Last week, I stood at an oasis in the desert, listening to the flutter of palm fronds in a light, warm wind under a clear sky. I listened to the loud chirping of birds darting from the skirts of dry fronds hanging from the trunks. I watched rabbits and lizards dash over the moist soil, in and out of the protective vegetation.
This sublimely beautiful place was created by a catastrophic break.
The Oasis of Mara, near Twentynine Palms just north of Joshua Tree National Park, was formed by an earthquake fault that interrupted the flow of water underground, forcing it upwards to the surface. It is a lonesome line of clustered palms stretching across an arid landscape of sand, scruffy creosote bushes, and the occasional Joshua tree or barrel cactus.
A fault line broke recently in my life, and in the life of Sausalito Presbyterian, the church I serve as pastor. A group within the congregation had been trying to remove me from my job for almost all of my four and a half years in this position, and finally they made my job untenable. (My short explanation: I followed a popular pastor who had been here for 26 years, and some members didn't make the transition.) So I resigned, effective the end of this month. Many people in the church are sad, upset, or angry. Others are glad to see me go. I have never had an experience anything like this one. I'm about to be unemployed for the first time in my adult life. The earth under my feet is shaking. It's exhilarating and scary!
The church may have immortal purposes, but it still consists of mortals, as I am amply reminded right now! Being made up of human beings, the church has feet of clay. The clay that was created by the grinding of the blocks of stone under the earth along the fault line in the desert. The clay that became an impermeable barrier that blocked the underground water so that it bubbled up to the surface, creating the oasis.
I went to the Oasis of Mara to get the perspective that comes from standing outside. Way, way outside, in the desert, where the stupendous landscape makes a mockery of my life's little dramas. What are my worries compared to the desert's saga of tortured rock-strata, layers of stone twisted like kneaded bread-dough, exposed by eons of eroding elements? In the desert, I take my true and puny place in the grand order of God, whose name can be spelled Nature. I find it both humbling and comforting to know that I am but a speck of dust on the tip of a cholla cactus spine, compared to the vast reality of the Divine.
As I watched the sundown light shimmer from the waving fronds at the crowns of the palms, I meditated about what might spring from the grinding and shaking that is happening around me right now. Something verdant could be forced up from this cataclysm. Something vibrant could well up from this break. Something intriguingly creative for me, and for the church I'm leaving, could grow out of this violent crack in our circumscribed cosmos.
I don't know what it is. It's still happening underground, beneath the consciousness that yields description. (If you are more aware of what is emerging than I am, I pray you'll tell me. I need all the job leads I can get!) But I catch a whiff of it, as desert lizards can smell water from afar. I sense that something is welling up. Any time now, a bird from a distant oasis is going to drop a date-seed on this moistened crack in the earth. And things will change.
As Jesus said, "This is my body, which is broken for you." (I Corinthians 4:11) May the tough breaks in our lives stay open long enough for seeds to fall into them, so that new life may bloom.... Amen!