocking, and I keep waiting for some parent to suddenly see what’s going on, take the child, and run screaming from the sanctuary.  

Out of these pieces, a new creation.

And should this surprise us?  Because this pattern of breaking and remaking calls to mind the story of Jesus himself, broken, blessed, and repurposed as the risen Christ, a creation so new even his disciples wouldn’t have recognized him – were it not for the marks on his body, witness to his own brokenness.  

Out of these pieces, a new creation.

The pattern of breaking and remaking is only another way of thinking about cross and resurrection, this time using the body of Christ as the mountain, the school, the broken pieces of our own losses.

Ah!  The most terrifying words in scripture may be the words God springs on us at the end:  “Behold, I make all things new!” Because the new creation always comes out of the shards of the old creation. Call it divine recycling, if you will, but this is God’s way of working in the world.

Here are some ground rules for moving through this divine construction zone: First, make no mistake, navigating the new creation takes time – sometimes more than seven days.  And you may be in Day One or Day Six, but there is evening and there is morning.  Another day.  

Second, remember that, just as God blessed each day of creation, God blesses broken pieces, so that they can come together into something new.  Expect that blessing – look for it, if you like, but it will find you.  Let your loss bless you.

Third, the new creation is just that: new. It’s not the old creation warmed over. I used to tell my friends that if anyone saw my Old Life wandering around, they should remind it where I lived. But I knew the Old Life wasn’t coming back again. Resurrection is never resuscitation; it’s something new entirely.

Finally, just for the journey ahead, take a mental snapshot of this image of the creation of Adam that Michelangelo painted in the Sistine Chapel in Rome.  This time notice two things: that God’s finger is not quite touching Adam’s – but it’s close.  And notice, of course, the crack. There’s always breakage.

Go forth with good courage.

Thin Places

As I read this wonderful set of writings and look at the photos I am reminded of the Celtic concept of “thin places.” A thin place is a place where the distance between the spiritual world and the material world is as ‘thin as gossamer,’ to use George MacLeod’s image. A thin place is where you experience God in a special way. Jesus certainly knew about those places. He would head to the hills when he needed to spend time in prayer with God.

One of my favorite spots is Grand Mesa in western Colorado. It reminds me of northern Minnesota with all the lakes and the evergreens. There is one particular lake where my dog, Molly, and I go to hang out with God. It is a beautiful and peaceful place. I love to hike through the squishy wet in spring and delight to the croaking of the spring toads. Summer brings an abundance color in gorgeous wildflowers and white puffy clouds against the blue of a Colorado sky. Fall brings the aspen gold amid the evergreens. Winter brings the silence of snow. There is a particular rock upon which I sit to meditate beside the lake. It is a thin place for me, a place to connect with the goodness of God’s creation and with the goodness of God.

May you be blessed with such a place of peace and joy.

--Janice Johnson

Janice lives in Cedaredge, Colorado. She is a pastor on leave in the Rocky Mountain Synod ELCA.

Pilgrimage

The difference between traveling as a tourist and traveling as a pilgrim is a matter of approach. The tourist wants to see, to be in a new place and enjoy a new experience. The pilgrim may also seek these things, but the pilgrim is primarily searching for a meeting place, an encounter with the living God.

Pilgrimages have always been part of spiritual life. It seems we humans need to move our feet to discover where our heads and hearts want to be. Although the sacred is all around us, sometimes we need to make journeys to discover the sacred for ourselves.

Mount of the Holy Cross Lutheran Church in Vail, Colorado makes pilgrimage part of its life together as a faith community. Every year a group hikes to a view of the Holy Cross Mountain. They  follow a pilgrims's trail that was popular in the 1930's. They travel as a group and worship together at the mountain top with a view of the cross on the mountain-side.

How can climbing a mountain be a pilgrimage? Pilgrimages share a pattern. This pattern can be applied to labyrinth walks, mountain climbs , as well as trips to the grocery store! Once the pattern is in place, the place of pilgrimage is wherever you intend. Here is the pattern, simply stated:

1) Relinquishment. Going up a mountain is physically exhausting and in the effort there is a release of all the strains and stresses of life. It is an opportunity to prayerfully "let go" to God and relinquish all that is burdensome.
2) Centering. Arrive at the top of the mountain, rest and reflect on the vistas that surround. Be refreshed by the wonder of the view and be centered in gratitude on the wonder of the Creator.This center place is often where you leave an offering and where you pick up something to take home with you.
3) Recommitment. Head down the mountain and begin to prepare for what meets you in life and what you are called to be and to do.


