Saturday, March 5, 2022 (today’s lectionary)
All around me sky
The ancient ruins shall be rebuilt for your sake, and the foundation from ages past you shall raise up. “Repairer of the breach,” they shall call you, “restorer of ruined homesteads.”
Surrounding an ancient cemetery, perhaps sometimes escaping it, the ghosts of Terlingua continue to fascinate artists, tourists, campers, and hikers. The Perry Mansion, half eaten away by time, looms on a hilltop. Mr. Perry himself “controlled all aspects of life” in Terlingua, nicknamed the “Land of Perry.” He owned three yachts. But the desert giveth, and the desert taketh away. Perry was forced into bankruptcy in 1942.
“Ancient ruins” do not cotton to easy repairs. Isolated remnants of once-thriving households are scattered all over Texas and New Mexico. They are highly photogenic, but not much good for living in.
Perhaps Yahweh was talking about ancient, ruined people, rather than houses. After visiting the southwest, Willa Cather wrote Death Comes for the Archbishop, about the religious faith that transformed, not ruined homesteads, but the peoples of the region. God’s touch opened their spiritual senses in new ways:
The miracles of the Church seem to me to rest not so much on faces or voices or healing power coming suddenly near to us from afar off, but upon our perceptions being made finer, so that for a moment our eyes can see and our ears can hear what is there about us always.
What a way to live, supremely present to the moment. Chardin called this “living as spiritual beings striving to become physical.” Even the earth is transformed, the earth … the sky … Georgia O’Keefe called the Texas sky, “that big, wonderful thing.” And Miss Cather saw it that way too:
The sky was as full of motion and change as the desert beneath it was monotonous and still, — and there was so much sky, more than at sea, more than anywhere else in the world. The plain was there, under one’s feet, but what one saw when one looked about was that brilliant blue world of stinging air and moving cloud. Even the mountains were mere ant-hills under it. Elsewhere the sky is the roof of the world; but here the earth was the floor of the sky. The landscape one longed for when one was away, the thing all about one, the world one actually lived in, was the sky, the sky!
Imagine this sky, rebuilt every morning by its Creator. I think of how Levi must have felt when Jesus called him, lifted out of himself into a new world.
Jesus saw Levi, a tax collector, sitting at the customs post. He said to him, “Follow me.” And leaving everything behind (!), Levi got up and followed Jesus.
Oh, how sweet to trust in Jesus.
If you call the sabbath a delight, if you honor it by not following your ways, then you shall delight in the Lord, and I will make you ride on the heights of the earth. I will nourish you. For the mouth of the Lord has spoken.
(Isaiah 58, Psalm 86, Ezekiel 33, Luke 5)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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