Musings

Treasure in the Field

We stood on the dusty street at sunset, Roberta, her son Nick, and I.  Up the hill rode a thin fellow on an elegant salt-and-pepper horse with fine silver-tipped wooden stirrups.  He was on his way to another Peruvian town over the mountains, to be a competitor in a horse exhibition.  He was visiting a friend in the town of Chetilla, where Nick serves in the Peace Corps.  The friend urged the horseman, whose name was Erasmo, to give us a show of his skills.

Erasmo, a gaunt-faced man with unforgettably intense eyes, nodded at us gravely and proceeded to guide his steed through its stepping-horse paces, prancing precisely up and down the dirt road as puffs of dust diffused the rich light.  Making tight turns, then leading the horse into a nearby pasture, Erasmo masterfully rode as we followed.  Dismounting, he made his horse rest its hooves one by one in his hands, then with gentle but firm coaxing to kneel on its front legs on the grass.  He ordered it to roll over, rise, and then allow him to pass between its front and back legs.  Then he mounted and in the pink-purple glow reflecting from the mountains looming beyond, he guided his high-stepping horse around the pasture again. 

Erasmo’s face burned with the beauty of man and horse moving as one.  His seriousness of purpose was as magnificent as the animal through which he channeled it.  I was awestruck as the world around him took on a hyper-reality, refracted through his passionate, one-pointed intention. 

It was the awe that strikes whenever I am in the presence of one who is fully present where he is, fully engaged in what she does, fully invested in what he creates, fully absorbed by what she sees and hears, empty of distraction.  This intense engagement is contagious, releasing me from all else, overwhelming me with wonder.

After hearty applause from the handful of us who watched him ride in that remote mountain village, Erasmo took his leave with a solemn bow and we went back to Nick’s house in the gathering dark.  The show had been unannounced.  There had been no tickets to purchase.  This may be the only review of the performance to find its way to print.  Yet the three of us knew we had seen somebody, seen something, distinctly significant. Ordinary time had been suspended, replaced by a holy, eternal moment, as Erasmo rode before us on that grassy field.

Perhaps it was the field of which Jesus spoke in his enigmatic parable:  “The kingdom of heaven is like a treasure hidden in a field, which a man found and covered up; then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field.” (Matthew 13: 44)  Erasmo in his joy had given up all else for the treasure of that moment, guiding his stepping horse in the setting sunlight.  He delivered to us, in a flash of hooves, the divine realm itself.

Sanctuary

Roberta and I are just back from two weeks in Peru, visiting her son who serves there in the Peace Corps.  In our travels, we admired a number of churches.  Several times during our trip, I found myself kneeling in Catholic sanctuaries in the centers of the towns, pausing for moments of prayerful silence.  The churches were oases of calm amid the din of street vendors’ bells, honking taxis, the nasal falsetto calls of ‘combi’ bus conductors, and the rumble of flatbed trucks spewing diesel fumes.  For a few minutes, I was liberated from our itinerary, transported to a place that was independent of any national identity, palpably aware of a divine realm beyond boundaries.

Those precious interludes reminded me that for many tourists from all over the world, our church in Sausalito has the same effect.  When our doors are open, our building is a welcome break from the traffic and the multi-lingual chatter and the crush of camera-toting pedestrians down the hill on Bridgeway.  Into our house of worship they enter with a hush, savoring the quiet, absorbing the warm light streaming onto the pews from above.  Into our sanctuary they enter, bringing with them that deep hope implanted in every human heart, yearning for transcendent meaning and purpose.

What a blessing we offer to passers-by, simply by keeping open the doors of this lovely sacred space!  What a gift to be able to enter such sanctuaries, houses of prayer of many religions, as we travel.  And what a blessing to find such spaces in our own hearts.

Because a physical sanctuary is an expression of the inner sanctuary of our souls.  Christopher Alexander’s seminal book on architecture, “A Pattern Language”, devotes a section to houses of worship.  He says that a key feature of a religious sanctuary is the entrance.  He said that it should have dramatic, narrowing stages of entry into the front door, opening into an expanding area for worship, reflecting the soul’s journey to self-realization.   The process of entering the sanctuary has much to do with its spiritual impact.  Perhaps this explains why I am so often deeply moved by entering churches when I travel.  The very process of going to a faraway place adds greatly to the effect of walking up the steps and entering the sanctuary doors.  It is a reflection of the long and sometimes arduous spiritual journeys I take within my soul, traveling long and hard to get past fear and guilt, climbing up the steep stairs of anger and resentment, pulling on the heavy handles of the tall doors of ignorance and rejection.  And finally entering into the sacred space at the center of my being, where I meet God face to face, and feel the glow of divine, unconditional, forgiving, redeeming love.

