Immigration Issues in Arizona

Sonoran desert landscape

I mentioned earlier that the Desert House of Prayer helps support a grass roots ministry to immigrants in Tucson.  The priest who works closely with this ministry (a community health clinic) comes here on Tuesdays and Sundays. He gives a talk on peace and justice issues on Tuesday evenings. Last week and tomorrow, he is talking about border/immigration issues.

Ironically, this morning the New York Times published an article that basically claimed that immigration is no longer the hot topic of Arizona politics.  A primary reason is the upcoming election season, where immigration can be a third rail issue for candidates. http://nyti.ms/wVNUJP

But immigration is not an issue that has gone away. In the past 6 months, 47 bodies have been found in the desert, migrants who did not make it through the harsh environment.  Another major issue is family separation: though our federal government states that its emphasis is on ridding the US of criminal undocumented people, in a recent 6 month period more than 46,000 parents with US-born children were deported.  Most of their ‘crimes’ were things like having a busted taillight or minor driving violation.

Fr. Ricardo spends some time at a mission on the Mexican side of the border that provides hot meals to deportees who are dumped by the US deportation buses. They serve upwards of 100 deportees per day (there are several similar service providers in the border city).  He reports that many of the younger deportees don’t even speak Spanish well and have never been to Mexico. Others have been in the US for decades.  Most of the deportees have been stripped of cell phones, identity, money, and any possessions they have at the time of their arrest. So they cannot even contact their family members.

All of this information was reported last October at the St. Lawrence District Social Justice Conference in Rochester.  The Rev. Susan Frederick-Gray, minister in Phoenix and head of the UUA’s Immigration Ministry, was the keynote speaker. Others who have worked on both sides of the border with immigration issues told the same stories about the injustices heaped upon immigrant families.

Something I found interesting:  in our group discussion last Tuesday, a few Arizonans who are concerned about this issue reported that they occasionally have dreams/nightmares about immigration issues. This is an issue that remains very much alive here in Tucson, regardless of what the New York Times reports.  I read the local paper almost every day, and there are regular news reports pertaining to immigration.

More than ever,  I look forward to this June’s Justice GA in Phoenix.

The Gift of Silence

Silence can be so nourishing.

I get up early and head to the chapel for meditation and morning prayer.  When I leave my room, the sky is beginning to lighten in the east, outlining the Santa Catalina and Rincon mountains.  Stars are still visible. Lights twinkle in the valley. The moon was barely a crescent this morning, low on the eastern horizon. Other retreatants and I can be heard, crunch-crunch-crunch on the gravel paths.  Birds are beginning to awaken.

Once in the chapel, we quietly take off our shoes and take our seats. We enter into the meditation time at the sound of the gong.  It is quiet except for the occasional cough, sneeze, or cracking of joints. On a couple of very chilly mornings, the heater has hummed (it’s never really warm in there in the mornings, we usually keep our jackets on).  Aside from these occasional sounds, the silence envelops us.

When we finally emerge, the sun has risen and the valley is awake.  Except for birdsong, it is very quiet. On many mornings, a hot air balloon (or maybe 2) ascends silently over the valley.  So peaceful.

I have volunteered for clean up duty after breakfast. This is not a quiet time – the dishwashing unit, the sounds of stacking plates and putting away silverware, all those ambient kitchen noises are front and center. This is about as noisy as it gets.

Many days I go from the kitchen to a hike in the desert.   Once I’m on the trails away from the road, a deeper silence surrounds me.  My footsteps crunch in the gravelly sand, my nylon hiking pants make a swishing sound.  I stop often just to take in the deep, deep silence of the desert.  Every now and then I will hear a birdsong and look for the bird atop a saguaro cactus – it seems as if the smallest birds sing the loudest songs.  Other than the occasional bird, it is utterly quiet.  Time seems to stand still.  The silence has a luxurious quality to it.   It nourishes my soul.

As I’m writing this in my quiet room after dark, the silence is pierced by the howl of a coyote somewhere outside my window.

It’s all holy.  The silence makes it especially so.

Desert Wanderings

snow on the mountain as the storm breaks up

I’ve pretty much settled into the retreat center in the desert – the Desert House of Prayer.  We have several group sittings of meditation per day, and lots of other times to do what we want, in silence.  There’s a good library, a few common areas, 2 chapels (a larger one for our group sittings and a smaller one for individual meditation/prayer).  My room is spacious with the large patio-style door facing south and a window facing north. I have beautiful views each way.

We are in the Sonoran desert, up in the hills north of Tucson.  The desert is surprisingly green and is beginning to bloom in wildflowers. Some of the ground is carpeted in a green ground cover that looks grassy, but it is ‘grass’ kind of like my lawn at home is ‘grass’.  Some of the bushy foliage looks so soft and green. The woman who gave me my orientation warned me that even the soft look bushes have thorns.

