To the Dogs

Three years ago, on vacation here at our cabin in Minnesota, Jessi and I stopped by to visit Ike, the local man who watches our cabin when we are gone. It just so happened that his dog, Molly, a pure bred yellow Labrador Retriever, had given birth to several pups.
Do I really need to tell you the rest of the story? Even I wanted one of those pups. Especially one that could be trained to hunt quail in Arizona and pheasants in North Dakota.

Now, I still find it hard to believe that I was the one who decided not only that Kira should be trained, but that I would be the one to do it. I got a few books from a friend, enrolled her in a several- week class, and took her there with treats in my pocket on Monday nights, sacrificing my Monday Night Football.

I guess I am truly the Alpha, because Kira knows better than to mess around with me. But you should see her with the kids. And anyone else who wants to play with her. Jump and roll and tumble they go.

But what I appreciate most about Kira is that she is an example of pure grace. By that I mean she is totally accepting, and filled with love and fun at all times. Never once, when I have told her to “come,” does she not come. In fact, she comes running full speed and jumps into your arms if you want her to. Never have I suggested we play, or go for a walk, and she has refused. Even if no one else in the house wants to play, I know Kira will.

She is always ready to sit at my feet, lick my face, snuggle on the couch. In October of 2005, when I stepped into a hole while quail hunting and broke my leg, guess who was there licking my face as I lay on a bed of cactus needles. Not that it was a pleasant experience, given it was 107 degrees out, my left knee tendon was nearly torn through, and—then those cactus needles. But there she was, “man’s best friend,” licking me and encouraging me to get up, which, of course, I couldn’t.

We have so much fun at the cabin. All I have to say is, “Kira, let’s go,” and off she and I go on our long walks, down the gravel roads, or in the back meadow.

I have come to understand over the years why humans love dogs. It may be a pejorative expression to say everything is going “to the dogs,” but if all dogs were like Kira, it could only be a good thing.

Sacred Place: Our Cabin

Belden Lane quotes Lawrence Kushner (p. 37):

"The memories of a place become a part of it. Places and things
never forget what they have been witnesses to and vehicles of
and entrances for. What has happened there happened nowhere else. Like ghosts who can neither forget what they have seen nor leave where they saw it, such are the memories tied to places of ascent."

When Mary and I were first married, I read an article by a pastor that fascinated me. He and his family had bought a cabin in Minnesota, and that became their focal point, their holy ground, as they moved many places over the years, living mostly in parsonages.

That made sense to Mary and me. Unlike most cabin people, we were not interested in living on a lake. We wanted a cabin in the country, on a fair amount of land that would give us privacy, places to hike, and a place that could serve as a refuge for all kinds of wildlife.

The first day of searching we found the place of our dreams, a once Finnish farmstread on forty acres near Menahga, Mn. On October 2, 1986, while we were in St. Luke’s Hospital in Fargo, preparing to give birth to our first child, we received a call notifying us that our offer had been accepted. We named our place Blueberry River Farm, because “a river runs through it.”

Like that other pastor family, this cabin truly has become a holy place for us, on sacred ground. It is has been the place to which we have always returned, whether living in Mexico, Dunseith, N.D., Grand Forks, Fargo, or, now, Phoenix. It has been the place where our children have grown up, loving and growing to know nature. They have had about every kind of pet imaginable: turtles, frogs, toads, birds, wild cats. Thanks to a neighbor in the early years who had his own more-or-less zoo across the road from us, they also had pet geese and rabbits.

What is it that is sacred about certain places, certain spaces? Kushner says it is the memories of events that occurred in those places, and the sense in which we know that those places have witnessed and remember those events. Anthropomorphic as that is literally, it expresses the spirit of what we feel.

I have nearly countless memories of our children growing up here, of long discussions Mary and I have had in front of the fireplace as we contemplated decisions about the future, of the many friends and family who have passed through.

I feel different here. I am so much more aware of the past, of the unbelievable grace and love that have been a part of my life. I am more sensitive to the present, realizing intensely what a blessing it to be here together as a family for such an extended period of time. I feel more existentially aware of the uncertainly of life, knowing that when I leave here and return in a year many things could be much different in my life or for my family. Yet I feel also a sense of peace and submission to the future, trusting that as God has blessed and protected us in the past, God will do so in the future.