We who pay for this building’s upkeep, and who maintain it with the labor of our own hands, will never know but a fraction of the ways and times that it has awakened consciousness of the sacred spaces in the hearts of so many perfect strangers.  Our pledges of money, and gifts of time and effort, grace the souls of people we will never meet.  People who pause for a moment to stand in front of our church and remember that they are more than bodies wrapped in touristy clothes, see that there is a realm that no camera can capture, know that there is a time that their watches can’t keep, and recall that they have a destination that will not appear in any travel brochure. 

Whether we fly to the other side of the world, or just sit quietly in a chair in our own living rooms, our inner sanctuaries beckon us to enter.  The ultimate journey leads to the place of silence and serenity within each of us – the sacred space that opens in every human heart.

Confessions of a Padrasto

Last week I discovered that I was a hangnail.  And being a hangnail isn't all bad.

This revelation came to me in the little village of Chetilla, a less-steep stretch on the side of a very steep mountain in the Andes.  Roberta's son lives in a small room facing the road in a house near the center of the town, where he serves as a Peace Corps volunteer.  We enjoyed sharing that cozy space, cooking meals together on a little gas stove and having long-overdue conversations with Nick, whom we had not seen in over a year. 

We needed do no more than open the door of his room in order to get to know the warm, gracious, impeccably polite folks in the town of 1,200 Quechua-speaking indigenous Peruvians.  Women in spectacular native dress -- bright 'chales' (capes) and blouses, skirts hemmed with a distinctive band of color, and wearing huge straw hats -- walked past us through the town, spinning wads of wool on long sticks into thread that they spun onto smaller, thinner spools as they tended donkeys laden with firewood, or herded sheep and cattle, down the dusty road.  Men on horses or on foot headed up the mountain to tend their patches of corn or potatoes perched on the heights visible from town.  People speak unrefined Spanish there, too -- at least most of them.  So Nick was constantly introducing us to the local folks passing by.  Roberta, he said, was "mi mama" and I was "mi padrasto"... the Spanish word for "stepfather".

And also, I discovered, the Spanish slang term for "hangnail". 

That made more and more sense with each introduction, because each Chetillan looked at me with bewilderment upon hearing that I was Nick's padrasto.  They were polite to me, but clearly they were bothered by my identity.  I wasn't supposed to be there.  They had already met his father, who had visited earlier.  In Latin America, people usually only have padrastos when their fathers die and their widowed mothers remarry.  Divorce is more of a rarity here, particulary in the "sierra" where Nick lives.  (Not that family life is somehow superior in Latin America.  Nick pointed out many men in his village who have "other women" beside their wives.)  So who was I?  An unwanted and annoying genealogical appendage?  To make any sense of me, it would have been necessary to give a long lecture about Western culture, or the lack thereof, regarding family life and marriage.   A lecture that they were no more inclined to hear than we were to give. 

So I spent the week being a hangnail.  Not only being strange by virtue of being one of only three gringos in an area at least the size of a state in New England, but also because of my implausible and somewhat scandalous marital status.

From my precarious vantage point, dangling from the fingertip of proper society, I was given a bit of extra distance from which to observe the goings-on in Chetilla.  Listening to the loquacious Don Cruz, the buy-low, sell-high guy of the town, peddling a dose of anti-parasite veterinary medicine to one woman for her sheep, and peddling a dose of Panadol to the next for her headache, and insisting that we buy "cuy" - guinea pigs - from him and not from the house where we were headed.  (No, we didn't bring them home as pets -- they became our dinner the next day... a local delicacy.)  Jollying with the toothless old men drinking cañaso (bad rum) out of used pop bottles while standing next to their donkeys, while politely turning down their offers of shots delicately poured into the bottle caps.  Gazing at the fields on the staggering heights, a pieceworked quilt of agriculture sewn with human sinew and sweat behind groaning oxen pulling ancient wooden plows uphill.  Meditating on how people manage to make a home even in places where nature would seem to suggest we don't belong.

Meditating on this, our human condition.  We are the padrastos, the hangnails, of the universe.  We sense we don't belong here, yet here we are.  Jesus said we "are not of the world, even as I am not of the world."  (John 17: 16)  It can be both curse and blessing to dangle off the fingertip of the natural world, separated from it all by our near-supernatural powers of insight and invention.  It is faith to seize it as blessing, to make the best of our status as an odd-and-out branch on the family tree of life.  It is a blessing to prayerfully, lovingly observe the world, being in it but not quite of it.  It is a blessing to hang alongside the world, and to use that distance to honor the otherness of God, of others, and of ourselves....