This is rule #1 – everything in the desert is thorny and prickly. It gives new meaning to bushwhacking, which I’ve had to do twice because I missed the turn to a path (no trees to mark trails– usually rock cairns do the marking, but animals, the wind or whatever often topple them).  I am now like a human pin cushion. The fine little needles break off easily at the point they enter your skin. Ouch!

Seriously, though, I think about (and pray for) the immigrants who cross the border here to escape the violence and impoverishment of their lives, and what they face crossing this desert. It’s mid-February, and I’m told that it really begins to heat up from here on out. The heat and thorns and lack of water would be bad enough, but adding in the hostile climate and groups like the border minutemen, it’s a deadly proposition.  This center focuses on peace and justice and helps sponsor a ministry to migrants.

We have hiking trails out our front door leading to the Saguaro National Park (who knew??).  All the hikes I’ve taken are outstanding, but my favorite to date goes through a box canyon where many westerns were filmed, including the series of High Chaparral.  It is really that spectacular. On my first hike, I thought I was going to the box canyon, but I made a wrong turn.  I came to a large red rock bluff and could see petroglyphs on the rocks. They always make chills run down my spine, those ancient drawings that point to a significance that we can only guess at, that have survived for so many centuries.

The weather has been chilly at night but in the seventies during the day. Bright sunshine. It’s so clear that everything stands out in bas-relief.  Sunrises and sunsets are spectacular.

This morning dawned mostly cloudy and very chilly. Earlier I watched the storms coming through. The sky changed every half hour, as the wind was strong.  At one point the sun was out here while I watched the dark clouds and rain come through the valley below. Then the storm arrived up here. It poured through our late morning meditation and lunch.  At one point big white flakes of snow fell. Then the sun came out. Some of the more distant peaks were snow-covered, but the snow disappeared quickly as it warmed up again.

I took a walk as it was clearing. There’s nothing like the aroma of the desert after a rain. Delicious!

Destination Tucson

Today I reached my first destination: a month-long retreat in Tucson.

First, the metrics:

• mileage:  2946
• mpg:  average 44.8 (I averaged less than 1 tank of gas per day — 10 gal tank)
• average miles per day: 254 (high 542, low 79) — 10 days total
• One day was foggy and rainy, and parts of 2 days were snowy going into and coming out of Denver. The rest of the time it was mostly sunny and relatively warm. Everywhere I went people were talking about a warm winter.

This retreat center is high in the hills north and west of Tucson. My spacious room overlooks the northern part of the city — right now the lights are twinkling in the valley below me.  It was 75 degrees when I arrived, but the night is getting chilly.

The desert is beautiful here. I took a sunset hike after dinner on this cloudless evening. When it grew dark, I could hear the coyotes singing. The night sky is dark and starry, but I didn’t venture too far away from my building.

Today is Friday, which is a modified fast day for peace and justice.

I think this next month will be awesome.

 

A Monument-al Experience

A highlight of my journey was Monument Valley.  I have spent time in the Four Corners area in the past but never made it here.  It is truly sacred ground.

Because it’s well within the Navajo Nation, it is a tribal, not US, park.  Their one hotel has balconies facing east toward some of the major rock formations. This hotel was a welcome respite from the hotel ghettoes along our interstates. It was great to be able to walk out the door of this hotel and do some hiking, which is limited without a guide.   A 3+ mile hike loops around one of the formations and is spectacular.

The rock formations are beautiful and powerful, upthrusting from the flat valley floor.  No wonder they are an icon of the ‘wild west’.

They are most beautiful at sunrise and sunset. Unfortunately, there was no sunset nor was there a ‘night sky’ — this area is one of the darkest places to view the stars on a clear night.

But the sunrise… oh the sunrise. Probably one of the most spectacular I’ve ever seen.   I need to sit down and figure out how to add pics, I will do that in the next few days.

It was most delightful to hear the call of ravens and the song of coyotes. They excite me because they touch something wild within me.

This is a place where I will return someday.

Mission

The congregation I serve, the First Unitarian Society of Schenectady, is beginning its process of determining its mission. Not writing a pretty mission statement, but finding the essence of who we are and what we are called to do and be in the world.

Outside of one city, I saw a billboard for a church – its denomination wasn’t clear but that doesn’t matter. The billboard header was the name of the church followed by, ‘where we feed the hungry‘.

Now that’s a mission.

Think about it… yes, there are people who hunger for food. Many of them. My guess is that this is a focus for service. Also, there are many who hunger for meaning in their lives. Hunger for community. Hunger for  spiritual deepening. Hunger to make a difference. Hunger to get out of the small boxes we can find ourselves imprisoned within.