I hope to return to this holy and sacred place many times in the future, and yet I know, someday, it will be somebody else who comes here to remember, and to give thanks. I hope it will be my children, but it is not for me to decide that.

When Kushner speaks of “memories tied to places of ascent,” I see this cabin. This has been a mountaintop place for me. A place of insight and revelation. God has been in this place. God has blessed this place. God has blessed my life through this place.

What and where have been the sacred places and spaces in your life?

The Mystery of God

At the beginning of my sabbatical blog, I stated that the Christian apophatic tradition, the via negativa, “rejects all analogies of God as ultimately inadequate,” [Lane, p. 4], whether from language or nature, and then went on to say that, paradoxically, it uses the three spare and lean images of desert, mountain, and cloud to bring us to the most profound and ultimately indescribable human experiences of both joy and pain, and of who God is in reference to these experiences. It is time to clarify this paradox.

Luther believed God is a hidden God. This is a somewhat strange and yet profound way of protecting God from the constant human tendency to “domesticate” God and make God our own.

Ludwig Feuerbach and Karl Marx argued that there is no God, and what we call God is nothing other than human projection onto a non-existing being of what humans really want for themselves. In other words, we create a god to justify our desires for life.

It is also possible for us to do basically the same thing within a theistic system. We define or interpret God only along the lines of what we want, and ignore any competing claims.

For Luther this was the “theology of glory,” which is nothing other than a theology that uplifts and magnifies the human desire for glory, power, control. Luther, in contrast, posited a “theology of the cross.” Our God is a “hidden God,” who comes “under the sign of opposites.” We would expect God to come in power, pomp, and circumstance, and shape this world up. Instead God comes in a manger, born into poverty, having to flee to Egypt to stay alive. This God lives in poverty (“the son of Man has no where to lay his head”), allows himself to be arrested, unfairly prosecuted, condemned to death, and then to die in the most gruesome and cruel fashion imaginable. For Luther, as for Paul, this God is God only to the eyes of faith, because this God goes against everything the world expects of a god.

This theological understanding of God coincides with apophatic spirituality.
While there is obviously value in metaphorical images of God (and the Bible uses many of them), yet there is a danger as well. We may use those images to try to control God, and assume we know God better than we do. The strength of the apophatic way is that it keeps us constantly aware of the limits of language, including metaphor, to adequately describe everything about God. For all we may know, there is still so much we do not know.

Pseudo-Dionysius (a Syrian monk in the 6th century) attempts to explain this distinction by referring to Moses assent up Mount Sinai. On the mountain, “beyond the summit of every holy ascent,” Moses was plunged into “a truly mysterious darkness.” He was not allowed to see the total splendor of God’s being and majesty, but only to see the place where God dwells. (See Exodus 33:21) By doing this Psuedo-Dionysius is making a crucial distinction between the essence of God (unknowable to humans) and what God does reveal to us about Godself. (See Lane, pp. 64-65)

Here is where we finally see the paradox of apophatic spirituality, which distrusts all language and images of God, and yet uses the most fierce landscapes to get us to the edge where we finally sense in the most profound ways the mystery of God. Lane writes:

. . . . apophatic tradition, despite its distrust of all images about God,
makes an exception in using the imagery of threatening places as a
way of challenging the ego and leaving one at a loss for words.
If we cannot know God’s essence, we can stand in God’s place—
on the high mountain, in the lonely desert, at the point where terror
gives way to wonder. Only there do we enter the abandonment,
the agnosia, that is finally necessary for meeting God. [Ibid.]

It is only when we give up our need to control God, including how God is defined and imaged, that we become open to revelations of who God really is, and what God wants for us and for the world.

Life on the Blue Roads

My step-brother, Paul, always likes to drive the blue roads. For years he drove my step-parents, when they had gotten too old to drive long distances safely, back and forth between North Dakota and Arizona. And he always traveled by way of the blue roads.

Now, I don’t know why they are called blue. They aren’t blue on my map. In fact, they are red. But they are the old U.S. highways that went out of vogue when the interstate highway system was built.