Kari Reiquam

Hyde’s Wall, Escalante Wilderness, Utah

Hyde’s Wall, Escalante Wilderness, Utah.  photograph copyright © 2011 by Stephen Trimble.


A Guest Blog by noted author and photographer Stephen Trimble

In the long-ago spring of 1976, the side canyons of Utah’s Escalante River were more remote than they are now, and they are still pretty remote.  My two buddies and I had driven without incident in our hand-me-down family sedans across the Circle Cliffs to the Moody Creek trailhead. We found no other vehicles parked at the end of the road.  Once we set off on foot, we weren’t expecting to see anyone else for the next week. We made camp at the junction of East Moody Canyon and the Escalante. In the lengthening iridescent light of late afternoon we wandered up East Moody Canyon.  Each rounding curve brought new walls.  Desert varnish streaked the crossbedded sandstone, black swaths across lavender and vermillion.  Here, the color fields of Rothko; there, the bold strokes of Franz Kline. One wall in particular drew me.  I moved my tripod this way and that, aiming my camera past piñons and junipers to a canyon wall reflecting purples and mauves, textured with fractures and cracks.  The light had bounced down between canyon walls from the sky and the stars, distilled to an unbelievable saturation.  I had never seen such surreal and intense colors.  Later, I realized Philip Hyde had photographed the very same wall for Slickrock and for his Glen Canyon portfolio.  Over the years as I published my pictures of that place, I captioned them “Hyde’s Wall.” We tore ourselves away from each mosaic of rock, tree, grass, and lichen in the endlessly changing gallery and strolled on, tantalized always by the next bend.  We came to an amphitheater, the canyon’s curves arranged to form an echo chamber with three reflective surfaces. A trickle of water in the streambed was enough for the frogs and toads.  On that springtime evening they were calling enthusiastically, the cricketlike trill of red-spotted toads and the plaintive bleat of Woodhouse toads advertising their readiness for sex.  Spadefoot toads added a third melodic line, a sawing snore, while the final accent came from the ratchety bark of the canyon treefrog—my favorite.  They took turns, calling across the alcove, each song echoing individually and distinctly.  Stage right, stage left.  Then a pause, and a call from back in the cheap seats.  We kept our distance to avoid silencing them.  They created a fully three-dimensional audio space, and to lie back against a boulder and listen to them felt both intimate and voyeuristic.

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Today, fewer and fewer canyon treefrogs call from potholes and desert streams.  The Colorado River Basin lies squarely within the crosshairs of global climate change.  Rising average temperatures are certain to bring warmer summers, more rain than snow, decreased spring runoff, and more frequent wildfires. Climate change will push every living community uphill until alpine tundra and alpine animals like pikas can retreat no higher and will be pinched right off the mountaintops of the southern Rockies. What will we do for water in this increasingly dry century? Our edges are rounder, our destination closer.  Gravity and time turn out to be equally inexorable.   This same arc through time deepens our relationships with the places we love.  The redrock wilderness has granted us refuge, repeatedly.  The universe has provided us with a lifetime of chances to speak up for these remaining fragments of wild ecosystems. Let’s take full advantage of these last few winding and glorious bends, missing no opportunity for joyful adventure and rising to each occasion calling for advocacy as we tumble toward the sea.

[Excerpted from  “Tumbling Toward the Sea” by Stephen Trimble, in West of 98: Living and Writing the New American West. Lynn Stegner and Russell Rowland, editors. University of Texas Press.]

As writer, photographer, and editor, Stephen Trimble has published more than 20 award-winning books.  Trimble teaches writing in the University of Utah Honors College, serves on the board of Utah Interfaith Power & Light, and makes his home in Salt Lake City and in the redrock country of Torrey, Utah.  His website is www.stephentrimble.net. 

The Plains

The Wyoming Plains looking East near the Nebraska line
©  JDL

"A person is forced inward by the spareness of what is outward and visible in all this land and sky. The beauty of the Plains is like that of an icon...what seems stern and almost empty is merely open, a door into some simple and holy state." 