If I lived in that city and were church shopping, I would want to visit that church to see how they lived this mission.

Westward Ho

I’ve traveled a bit under 2500 miles by now.  The past two days have been spectacular – the first traveling from eastern Kansas to Denver, across rolling prairie spreading out to the wide-open plains where one could barely distinguish land from sky.  By the time I got to eastern Colorado, the ground was snowy and the sky – that vast open sky – was overtaken by whitish gray clouds.   And then it started to snow lightly.

I like to drive in silence, watching the road and the landscape unfold around me.  It was so calming to let the wide-open spaces drift inside of me.  I meditated on what it might feel like to live in open space.  Possibilities seem endless. Yet the simplicity and austerity of the landscape hint at another reality. There’s no place to hide. One is exposed in the open space. Yet it feels so free.

I am aware that most of my day to day living is not wide-open space. Rather it is more constrained with all that I do.  And living in an urban tree-lined street means that the wide-open sky is not part of my daily life.  And so I carve out my open space through my daily spiritual practice, relating to those who populate my life, and reading beyond what I know.  My urge now is to bump up my access to the open places.

Yesterday I drove from a snowy Denver through the Rockies and into eastern Utah.  What a journey that was!  Unfortunately the first part of the trip was a white-knuckle experience, driving into the mountains with thick snow falling and slushy curvy roads.  I could barely look at the amazing scenery around me.  Thankfully, this did not last long. I entered a short tunnel and on the other side, the sun was out and the snow was over.

Then began a huge climb, followed by a lot of downhill driving. The mountains were white and glistening with fresh snow.  It was breathtaking.  Then as I moved toward the Western Slopes, the snow thinned out considerably and the landscape was more desert-like.

I drove through the Glenwood Canyon.  I’ve never driven through this canyon east to west. It is even more spectacular traveling in this direction.  The road follows along the Colorado River winding through the narrow canyon with towering rock walls.  The grandeur of these towering walls sheltering this narrow canyon with this beautiful and epic river was awe-inspiring.  In this canyon I felt protected and sheltered, filled with the grandeur of this space.

Then the landscape opened out with vast stretches of desert punctuated by mesas, buttes, mountains, and red rock.  Passing near towns and settlements, buildings looked like doll houses, and passing trucks looked smaller than Tonka trucks. Ah, the vast open space again.

I’ve traveled through the west many times. I’m not sure I could ever live here, as I seem to be hard wired for forests and eastern mountains.  But each time I’ve traveled west, I’ve found an amazing spiritual journey that is inaccessible in my home territory.

May this be something I always carry in my inner landscape.

 

 

The Journey Begins…

My sabbatical journey began with the warm afterglow of a marvelous send-off from the congregation.  I carry them with me in my heart.

I’ve driven over 1000 miles and am in Missouri.  As the hours roll by, I feel as if I’m shedding layers of responsibilities and commitments.  For 20 years these have been a primary focus of my life and ministry.  Now the particulars of my day to day living are radically changed.  I’m reminded of that classic poem by Stanley Kunitz, The Layers:

Here are 3 excerpts:

I have walked through many lives,
some of them my own,
and I am not who I was,
though some principle of being
abides, from which I struggle
not to stray.
When I look behind,
as I am compelled to look
before I can gather strength
to proceed on my journey…

Yet I turn, I turn,
exulting somewhat,
with my will intact to go
wherever I need to go,
and every stone on the road
precious to me…

Though I lack the art
to decipher it,
no doubt the next chapter
in my book of transformations
is already written.
I am not done with my changes.

So three days of travel have been accomplished, the first a short day because I got a much later start than anticipated.  I was not happy about that, but at this point in the journey, it made no difference.

Here’s my take on the past 3 days:

No snow anywhere – not Buffalo, not Erie, not in the Midwest.  More green than I might have imagined as well.

When I crossed into Indiana, something felt off: I immediately realized it was the glut of billboards on both sides of the roads.  It’s been a long time since I’ve seen that many billboards (with the exception of Guatemala).  Most advertised the fast food hell that our interstates have become. There were billboards with various descriptions of what we will encounter in eternal hell (mainly, that eternity is a very long time).  But the prize was the billboard that featured a Pee Wee Herman kind of character leaping out of a casket (you read that right) – with God rays all around him. The caption?  Pre-planning can be fun!!!  It was an advertisement for a funeral home.  Yippee!

But the most amazing sighting of the day was 3 roosters walking in single file on the shoulder of the interstate, nice as you please.

Leaving the East behind and moving into the big sky and flat plains of the Midwest marks a big shift – the first of many, I’m sure.  I’m moving from the theoretical sabbatical to the reality of sabbatical time.  A huge gift.