The interstates were built for efficiency and speed. They are “limited access,” meaning it is more difficult to get on and off of them. They are built for greater speeds (70-75mph in most of the country), which means there is not much time to see what is going on along the way.

I have spent most of my life on the interstates when driving, and, I hate to admit it, often when living.

Now I understand the difference. The nature of this sabbatical journey, in which I would take time to see, photograph, and write about fierce landscapes, has also allowed me to go back to another time when life was slower, and perhaps, in some significant ways, better.

Blue roads take you through the center of most towns and cities, and you get a feel for what life is like there today. I stayed in locally owned motels, like the delightful North Winds in Bowman, North Dakota, run by a husband and wife and their three children. I ate in locally owned restaurants, like the Thai Mini Cafe in Poncha Spring, Colorado. I not only had a fantastic meal of Pad Thai and Bangkok Shrimp (in a marvelous chili sauce), but I bought products from the owners and they told me how to cook my own Pad Thai and Bangkok Shrimp.

The blue roads also give you a chance to photograph along the way. Death and/or a ticket awaits you if you stop on an interstate for anything other than an emergency, and most sheriffs do not consider the desire to take a picture an emergency. On the blue roads I was able to stop over and over again, to photograph deserts, mountains, clouds, sand dunes, plains, prairie, ducks, antelope, and horses. I was traveling slow enough and able to observe life closely enough to begin to formulate ideas of things I wanted to write about.

I plan to take a lot more blue roads in the future, and I pray the Spirit will remind me to live more of a blue road life.

Sabbath Keeping

I know... it's been a while since I've posted anything. (Not for lack of interesting thoughts flying through my head, but for lack of an available keyboard and internet connection when I have the time and inclination to write. Anyway...)

With Pastor Brian on sabbatical this summer (hey Brian - you're 1/3 done, how does that feel?) I've been paying more attention than usual to my own rhythm of work and rest, of busyness and stopping, of adding things to "The List" faster than I can check them off and not even wearing a watch.

My husband and I do devotions together each morning, and this summer we are reading Marva Dawn's "Keeping the Sabbath Wholly" - a re-read for me and his first time through. It's a great book on Sabbath keeping, in four parts: ceasing, resting, embracing, and feasting. We're just beginning the section on "ceasing," and it is prompting all kinds of great conversations between us. In the introduction to the section Dawn writes,

"We will consider many aspects of Sabbath ceasing - to cease not only from work
itself, but also from the need to accomplish and be productive, from the worry
and tension that accompany our modern criterion of efficiency, from our efforts
to be in control of our lives as if we were God, from our possessiveness and
enculturatin, and, finally from the humdrum and meaninglessness that result when
life is pursued without the Lord at the center of it all. In all these
dimensions we will recognize the great healing that can take place in our lives
when we get into the rhythm of setting aside every seventh day all of our
efforts to provide for ourselves and make our way in the world. A great benefit
of Sabbath keeping is that we learn to let God take care of us - not by becoming
passive and lazy, but in the freedom of giving up our feeble attempts to be God
in our own lives."

The first part of the book is about ceasing work. Stopping. And even the very first paragraph has helped the two of us start thinking about what we would like our day off from work, our weekly Sabbath, to be like. Dawn writes,

"Most Americans work five days a week and then spend the weekend trying to do
everything that needs to be done around the house and yard. Consequently, the
Sabbath day (whether that be observed on Saturday or Sunday) is not a day of
ceasing from work because the pressure of the work that "needs to be done" at
home matches the pressure of the work that earns one's salary. To cease working
on the Sabbath means to quit laboring at anything that is work. "

What would it look like if Christians actually managed to honor the 3rd commandment, not in a legalistic way, but as the great gift it is? To do all their work in 6 days, and then keep the Sabbath? To make community worship, time with family and friends, and not soccer practice, housework, or shopping the norm for any and every "day off"?

As a clergy couple, we both take Mondays off. (Contrary to the popular humor that says pastors work only 1 day a week, most pastors easily work 6 days a week, and many are tempted to go as close to 24/7 as they can). The problem at our house is that most of the housework, yardwork, and errand-running are left for Mondays. Not my idea of a good time. The to-do list at home is plenty long, and the pressure is on to get the house presentable, since there are still boxes in the living room from when I moved in 4 months ago. And yet, to leave that list for Monday means it's not actually a Sabbath. On the other hand, doing all the housework the rest of the week means we're going to be working harder those other 6 days.

