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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Early in my seminary career in Chicago, we spent a week learning about Jane Addams and Hull House.

Jane was educated well, but there weren’t a lot of options for careers for young women in the late 19^th century.  She had aspirations to become a physician and work among the poor, but her health issues prevented this. Instead, she traveled abroad to figure out what was next for her. While in England, she came across the settlement house concept in London.  She was drawn to the Social Christian movement she found there, where people of many classes joined together and worked for common causes.

And so the idea of starting a settlement house in the US was born. She bought a house built by Charles Hull, the neighborhoods around this house now filling up with European immigrants.  All kinds of things happened at Hull House. It was a place where people could come to learn skills – literacy, (her night school became a prominent way for many to get an education), domestic skills, music, the arts, recreation, whatever was needed to improve the quality of life. I remember that Benny Goodman was a frequent attendee, learning to play the clarinet there.

Children, youth, and adults equally benefitted from Hull House.

The campus of Hull House eventually took over a city block.  Jane’s background enabled her to network among some of Chicago’s wealthy families to keep the funding going.

Jane was always driven by her social/religious vision of a just society. She is considered one of the early proponents of the social work field. She became active in reform movements, such as child labor legislation, health issues stemming from the terrible pollution of the Chicago River, protection of working women, and a myriad of public welfare issues.  The ethics of social democracy were important at Hull House. And her work with reform issues grew past Chicago to state and national issues.  Many leading reformers were invited to Hull House through the years, and she was invited to speak far and wide.

Come World War I, she became a prominent peace activist, an unpopular cause in that time.  Following the war, she became an important voice in the formation of the League of Nations.  She won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931.

Unitarian Universalists like to claim Jane Addams as one of our own. However, she never joined a Unitarian church, though she attended frequently in her working years.   She befriended many ministers of the Iowa Sisterhood, women who had been seminary-trained but were denied Unitarian pulpits in New England. They were happy to go to the frontier of Iowa in the late 19^th century to begin churches there.  In the early 20^th century, the Unitarian powers-that-be decided to end the ‘experiment’ with women ministers, and several found Hull House to be a place to reboot their lives following the end of their ministries (this is another story).

Jane Addams has long been an inspiration to me, first as a social worker. In one phase of my social work career,  I worked in a settlement house in a poor neighborhood, networking a pilot public welfare program among many settlement houses in our area.  I’ve also always had an inner compass that has led me to want to seek justice for all.   I admire the way that she will see a need or an issue needing to be addressed, and stepping right in to work on all aspects of the issue.

Another important fact of Jane Addams’ life:  she was a lesbian and was in relationship with significant others in her adult years.  Although being ‘out’ was not something that people did back then, she did not hide these relationships. Brave woman.

During Jane Addams week in seminary, we visited Hull House in Chicago. It was a thriving social welfare agency dedicated to Jane’s principles.  I am so sad to see that it’s now gone, 120 years later.

It seems to be a most depressing testament to the times we live in. This I know:  it is ours to keep her vision of justice and mercy alive.

Perhaps this is the first lesson of my sabbatical time — there is no perfect leave-taking, it’s always a bit messy and it takes some time to unravel the ties that bind.  It will be the same at the other end, coming back together with the congregation.  We will not re-connect perfectly in sync, a synchronicity that has grown over 5 and a half years.  We will have to re-weave those ties and at times it will be awkward, as a leave-taking can be awkward as well.

These days I have to-do lists for my house — preparing to leave it for an extended period. I have lists about packing my car, what I can and can’t take with me.  I have lists for last-minute instructions for people in the congregation and outside the congregation.

Preparation for anything is important. For something on a grand scale as a sabbatical, it seems especially important. These are days when excitement and fear coexist, for I’m leaving behind daily rituals, habits, and schedules. What awaits as I take to the open road?

Preparation is an important foundation for my journey. But there is much that I cannot prepare for. That’s the place where excitement and fear co-mingle, a dance of the spirit.

The first red-letter date for me on this calendar  is February 1. This is the day  I’ll be leaving on a four month sabbatical. Some of it is spiritual deepening and reflection.  Some of it is digging into the question, how do we truly become a religion for our time? I am most grateful to my congregation for making this happen.

I have made the decision to go away for the whole time.  I feel called to the desert for spiritual deepening, so I will begin with a retreat for 4 weeks in Tucson.  I’m such a tree and forest person — but the desert is where I’m called to.  Then I will slowly wind my way to the southeast, where I will spend another chunk of time in the Smoky Mountains as spring unfolds.  Then more meandering.

To make the most of this journey, I will blog here at least 3 times a week. I will do much writing and reading. I will be talking to colleagues and visiting congregations in my travels. I vow to try at least one thing different each week. I will observe weekly digital sabbaticals. And I will live on what I can carry in my car (and still be able to see out the windows).

Exciting? You bet.  Scary? Absolutely.  2012 promises to be an eventful year, no matter how it unfolds.

May I be open to how it unfolds in my life.