Bass - Grounded: reconnecting the kingdom of heaven with our life on earth

For Richard

A few lines from Wendell Berry:

Make a story

Show how love and joy, beauty and goodness

shine out amongst the rubble.

Thank you for writing a life with me.

The whole universe is Gods dwelling. Earth, a very small, uniquely blessed corner of that universe, gifted with unique natural blessings, is humanitys home, and humans are never so much at home as when God dwells with them.

U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops,

Renewing the Earth (1991)

Everything is related, and we human beings are united as brothers and sisters on a wonderful pilgrimage, woven together by the love God has for each... and which also unites us in fond affection with brother sun, sister moon, brother river and mother earth.

Pope Francis,

Laudato Si (2015)

1. INTRODUCTION
   Genesis
2. 1. CHAPTER 1
      Dirt
   2. CHAPTER 2
      Water
   3. CHAPTER 3
      Sky
3. 1. CHAPTER 4
      Roots
   2. CHAPTER 5
      Home
   3. CHAPTER 6
      Neighborhood
   4. CHAPTER 7
      Commons
4. CONCLUSION
   Revelation

What we need is here.

Wendell Berry

I am sitting in the center of a labyrinth at Mount Calvary, a monastery in Santa Barbara, California. The labyrinth, a walking path for prayer, is painted on a concrete patio in a garden behind an old building that now serves as a retreat house. At the edge of the labyrinth are native plants and flowers, including a bright purplish bush called woolly blue curls, where a hummingbirdoblivious to my presencefeeds. Crows, sacred to the Chumash people, who once inhabited this place, fly from the gnarled branches of live oaks to the heights of eucalyptus trees as they caw and search for food. There is abundant bougainvillea, fragrant lavender and rosemary, bright mountain lilac, and coastal sunflower. Along the stone pathways are statues of the Virgin Mary and saints, often paired with benches for those who wish to sit in prayer-filled solitude. A creek, actually a dry bed due to Californias extended drought, runs along the base of the hillside below, where, I suspect, rattlesnakes make their home.

This is a contemplative place. But, oddly enough, it is not terribly quiet. Across the creek, schoolchildren play, cheering for their teams. Not far away, someone stands in back of a building talking on her cell phone. The museum nearby will open soon, and workers are making ready for the day. The sound of traffic on Los Olivos Street is muffled by the trees and shrubs but still obvious. Joggers on the road chat with one another during their morning run. Tourists talk behind the wall that separates the monastery from the mission next door. Neighborhood gardeners mow lawns and blow leaves.

Mount Calvary has not always occupied this particular place. Years ago, I often visited its original locationfifteen mostly vertical acres of mountaintop above Santa Barbara with sweeping views of the Pacific Ocean. When sitting on the porch on a clear day, you looked out toward the Channel Islands and down upon the city. There were distant sounds, voices traveling across the canyons or the faint rumble of the freeway far below, like indistinct prayers rising to the skies. Mostly, it was quietstunningly sothe immediate silence broken mostly by birdsong, bells, or monastic chant. So high up, that otherworldly place felt a bit like heaven.

But Mount Calvarys mountaintop paradise is no longer. In November 2008, the California winds blew hot, and a wildfire destroyed it all.

As the flames engulfed their home, the terrified monks fled downhill to the city. The sisters of St. Marys Convent, an order whose house sits behind the Santa Barbara Mission in a busy residential area, took them in. At St. Marys, the sisters and brothers lived together, sharing monastic community. Eventually, the monks received an insurance settlement for the old Mount Calvary and faced the decision of whether to rebuild on the top of the hill. After much prayer, they opted to sell the scorched site in favor of finding a different location. The sisters, with only a few women remaining in their small community, offered their property to the brothers. Thus, St. Marys Convent became the new Mount Calvary, and the brothers took up permanent residence in the city.

From the labyrinth, I look up and see the peak where the monks used to live. When they gazed down from the heights above, this spot would have been just a speck in their commanding perspective; a person sitting where I sit would have been invisible to them. Now they live in the world, with everything right around them, no longer above it. They have become part of the view, not distant observers of it. Up there, they would not have heard the children, joggers, or tourists or noticed the persistent hummingbirds and noisy crows. Whereas once Mount Calvary offered retreatants the capacity to see widely and dream vast dreams of God, the new monastery invites guests to feel the world more deeply and experience the intimacy of Spirit.

If I think about what was lost, about the beautiful old monastery, I feel sad. I miss the majestic views, the vistas of mountain and ocean, with the towering sense of being above the world. But here, in the center of the labyrinth, peace prevails. The morning fog is lifting. I kick off my shoes. The sounds provide a kind of gentle companionship, reminding me that I am not completely alone with my prayers. Sitting on the ground, I feel warm solidarity with the world of nature and the worlds of all those traveling nearby. And I feel that other presence as well, the heartbeat of love at the center of things, the spirit of wonder or awe that many call God. Any sense of monastic isolation has been overcome with a sense of intimate connection with all that is around, things seen and things less tangible. I, like the monks, am not above. Here, I am with the world. And I find that God is with me.

Maybe coming off the mountain is not a bad thing after all.

Not so long ago, believers confidently asserted that God inhabited heaven, a distant place of eternal reward for the faithful. We occupied a three-tiered universe, with heaven above, where God lived; the world below, where we lived; and the underworld, where we feared we might go after death. The church mediated the space between heaven and earth, acting as a kind of holy elevator, wherein God sent down divine directions and, if we obeyed the directives, we would go upeventuallyto live in heaven forever and avoid the terrors below. Stories and sermons taught us that God occupied the high places, looking over the world and caring for it from afar, occasionally interrupting the course of human affairs with some miraculous reminder of divine power. Those same tales emphasized the gap between worldly places and the holy mountains, between the creation and an Almighty Creator. Religious authorities mediated the gap, explaining right doctrine and holy living. If you wanted to live with God forever in heaven, then you listened to them, believed, and obeyed.

During the last century, the three-tiered universe and its orderly certainty crumbled. The Great War caused its philosophical and political foundations to wobble, and the whole thing collapsed after the even greater war, World War II, when the Nazis and the Holocaust and the bomb shattered history. God, like the monks from Mount Calvary chased by the roaring inferno, fled down the mountain seeking shelter in the midst of the city.