Living with Contradictions

Sunrise view from my hermitage.

I bought groceries at Wal-Mart on the way to my three-day retreat at Casa del Sol, an extension of Ghost Ranch.  I have never purchased groceries at Wal-Mart before, and I certainly wasn't planning to buy them there as I headed to the quiet and stunning context of a hermitage in Abiqui, but I was out of options. Espanola, thirty miles south of Abiqui, is the closest town with any major stores. I drove by the Shop and Save, thinking I'd find something a little  more local--like the southwest version of Harris Teeter. No such luck.

The Wal-Mart was busy. I was so overwhelmed by the quantity of stuff and the noise and the crowd that instead of buying a box of granulated sugar for my coffee I bought powdered sugar (the verdict: it'll do the trick in a pinch).

Later I learned that Espanola, whose nickname is "The Jewel of Northern New Mexico," has a long and rich history of cultural diversity and is an up and coming town in the region. A majority of the residents are documented immigrants whose votes matter to politicians. President Obama campaigned there when he was running for office; President Clinton spoke there last week to support the Democratic candidate for governor of New Mexico.

Espanola is also one of the poorest cities in New Mexico. The estimated median income in 2008 was $33,867.  Beside nearby Los Alamos National Laboratories, the public schools and the hospital, Wal-Mart is one of the largest employers. Sadly, Espanola consistently rates as one of the cities with the most drug overdoses per capita; health officials are engaged in what some call an "epic battle" with heroin use.

If you can't stop, wave as you go, read a sign outside an auto repair shop I passed. I thought about that message throughout my stay at Casa del Sol.  I thought about the people who have to shop at Wal-Mart, who struggle to make a living, who are wooed by politicians and sometimes try to forget it all by using drugs. I thought about the contradictions, too, between my privileged worries about where I buy my food and worries that are far more grave.

On the trail to Box Canyon.

In the midst of rocks that are millions of years old and a landscape that is as terrifying as it is beautiful, one wonders if God really cares about one's "shop locally" commitment.  I felt so small out there, almost irrelevant.  As Presbyterian minister Belden Lane writes in The Solace of Fierce Landscapes, "The desert reduces one to raw-boned simplicity. You quickly come to the end of what you have depended on to give continuity and meaning to your life."

Yet fierce landscape also confronts one with the reality that everything matters. One false step up on the mesa and life is over; more than one hiker has perished that way. Water use matters. Use of any resource at all matters. How you inhabit your place on earth matters to the life all around you.

One afternoon I visited the Benedictine Monastery of Christ in the Desert, thirteen miles down a dirt road. It took an hour to go those thirteen miles, so I was in no rush to get back to my hermitage. I read in the meditation garden and hung out in the gift shop long enough to overhear a conversation about the organic hops the monks are growing for a new ale they're planning to sell; again, it's hard to make a living out there. Then I went to the afternoon service, Terce, at 3:30, which consisted mostly of sung psalms and ended with praise to the triune God, world without end. Gazing up through the sanctuary's windows at the cliffs soaring above, those words about the endless world rang as true as they ever had.

On the way back from the  monastery I stopped by the Chama river and took a picture of a cottonwood tree, a reminder, it seemed, of the contradictions surrounding me. Beautiful things grow in the desert. Monks sing psalms in the middle of the afternoon in the middle of nowhere. God is like a rock, and God is as unknowable as the desert. That landscape was large enough to hold all these things in tension. Large enough to embrace all the contradictions. Large enough to suggest that possibility to me.