A week after school got out, our family hit the road headed for my brother’s wedding in Lubbock, Texas. Every wedding is a beautiful celebration, but some are just more “Rich” in beauty and significance.
I am writing on the shore of the Chippewa River as my daughter is at a volleyball camp at UW-Eau Claire. The reality of the peaceful rolling river in front of me, the gentle breeze and melodic accompaniment of birdsong parallels the spiritual experience I had at my brother’s wedding and a few days of sightseeing in New Mexico afterwards. This river represents both life and death – endings and beginnings, loss and gain – as does the Guadalupe River in the Texas hill country. As a parent of young daughters, the lives lost in the recent flash floods, especially those from Camp Mystic, have been very present in mine and my husband’s hearts and prayers. What unimaginable loss! All of those who have lost loved ones, homes and livelihoods are facing incredible desolation.
Our Lady of Guadalupe’s famous message from her 16th century apparition to Juan Diego keeps ringing in my ears as I think of the flood victims devastated by a river named in her honor: “Am I not here who am your mother?”
It was a similar sense of this loss-and-love paradox that overwhelmed me at my brother’s wedding. Rich is almost 41, and this is his first marriage. A faithful Catholic and seasoned catechist, some of you might recognize him (last name Allen) from the years that he lived in Phillips and belonged to St. Therese of Lisieux Church. He was ready to settle down and start a family in the Northwoods, but God had other plans. A couple years after moving to Lubbock for a job, less winter and more golf, he met a widow with a young son. Heather lost her husband, Colby, to cancer when Levi was 2 years old, just as the promise of their life together was blossoming. Mother and son have remained very close to her in-laws, and Grandpa Mike has been the main man in Levi’s life these past six years.
The incredible thing about the union of my brother and his bride is that their relationship, engagement and even marriage has been accompanied and celebrated by this amazing family. It was in front of her in-laws that Rich proposed last Thanksgiving, and it was Heather’s father and father-in-law who walked her down the aisle to enter into a new union with Rich. At their rehearsal dinner, my brother raised a glass to not only two families, but the three that were coming together with their marriage. He said that Colby would always be a part of their lives.
The beauty I felt surrounded by in their sacramental union was the same mingling of death and resurrection we remember at every Mass, the same mystery of love and loss, salvation and sacrifice that is the experience of daily life’s deserts. How often do we miss the joy of the one trying to blot out the pain of the other?
Road trips are some of the best teachers! As we made our way south along Interstate 35, then west from Oklahoma City to Lubbock, I observed the change of landscape. Heading further southwest into New Mexico (we visited Carlsbad Caverns and White Sands National Park before heading up to Santa Fe), my husband and I wondered why anyone would live in such a desolate area. We asked how anyone could sustain life there amidst the barrenness of the land and intensity of the heat. Driving over the mountain in the Lincoln National Forest provided brief respite with familiar coolness and evergreens, then back to the bleak desert along the Sangre de Cristo Mountains heading north.
Stopping at the Valley of Fires volcanic field near Carrizozo, I was astounded to see flowering cacti. How could anything breathe life in that rock, much less breed beauty from the thorny cactus struggling for mere survival?
I texted a friend in west-central Texas the next day, reflecting, “Hard to explain how ‘at home’ I feel here in the Southwest. The balanced and integrated existence of desolation and beauty at every turn – cacti that I want to stay far away from draw me in with their rare flowers, the rustic landscapes where curated lawns and tidy yards are as distant as the stars the mountains peaks here cozy up to, even the trees carry both death and life side by side. It just feels like a landscaped definition of the reality of life … and we spend sooo much time curating Instagram worthy half-truths.” She admitted it was a “unique beauty” that took her years to appreciate.
The harmony I heard as my eyes took in these impactful visions was an integration of letting go of the dry-earth expectations I can hold for myself, my relationships and life circumstances and God’s omnipotence drawing all things together through light and dark towards a radiance that humanity cannot produce of our own efforts. (Mind you, the depth of my prayer might have also come from the dire need for grace I felt as the kids, by this point, just wanted to go home and their complaining threatened to drain the “enchantment” of these few days in New Mexico.)
I tried expressing the experience with a few lines of poetry, though even they fall short:
Yes, bloom where you are planted’s commonplace,
But in the desert life’s a daily war
Between dry desolation and blue’s chore
Of finding clouds to rain sustaining grace.
Hopefully my recounting brings to mind some similar experience you’ve had of God’s love and closeness, not only in the abundant but in the desert moments of life. Given the rich Catholic missionary history in the area, I was clearly not the only who experienced God in this place.
We were able to visit the humble Church of Our Lady of Guadalupe, the first and oldest shrine dedicated to her in the United States (although when the Santuario was built it was still Mexican territory). My husband, an engineer, was enthralled by the miraculous staircase at the Loretto Chapel, also in downtown Sante Fe. Just blocks away is the oldest church structure, San Miguel, whose original adobe walls and altar were built by Mexican Indigenous around 1610. A few blocks in the other direction, the Cathedral of St. Francis of Assisi (honoring the Franciscan missionary heritage of the region) was built between 1869-1886 on the site of a Catholic community that also dates to the early 1600s.
One of the last days I was able to make a personal pilgrimage northwest of Santa Fe to the quaint village of Chimayo. The shrine is actually made up of two little adobe churches and is known for its miraculous holy dirt. It is sometimes called “the Lourdes of North America”; the sense of renewal and healing I received was holistic. With the rich heritage of Native American spirituality and Catholicism’s sacramental religiosity, my days in the desert left me thirsting to return. I carried memories not translatable to photographs and a sense of peaceful surrender to find the cactus blossoms among the thorns that crop up in my normally green and lush life.
