Pedernal's silhouette, lifting its slightly-tilted, sheer-sided mesa skyward to the west, brooded under a dark and boiling sky as I drove up the winding road out of Abiquiu, New Mexico. It was nearly noon, earlier than usual in the day for a monsoon-season storm. As I crested the pass, a wide vista opened. To the north, sheets of dense rain moved toward walls and promontories of red and yellow stone. Lightning flashed, thunder boomed. As I made the turn up to Ghost Ranch, a huge squall obscured the high mesa above it. By the time I got to the ranch headquarters, the squall had passed over the heights to the east. I walked to the trailhead at the dry wash and headed up toward the golden precipice of Chimney Rock, hoping to get there before the next storm cell approached. To the east, flashes of light were followed by deep booms rolling and tumbling across the broken landscape.
Photo Courtesy of Jim Burklo
Chimney Rock
Chimney Rock near Ghost Ranch, NM.
As I approached the base of the mesa apart from which Chimney Rock stood, I heard a roaring sound. Was it wind coming down from the heights above the mesa? Yet I saw no fluttering of branches of the junipers along the trail above me. I climbed to the edge of a cliff, and I saw across a canyon the source of the noise. A rush of dark purple-brown muddy water leaped off the opposing cliff and into a chasm. Looking down, I witnessed a churning stream plowing ahead in the dry wash I had crossed earlier at the bottom. In a matter of minutes, the storm cell had dumped an enormous quantity of water on the upper mesa. It had concentrated into a bone-dry channel of stone and now emptied itself, rippling over a cliff in long sinews of mud down to the desert plain below.
The darkening above me bode ill for safe passage to Chimney Rock. The top of the mesa would have been exactly the wrong place to be in a lightning storm. So I hiked with dispatch down to the Presbyterian retreat center at Ghost Ranch. Spats of rain pocked the dust in the trail as I descended. At the bottom, I leaped across the muddy torrent.
I've been there many times over the years, for conferences, art classes, and mostly just to camp and hike. One of my favorite haunts is the Theology Room of the Ghost Ranch Library. It is in the very back of the old adobe-style stucco building with creaky wooden floors. The room has a skylight above a wooden table surrounded by shelves crammed with books about God. I was warmed at the sight of my first published book, Open Christianity, on one of the shelves, and was further warmed to find that an old friend of mine had written his name on the check-out card in the pocket in the inside of the back cover. After browsing among books representing many different religious and spiritual traditions, I eased into a stuffed chair with a view out a window of the glowing gold-and rust- colored cliffs of Kitchen Mesa.
There I sat, contemplating the nature of divinity, and the divinity of nature. I looked at the books, then I looked outside, then looked at the books again. Were they all follies, our verbal exercises in the futility of describing or explaining the Ultimate Reality of the cosmos? Or was it enough that we remind our readers to pay attention to this ineffable divinity? As I turned to gaze again at the wall of stone beyond the library, carved with sublime artistry by a hand unseen, I felt again the urge to describe the indescribable. I found myself chuckling quietly at the hopeless quest that I and my fellows in the God-talk profession have undertaken. At best, our books urge our readers to look out the window. But we look out the window and feel the urge to write more books!
Through the skylight, the diffused light of a stormy day cast a glow onto the table in the middle of the Theology Room. For a moment it seemed that the books worshipped the light, facing it like Muslims praying toward Mecca. All the words on all the pages of the books were lined up sideways, their thin sides facing the center, giving up their identities, abandoning the egos of their authors, in order to point beyond themselves to that which contained them, but which they could not contain.
The Rev. Jim Burklo, a Presbyterian minister, serves as associate dean of religious life at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. He blogs at Musings, from which this essay is reprinted with permission.