Cultivating Calling and Pilgrimage is a meandering column documenting the pilgrimage of faith. It’s an occasional letter arriving in the mail from that shabby, wandering uncle you only see a few times year, describing the odd bits and bobs of books, songs, stories, people and places that have struck his fancy, put a lump in his throat, or kept him putting one foot in front of the other toward the Face of Jesus, that Joy set before us all.
Yesterday my friend Joe mentioned Canyon de Chelly was nearby and that I shouldn’t miss the chance to see it. “It’s like a smaller, uncrowded Grand Canyon,” he told me. A few days ago, I had no idea this place existed. I followed Joe in my van from the mission on the Navajo Reservation, where I’d played a concert the night before, to the Thunderbird Lodge, a restaurant by the park entrance. We visited over dinner, and I decided to camp nearby for the night. I needed to give this place a proper look. I didn’t have anything planned for the following day, so it was wide open for some impromptu exploring.
Joe and I said our goodbyes and I found a good place to park and sleep, setting my alarm for 5 a.m. I wanted to see the sun rise over the canyon, if I could manage getting up so early.
I was snug in my bed in the chilly desert air when my alarm rattled my sleeping body awake. I groaned and opened the porthole window by my pillow to see the stars presiding steadily over that small round frame of a wider world. There, in my sleepy darkness, an aperture of living lights rested, seemingly suspended like a glimmering orb—like a planet of smooth benighted ocean dotted with lighthouses manned by … who?
I closed the porthole cover again, made my bed by folding it back into the wall, layered on clothes, and brewed coffee. Its heat worked through the clay cup to ease my cold fingers. If I kept moving, I could make it to the canyon’s edge with the world still draped in starlight to see our own star’s slow ascent. I fastened down everything in the van and then drove off, following the directions for a few miles of curving roadways to Junction Overlook. It seemed like a good spot, and this morning I had it all to myself.
The western winds coursed over the plains, which were now growing dimly visible with the slow approach of dawn. For hundreds of miles in every direction. In Mississippi where I live, we are cocooned in trees, and visibility is rarely more than a few hundred yards. I like both—the woods, the plains. Out here, the land and the sky seem more intimately related; one seems almost just as wide and open as the other. In some ways, earth’s participation in heaven is more clearly plausible, as they are pressed right up against one another. Maybe not just plausible, but somehow, in a sense unique to this landscape, more intuitive. The woods have their own way of saying the same thing, of course, but my senses can get over-familiar with their voice, and, for now at least, this place was prickling what had grown dull back home.
Just ahead of me lay the deep cut canyon. Before there were roads here, I can imagine it would have been easy to look out in front of you and see nothing but level ground right up until you were about to step off into this great opening carved into the earth by eons of river-flow. It’s invisible until you’re nearly tumbling over the rim. Thankfully, someone has since thought to put up guardrails.
It’s incredible how something as powerful as the sun can slip up on the world, silent as a doe in the woods, and quietly ease all that potency across all these stone-faced canyon walls, which redden like the cheeks of a lover surprised by a hoped-for kiss. The whole world, in this early, early light, seems soft as skin, tender as being wakened by a whispered word of light smoothed across its grey, wrinkled countenance.
I watched it grow warm. Felt the light on me and in me.
I packed a few things and spent the rest of the day descending into the canyon and exploring it on foot. It’s a great place, since you can get down to the canyon floor in around an hour or so. I had plenty of time to wander, but by the end of the day, I was wishing I’d known about this place sooner. I would have planned to stay four or five days. As it was, I had to leave the next morning.
That day at Canyon de Chelly was years ago in reality, yet only a few days ago in my memory. The light from that morning still glances ruddy off the rocks, overflowing the banks of time and mind into the present. The presence of the world’s Maker through the world He has made overruns creation’s boundaries, time’s and flesh’s too, and wakes up the human spirit’s memory of memories only the Spirit still knows. A Deep we cannot reach reaches down deep into us. We tumble over the rim and fall splayed onto the floor, not of a canyon, but a throne room. Heaven has slipped up on us, wild and silent as a doe. A Face presses in for a hoped-for kiss, and the world goes rosy with blushing. Who hopes for it more, Earth or Heaven? I’d bet on Heaven; it is the Lord who keeps the lighthouses of the heavens burning; the Lord who daily sends the sun from his chamber like a bridegroom to face the world with gladness and warmth.