We think it's going to be worth it. I'll let you know how it goes. Let me know how you keep the Sabbath at your house, both the struggles and joy it brings.

Isn't it amazing that such an old commandment/idea is still so radical today!?

Emotional Deserts

The technical definition of a desert is an arid land with sparse vegetation in a warm climate having less than ten inches of rainfall per year. Merriam-Webster also calls it a "desolate or forbidding area." So while not all of these pictures are technically deserts by the first definition, they can all be by the second. Throughout the United States you can find vast and remote spaces that evoke the emotional feeling of desert, where one feels alone, powerless, and open to the revelation of God.

The first picture is of the Verde Valley in Arizona. This is what we call high desert. I have already shown a picture of the high desert of the Navajos in an earlier blog. The second picture was taken near the Ute Mountains in southwestern Colorado, another example of high desert. These qualify as deserts in the technical as well as the emotional sense.

The third and fourth pictures are of the the prairies of Wyoming and South Dakota, respectively. While not deserts, you can sense the great vastness that intrigued Native Americans who hunted them for buffalo and antelope. Interestingly enough, on hills in these prairies those Native Americans would go and sit for several days in a Vision Quest, seeking revelation and illumination from God. These lands look safe enough in the spring. But wait until winter. Temperatures in the Dakotas can drop to twenty below, and stay below zero for a month at a time. Add deep snow and icy cold winds out of Canada, bringing a wind chill of fifty below, and you have desolation.

The final picture is from my home state, the Badlands of North Dakota, where Teddy Roosevelt liked to spend his vacations hunting and fishing. They have a feeling of both prairie and desert at the same time.

Wherever one lives, whether near a desert or not, we can find those vast, uninhabited spaces that call us to relinquishment and open us to the vastness and grandeur of God. Take time to go there and just sit, breathing in the beauty and mystery of God's creation. And perhaps God will speak to you just the Word you need to hear.

Cemetery as a Desert Landscape (and Mountain, and Cloud)

I woke up on Memorial Day in Bowman, North Dakota, at a motel just across the road from the local cemetery. If the desert is a place of weeping, then a cemetery is certainly a desert.

I decided to take my normal morning walk around the cemetery. People were busy putting up flags and placing flowers on graves. I know from my own experience with grieving that space and a sense of privacy are important in cemeteries, and so I tried not to walk too closely to anyone. I saw one older woman place flowers on a mound of dirt—no grass, the earth hadn’t settled yet, no gravestone—her loss was very recent.

For such a small town the cemetery seemed immense. That gave me a real sense of history, a reminder of not just what Bowman, N.D. is today, but what it has been. All the people who have been a part of the history of that community. One more reminder that who each of is today is based on countless people who blessed us through their lives.

Memorial Day has a kind of strange, dual emphasis. It’s primary purpose is to honor United States men and women who have died in military service to our country, going back to the American Civil War. It is a reminder of the ways in which war is truly a desert experience, and the sense of loss and grief it leaves behind. Memorial Day is a time of honor and thanksgiving for those willing to risk their lives for others.

In an unofficial, cultural way Memorial Day has also become a time for all people to honor those they have lost to death. Death, from whatever cause, and in whatever situation, is a desert experience.

There are no politics in cemeteries. It doesn’t matter whether the war was considered just or unjust by theologians and ethicists, successful or unsuccessful by generals or politicians. It doesn’t matter why or how someone died, whether by natural cause, accident, suicide, or an act of violence. Every grave is of equal value and significance, just as every life is of equal value and significance to God.

Cemeteries have the possibility of moving us from desert to mountaintop to union. We weep over our loved ones now gone, we reflect on the wonderful things we have learned and received from them, and we end up feeling a kind of strange, paradoxical, mysterious union with them and with God that transcends time and place and space.

A cemetery would not be a bad place to start each day. It reminds us of the grace and love in which we walk each day because of those who have gone before us, it reminds us of the importance of whatever vocation to which we have been called, and it reminds us of the deep meaning of the day we have just been given, because the destiny of each of us is a cemetery some place on our way to the Kingdom of God.

