A Journey to a Lush Desert 7-29-9

A Journey to a Lush Desert

This is going to be a very different kind of journey. No Rolls Royce jet turbines hurled me across the sky at 820 MPH ground speed. I came up the serpentine mountain roads in a fifteen-year old Toyota doing 40 MPH in a hard rain.

There are no departure and arrival boards depicting the coming and going of a hundred thousand people from uncounted destinations around the world. The frenetic crowds are not here. I have seen but one person. The only significant movement here comes from clouds scudding across the sky, and from flickering shadows cast by leaves scintillating in the crisp mountain air.

There are no grand plazas with their bully pulpits exhorting the thousands below to embrace a dozen causes. No one asks me what I think about anything. The only daytime voices come from song birds chirping in the distance.

There are no epic gilded neo-classical facades surrounding plazas here, yet the oldest mountains on earth are surrounding expansive mountain valleys cloaked in the emerald green of abundant arboreal life. Ten thousand Christmas trees are transforming solar radiance into the laughter and joy of children yet to be born. Butterfly bushes, hosta, lilies, daisies, begonias, and impatiens are the ornaments for all those fir trees spanning the horizon.

In the Gospel of Mark the twelve guys are all telling Jesus all the grand busyness they have been up to. He as much as tells them to go to an empty place, sit down, shut up, rest, and listen. I too, have been running around, caught up in my own epic business, telling everyone who will listen about it. An amazingly dense moroseness sets in when few pay me any attention. Perhaps I am being told gently to go to an empty place, sit down, shut up, rest, and listen. So I find myself here in the quiet mountains with a noisy head looking for the off switch.

I have never heard the flutter of a hummingbird before. One just flew by my head. I never knew that such a tiny bird could have such strong wings. Perhaps this is a small omen about what can be heard in quiet places when I am not talking. Maybe even God’s voice can be heard in this place.

The spiritual director here told me yesterday that if one is very quiet and holds out a still steady hand, it is possible to feel the turbulence from the wings of clouds of butterflies on the bushes outside the hermitage I am staying in. This could be even better than getting bumped to first class seats on a long-haul plane ride.

“Eyes have not seen, ears have not heard, the hearts of men have not even imagined the things I have prepared for you.”