I was reading about the Lord’s Prayer recently in Pope Benedict XVI’s book Jesus of Nazareth, and he brings up a fascinating possibility about the phrase, “give us today our daily bread.” He points out that the Greek word used for “daily” is unique to the gospels.[1] It’s even been suggested the gospel writers coined the term, and one possibility for why they would do so is to give the phrase a future sense in which the reality of the eschaton “spills backwards” into the present. So “daily” bread can mean something like, “feed us daily on the bread that we will one day have when Christ returns.” In the Old Testament, the manna was like that; it was provision they depended on day by day that pointed to a truer fulfillment in Christ, the True Bread from Heaven. Benedict suggests that one thing we can mean when we pray for daily bread is that we “are asking the Lord to give us ‘today’ the future bread, the bread of the new world—himself.” [2]
To even begin to imagine that kind of thing is mind-bending. But, if we make it about how time works, we’ll miss the point. The point is personal, relational, intimate on a cosmic scale.
The same Jesus who was here a couple thousand years ago is hearing your prayers right now. And He is the same Jesus we will see face to face at the close of this age, when He comes to judge and make all things new and seat us finally at the marriage feast of the Lamb.
The love of Christ flowed by the Spirit from the mouths of the Old Testament prophets and flooded the future with promise. Now, the warm aroma of a feast at the world’s end backfills history, meeting us each day with a taste of what is coming (at least we pray that we may be present enough to taste it). Christians around the world gather regularly to participate in the Lord’s Supper, where we take into ourselves today the bread of the new world, Christ. Where our “sinful bodies are made clean by His body, and our souls washed by His most precious blood, that we may evermore dwell in Him and He in us.” [3]
The Eucharistic Table tells us something about what reality is really like. Just as the sky above the canyon felt to me like its involvement with earth was intuitive, even inevitable, there is a sensation that this world is deeply involved in a reality beyond this world. That it is somehow Christ’s precious blood blushing in the rock faces of de Chelly; that if God were to cease sending out His Word, the air itself would be emptied of its Breath and all things would expire. If that pulsing power so fierce and seemingly far away refused to make its face to shine upon us, all that would be left of this precious world would be a cold canyon whose depths lay untouched by love.
But this is a world dearly loved. Every beauty here is to be taken personally, seriously. It is to be taken in, like bread, like a taste of the Lord’s future goodness right now. Every sunrise is a prophecy and an apocalypse, the past filling the future with promise and the future “spilling backward” to greet the present, nourishing us with hope to carry on.
One Day, our cold hands and faces, our grey craggy countenances will be wakened early and warmed by the Light that all the light we’d ever known had only guessed at. And we will break our long, long fast, taking hold finally of the True Bread—the only Bread that could ever fill the great canyon of our God-given hunger for love.
[1] Joseph Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI), Jesus of Nazareth: From the Baptism in the Jordan to the Transfiguration, (New York: Image, 2007) 155.
[2] Ibid, 156.
[3] Prayer of Humble Access, The Book of Common Prayer, (California: Anglican Liturgy Press, 2019) 119.
The featured image, “Fruitfulness,” is courtesy of Ariel Lovewell and is used with her kind permission for Cultivating.
Matthew Clark is a singer/songwriter and storyteller from Mississippi. He has recorded several full length albums, including a Bible walk-through called “Bright Came the Word from His Mouth” and “Beautiful Secret Life.” Matthew’s current project, “The Well Trilogy,” consists of 3 full-length album/book combos releasing over 3 years. Each installment is made up of 11 songs and a companion book of 13 essays written by a variety of contributors exploring themes around encountering Jesus, faith-keeping, and the return of Christ. Part One, “Only the Lover Sings” is available both as an album and as a companion book.
Matthew also hosts a weekly podcast, “One Thousand Words – Stories on the Way,” featuring essays reflecting on faith-keeping. A touring musician and speaker, Matthew travels sharing songs and stories in a van called Vandalf.
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