Fierce Landscapes, Part IV: Returning

(Here we see desert, mountain, and cloud along with the Great Sand Dunes of Colorado.)


How marvelous it is to be on the mountaintop, receiving revelation and illumination. How marvelous it is to be in the cloud, feeling so close to God. Yet there is an irony in the cloud. Yes, we do see the world more from God’s eyes, but not completely.

For the top of the mountain is enshrouded by a cloud, and we cannot see the very top. And the cloud extends beyond the top of the mountain. As Luther understood so well, God ever remains a hidden God. As we step into that cloud, we also begin to lose ourselves. We sense mystical union with God, we sense God’s presence, we feel God’s grace and love, but there ever remains that mysterious distance. The mystics called it “brilliant darkness.” Rudolf Otto called it the numinous, the “idea of the holy” that is always out of our touch.

We want to remain in that mystical union, in that mountaintop experience. But, like Peter on the Mount of Transfiguration, we cannot stay there. Over again and again we will return to the desert. Our joy will turn to sorrow, our feeling of union to experiences of abandonment and rejection.

We will again experience the metaphysical pain of mortality, of finiteness. But, having been to the mountaintop, we will not lose faith. We will understand ever more deeply that our love and joy are tied to our losses and grief.

Here is one of those strange times in life when the mental trumps the emotional. We remember. Yes, we remember. Just as the Israelites remembered how God had been faithful to God’s promises in the past, so they trusted God would be faithful to them in the future. We, too, in our times of sorrow and loss, remember the mountaintop revelations we have had. We remember those rare but unforgettable experiences in the cloud when we felt so very, very close to God; even “at one” with God. As we remember, we receive the strength and fortitude we need to move on. We may even begin to love the desert, because, painful as the desert always is, it is the beginning point of revelation, and, like Jesus, we return to it again and again to find the courage and direction we need for our lives.

In future posts we will continue to reflect on how desert, mountaintop, and cloud can act as metaphors that illuminate our experiences in life. I invite you to share your own examples.

Fierce Landscapes, Part III: Cloud

(Sangre de Cristo Mountains, Southern Colorado)

Often in life we simply cannot handle the challenge of new knowledge, of revelation, of illumination. Sometimes our fear of change is so great we would rather stay in our pain.

We begin to climb, but it seems so far. So very far. We look back to the valley below. It seems safer there. It would be so easy to return to the valley below, even though it is the valley of the shadow of death. (Psalm 23). We deceive ourselves into thinking we can go back. And often we do. But then, by God’s grace, there are those times when we gather courage.

We look up again. We begin climbing again. Step by step, trusting grace and joy await us. And then an amazing thing happens. A hand reaches down and begins to lift us up. We arrive at the summit. We feel a mystical union with God beyond description and comprehension. We lose ourselves in God. Our separate identity is gone. We feel pure grace. We know we are loved with an everlasting love. This is what the Celtics call a "thin place," where the boundary between God and us is nearly taken away.

It was in the pillar of cloud that Moses spoke with God “face to face, as one speaks to a friend.” (Exodus 33:11)

Our hearts are also filled with indescribable love for all people. It is when we finally relinquish the need to control, when we have gone so deeply into solitude that it appears we are indifferent to the world, that the deepest love and compassion are born. [See Lane, pp. 167-173]

And finally, the cloud reminds us of that final act of relinquishment, when in death we are given entirely to God. (Lane, pp. 152-54)

Pauline, my first wife, came to this point. In one of her journal entries, some three months before she died, she wrote:

I do not think my positive attitude will desert me—off and on, perhaps,
but never completely. For I have my belief and faith in God. She/He
gives me courage, and, more importantly, love. I have Bear. Our
love is everlasting. I have the love of my family. The love of my
friends. I am truly blessed. I have been to the mountaintop. Life is
beautiful; it hurts, but I can leave it. (Italics mine.)

When have you felt a mystical union with God? When has your love for all people felt almost overwhelming in its power?

In the next post we will talk about what comes next, since we cannot remain in the cloud of the mountaintop in this life.