This Easter morning I climb a scraggly rock strewn hill on the outskirts of the city of Holy Faith. I snake my way through prickly pear cactus and sharp volcanic cinders. At the top a simple wooden cross stands askew, its white paint chaffing at the mercy of the fierce desert wind. In the high desert of New Mexico, crowning the peaks with a sign of God is an old Spanish tradition. In the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, you can feel the presence of the many believers who have traipsed across this land seeking communion and forgiveness. Like the good sons of Abraham, these desert dwellers knew that death is necessary for renewal. Today on Easter Sunday, I reflect on how delicate life is. It forms as clusters of cells, moves about, and then scatters like the wind.
At the top of the peak, an April gust penetrates my flesh and bones. I feel a shiver of sorrow for the world today, for the horror of war and destruction of the planet. Below my feet, tufts of blue grama grass and a tangle of wild rose miraculously sprout new growth from the sandy soil. This is the season where all that seems dead in winter comes back to life. I feel an enduring faith emerge from this renewal, like the tenderness that Mary Magdalene must have felt, standing amidst those ancient desert stones at the threshold between the living and the dying.
On this Easter morning, in a kind of exalted wonder, I am brought closer to the incomprehensible. The great blue sky towers overhead. I find myself in a kind of bardo, suspended between sky and ground. While firmly planted on the decomposing sandstone, I experience a kind of ascension. It is then that the rocks and the twisted juniper tree cry out, beckoning me to live both in the flesh and in the spirt and to lean forward, and trust this season of regeneration.
Photo: Joshua Earle / Unsplash