Kathleen Norris quoted in The Solace of Fierce Landscapes, by Belden Lane, p. 36

Most of the Rocky Mountain Synod isn't rocky or mountain. Most is high plains, prairie, a vast gently rolling steppe, sometimes as empty and wild and desolate, and even as dangerous as the highest mountains. Here we have our severest weather : heat like you can't believe, constant hot dry winds, tornadoes, the world's most active hail region, bitter cold and clouds like nowhere else on the planet. Fields of corn and wheat as far as the eye can see. It is a landscape for the soul, one that strips us bare and in the best sense of the word, makes us "plain."

Where is your favorite place on the Plains? What memories are attached to it?

Jeffrey Louden

The Difficult Place

I cannot help it. I keep going back. The Bristlecone Pine National Forest near Alma, Colorado, keeps calling. Some of these trees are 1500 years old; they cling to a windy ridge on the face of a stark and barren mountain.

These trees are known for their resilience. They live the longest in the harshest conditions with poor soil and the worst of climates.  They thrive on adversity. Many appear to be dead, until a closer look reveals the strand of life, a cambium layer hidden deep in the tree, a life-line that continues to grow from the inside, even as the bark on the surface dies away.

Many of the trees have bent sideways to cope with the wind; they huddle together protecting each other in their proximity. They grow off- center, sacrificing branches and balance for the sake of life’s growth and seed. Even the pinecones are tenacious; they are coated with a sticky surface that clings to the soil and to my fingers for days after my visit.

Repeatedly, I am amazed and heartened in their presence.

   Kari Reiquam                                                                                                                                 

Hot Springs, Hot Water

Photo by Jeffrey Louden

Hot Springs. I have loved them my whole life. Hot water from the continuing formation of the continents. All five states of the Rocky Mountain Synod have hot springs. The spring above, Hobo Springs, in Saratoga, WY was gifted to the town with one proviso:  it needed to remain free. They could not charge for it. So today one can drive south of I-80 near Rawlins and there in this small town, next to the Platte River, on the edge of the Colorado border, is this hot oasis. Heat for one's bones. Balm for one's aches. Beauty for one's soul. One can soak in the springs, which are anywhere from 104-110 degrees hot, and then, if you dare, cool off in the Platte River. On the way back from the Theological Convocation three of us took the time to slip into those waters, remembering our baptism, rooted in the continuing mystery and gift of the Earth. Ahhh.

Jeffrey Louden

Grounded

The word humility comes from the Latin, humus, which means ground.

Sometimes when we speak of humility, we confuse it with a shame-based humiliation. At its roots, it is not. It is not poor self-esteem or shyness.

Humility is like taking off your shoes and walking on the earth. It is feeling the softness of the grass as well as the sharpness of the burrs. It is receiving the welcome of soft dirt, wet mud, and the hardness of stones.

Humility is awareness, deep awareness, of connection to the earth in its dying and rising, in its refuse and renewal, in its limits as well as its freedom.

To be humble is to be grounded.

                                                                                                                                    

Kari Reiquam

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Watersheds of Life

Location El Paso County, Colorado

Latitude (lat) 38.614720°

Longitude (long) -104.674695°

Elevation 5377 ft. 1638 m.

My heart was captured by Fountain Creek in 8^th grade, as a life-long friend and I explored the many small creeks and drainages on the slopes of Pikes Peak. When I put my face in to take a drink my nose and chin were numb when I stood up—cold water. We dug our own worms, so we could cut willow sticks when we got to the stream and go “stick fishing.” Little Brook Trout that were all head and tail, it took a dozen to make a meal. Forty years later, I am back in Colorado working for the creek and the greater watershed by trying to organize a non-profit dedicated to riparian restoration. My love had been battered while I was gone chasing my fortune. Fortunately, my path led back to Colorado to raise a family. Rivers connect us to the land and to each other and to our own spirits. Holy water.


Gary Barber
President, Two Rivers Water Company, Colorado Springs
Executive Director, Fountain Creek Watershed Floodcontrol and Greenway District
(Jeffrey Louden is the life long friend. Gary and his family attend St. Gabriel's Roman Catholic Church in Colorado Springs.)

A poem, a picture, a question

Pikes Peak from Manitou Springs
JDL

Range after range of mountains

year after year after year

I am still in love.

Gary Snyder

What are you in love with?

Sing Together for Joy

The pastures of the wilderness overflow,
   the hills gird themselves with joy,
   the meadows clothe themselves with flocks,
   the valleys deck themselves with grain,
   they shout and sing together for joy.  


Psalm 65:12-13