Contemplation at the shore

 

Descending the gritty staircase carpeted with wet maple leave, I can hear the hush of waves getting closer.

I scale wind and water smoothed logs and hoist myself onto a boulder at the edge of land and sea.

I look out into the grey fog.

Sea and sky are blurred.

With my beads, I mumble the Jesus Prayer 100 times.

Meanwhile, the ocean eternally laps at my feet.

Stones imperceptibly lose their edges as the sea pulls them closer to her.

Gulls and cormorants fade into being from the right and then the left.

Slosh and crash…Slosh and crash in stochastic eternity.

Fog horn bellows punctuate my contemplation and the waves.

I begin to climb the gritty staircase once more, the hush of waves getting dimmer.

A Doubter's Response to President Uchtdorf

As a non-practicing person of LDS heritage, I have fallen out of the habit of watching general conference. I am still connected to Mormonism through family and friends and continue to love my Mormon heritage and the foundation it has provided in my life. Because of the Facebook flurry it generated, I decided to listen to President Dieter Uchtdorf’s talk. It was wonderful to hear a talk on doubt. Anything helps in respect to shepherding members to broaden their understanding of why people leave full participation in the LDS Church. However, I was disappointed that President Uchtdorf did not address the substance of doubt. Talks like this encourage tolerance for those of us who doubt or decide to leave the church, but there is always an underlying subtext: It is ok to doubt, so long as your doubt produces the right outcome.

Uchtdorf lovingly acknowledged that there are a host historical issues that cause some to doubt the church’s claims to truth with a capital ‘T’. However, he did not address these issues in a way that would help those who struggle to think through these issues. There is no method, no advice.  In a very euphemistic reference to “historical issues” he says: “Some struggle with unanswered questions about things that have been done or said in the past. We openly acknowledge that in nearly 200 years of Church history, along with an uninterrupted line of inspired, honorable, and divine events, there have been some things said and done that could cause people to question.” This statement makes it seem like the issues are trivial or superficial keeping the doubter on the outside, on the fringe, rather than acknowledging that these are serious challenges to the Church’s claims. Yet, Uchtdorf acknowledges doubt as essential to seeking truth: “In this Church that honors personal agency so strongly that it was restored by a young man that had questions and sought answers, we respect those who honestly search for truth.” Doubt is framed as a sort of right that we (unwisely) exercise, like our right to sin. While this talk may be a step in the right direction, Mormons must do better at acknowledging that the search for truth can sometimes lead people out of the Church. Thank you president Uchtdorf for your kind and respectful words, may the dialogue between Mormons and their doubting friends and family return to the table in love and good will.

Solstice

For the last several years I have tried to commemorate the solstice with at least some acknowledgement of this our longest day of the year. Nothing to New Agey, ritualistic or woo-woo; solitude, a hike, etc. This year I awoke early and watched the eastern sunrise from my Forest Service station at the Mill Hollow Guard Station east of Heber, Utah. As I watched I thought of the trip I had recently made to the Chaco Canyon Pueblos in New Mexico where the Puebloan peoples that lived there for approximately 1,000 years developed an elaborate sun, moon and star watching practice. It is thought that the astronomy of these people developed to plan festivals and trade fairs that were held each year and which were attended by thousands of people from all over the region. Being able to predict the cycles of the sun and moon in their ascent and descent in the sky were essential aspects of everyday life because Chaco was the ceremonial center of this brief empire that synchronized trade and streamlined architecture into the uniform masonry that the Chaco ruins reflect. The sun and moon were meticulously watching using simple instruments like a stick in the ground whose shadow was measured each day to orient the villages along a north-south axis. Natural monuments such as Chimney Buttes and small cracks in the rocky mesas were used to track the journey of the Sun high into the summer sky and back to its winter nadir.

How little I know about the cycles of the sun, moon and stars. They have been mostly eclipsed, so to speak, by our more precise technological time pieces and secular calendars. I struggle to remember whether the moon is waxing or waning. I sometimes notice the ascending and receding position of the sun throughout the year, but am never still enough, in one place long enough to watch it actually change. Yet, on the solstice I try to be present to this silent but ever present liturgy as the sun rises and sets, ascends and descends in the sacred sky.

On this particular solstice I didn’t do anything that different. I watched a spotted sandpiper drunkenly walk the shore of the creek near the cabin. I listened to unknown birds call from hidden bows of a nearby aspen wood. I watched the slow advance of a beaver logging operation on the other side of the creek. I walked endlessly through forests that were being ravaged by spruce beetles; the sappy trunks of towering trees smattered with the frass and pitch of fresh beetle entries and exists. The tall, ancient boles whose glory fades one needle at a time; from green to faded brown.

The spruce beetle (Dendroctonus rufipennis) is such a small creature having such a huge impact on a place. I am reminded of us; our voracious appetite for material things, money and comforts is killing the earth upon which we have evolved, lived, loved, laughed and learned. And just as the beetle knows nothing else but to eat, mate and reproduce; we too, despite our supposed enlightened minds, technological prowess and religious moralities are eating ourselves out of house and home. And like the beetle, when the trees run out, we may very well face a crash. I hope we have the strength to buck this powerful evolutionary urge and course correct. Perhaps we will, and perhaps we will not. Yet on this solstice, even under the fading green of spruce trees fighting to stay alive, I have hope that we too will survive, that the trees will grow back and that a balance will be struck.