some days theme themselves. this has been such a day for me. it was one of those days of beauty peculiar to the northwest corner, with the temperature hovering around freezing and the clouds hovering around 1500 feet. it has been the feast of st. lucy and st. herman, two holy people known for great vision, in lucy's case more so after casting out her physical eyes. and it was a day i read maggie ross' blog post http://ravenwilderness.blogspot.com/2011/12/blog-post.html in which she considers the lines from one of last sunday's hymns, '... shine forth and let thy light restore earth's own true loveliness once more.'
it might seem that a day when the cloud covered the sanctuary, so to speak, would be less revelatory than one in which the sun shines clearly. but often that is not the case. to veil is often to reveal. if you doubt this, compare the dance of the seven veils from salome with the dance of goldie hawn fromlaugh-in. (if you're too young to know of laugh-in, i'm sure youtube can clue you.)
it was a day i found myself out of oatmeal, so, with ross's blog and ponderings about the day's saints dancing in my head, i set off down highway 101 the three miles to my neighborhood walmart. i know: walmart! but if wisdom still 'crieth at the gates, at the entry of the city, at the coming in at the doors', there is no place more better described by those words than the local walmart.
walking along highway 101 can be a little disturbing. one disturbance is the situation: my 155 pounds of mortal flesh, pacing along at 3 mph., is constantly being approached by masses of steel and silicon weighing 2500 pounds and much more, whooshing by at 63 miles per hour or more. anyone of them could knock me to 'kingdom come'--in heaven, hopefully--at any instant.
more disburbing, and this is spoken to in ross' blog, is the way the drivers of those vehicles treat the road. the sides are littered with all sorts of garbage, thrown out, i suppose, in order that their view of their fake-wooden dashboards be not blocked. yet more disturbing is the whole activity of gasoline-powered transport. western washington is a very blue state, where the same drivers who fuel their suburus and suburbans with the blood of edomite children are quick to rail against 'big oil' at dinner parties. even the bus which i sometimes take still traffics in the blood of innocens, even if the servings per passenger are smaller.
but i am not looking for more evidence that we live in a seriously deranged world. so, noticing that many of the cars--the suburus especially--have john muir club stickers on their read windows, i wish that more of them would walk as much as muir--another holy man who only came truly to see after being blinded--and hum a little bit of 'kyrie elieson on the highway that we travel' with mr. mister and look around, knowing that the kingdom of heaven, the isle of avalon, is closer at hand than any of the log trucks.
between farm lake road where i'm 'camped' and the walmart, the highway goes through the valleys of two creeks. the first one, bagley creek's, is rather gentle, and gives long vistas towards the mountains to the south and the strait of juan de fuca to the north. i stop at the entrance to the port angeles shooting club to look towards vancouver island, the southern isle in the archelelago that stretches up towards st. herman's spruce island, where he saw in the aleut and creole people around him not a source of slaves for the fur trade, but people just as loved by christ our god as any russians. as the road curves to go down the much steeper slope of the canyon of morse creek, i am confronted with a hillside not of mere bushes on fire but towering firs ablaze with the crystal fire of winter. i decide it's too cold to take off my sandles.
but, the glory of the lord was shining round about me, and i was, if not sore, then a bit afraid. how can one see the glory of the holy, the eternal one, and not be a bit taken with shock and awe? the book of proverbs says 'the fear of the lord is the beginning', both of knowledge and of wisdom. but we have done as much as we can to insulate ourselves from thinking of the holy one as fearsome. unless you are a member of an old calendar russian parish, perhaps, i expect you can't remember the last time you heard a sermon or a hymn suggesting that the holy might be fearsome. the conglomorate of platitudes which are passed off as 'modern science', which have neither knowledge nor wisdom, have kept the holy safely at bay, warded off by air bags and climate control. a healthy fear of god would certainly make us think twice before trashing the creation. it is important to remember that the fear of the lord is only the beginning of wisdom, as is illustrated by the lives of so many saints, remarkably that of st. anthony of the desert, who emerged from his time in a tomb, radiant, saying 'once i feared god, now i love him.' but if we do not start at the beginning, we will not reach the end.
what is needed is to see beyond the veil of advertising and trash, to see with the eyes of our heart, and then to wonder in the sight. as ross says, 'it is our attitude that needs enlightening, our eyes that need to be opened, our perspective that needs to be changed so that we see the loveliness inherent to the earth. Such an opening of our eyes would make us recoil in horror at what we have done, undertake to repair the damage, and refuse further despoliation.' then even walmart is full of people entirely loveable because they are creatures whose creator loves them. there one is greeted by a joyous one-armed 'retired' fisherman who could never have been happier with a great catch of salmon as he is with each person who comes into his gates.
the trip back was perhaps even more wondrous. i stopped at morse creek, whose banks still seem to echo the baptist's cry, and a water ouzel performed her miracles just three feet from my rock perch. then, headed out of the canyon, there was, in the yard of an abandoned house, a paradise tree: a tree i had never seen before, hung with gold delicious apples, the fruit of the misty isle. i brought some home as proof that the kingdom of heaven is, indeed, at hand.
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