Sometimes, I just need a day away from it all. A mini-vacation, somewhere between
a long look out the window, and a "shut down the office and leave for a
week or two" vacation.
So, Wednesday, I attended a two-hour meeting three-and-a-half hours
from home. You read that right -- I drove for seven hours total to be in a
two-hour meeting. Had it been in Yuma or Globe, I wouldn't have considered it.
But the opportunity to drive to the White Mountains ... ah, sure. Bring it
on.
I consider naturalist John Muir to be one of my favorite theologians.
Muir saw the wilderness as the threshold to all that is sacred. "The
clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness, Muir remarked.
Before I leave the Prescott National Forest, the high desert landscape
turns into conifer-covered ridges. The temperature drops 10 degrees and the
scent of pine and juniper refreshes me. It's a world away from the scrub
vegetation around Prescott Valley. I drive into clouds towering before me, dropping
moisture everywhere. I leave the car window wide open until the rain blows in my window.
Perfection.
I arrive at Lions Camp Tatiyee in mid-afternoon. Envision a summer camp,
and this will be nothing like it. There's a lake for fishing, but most of the swimming takes place in an indoor pool equipped with ramps and lifts. No steps up to the cabins. No dirt trails -- the roadways are
paved and wide enough for golf carts and vehicles. Camp Tatiyee hosts groups of
kids and adults with various disabilities all summer long. Everything has to be
accessible for the campers who are blind, deaf, orthopedically and sensory
challenged. Some weeks, there is one staff member for each camper.
Our business for the day involves making sure this property and these
facilities are available to the people of Arizona in perpetuity. For going on
60 years, the camp has been a contracted user of Forest Service land. With a
recent land exchange, the Lions of Arizona will own the land under all of these
buildings. A legacy.
Priority for the drive home -- dinner and something to drink. Then I
soak up the heady forest fragrance until my ribs hurt. I savor the invigorating
breeze like a captive embraces freedom. It's so unlike the inoperable windows and filtered air of my office.
Every trip to Lakeside-Pinetop takes me through a memorial -- my own
term for how humans can destroy nature's magnificence in a careless instant.
Even 16 years after Rodeo-Chediski ravaged the Apache Sitgreaves National
Forest, swathes of uncleared, charred trunks stand over brown and gray
detritus, where proud Ponderosas reigned at the turn of the century. A doe and
her fawn graze at the edge of the highway.
Pulling off, I drive along a forest road. Three large RVs are parked
among the disbursed campsites, portraits of those who pull their urban life
into the wilderness, like kids who dip their toes off the dock, but never throw
themselves into the lake.
It's there that I find it, the hidden nursery of oaks, ponderosas and
junipers among the stumps, milkwood and charred remains. Infants tended by the forest family. In 80 years,
they will be the gigantic spreading timber that will be touched off again: by
lightning, an abandoned campfire, an arsonist. Fire is the catalyst of change,
arbitrarily wiping out trees, brush, undergrowth and living things.
A microcosm of life, of time, of eternity itself. Growing. Falling.
Renewing. Dying.
The way the Church is dying, Spirit whispered, and I connected the dots. Survivors standing tall,
keeping watch over deadfall and the barren landscape. Hanging on to the proud
traditions of liturgy and classes, buildings and rituals. And among the ashes,
infants are born that won’t know the Church as it was, discovering their own
ways to live, growing into the Mystery, and abiding in it. As I trust the
regeneration cycles of the forests, the uplift of new landscapes and the renewing of
all that is, I will trust that the Church will survive, despite its fires and devastation, and people will keep finding their way to the Creator of it
all.
