Prayerful Life

We arrived in New Mexico on a cold winter’s night. We had turned off of Highway 40 in eastern Arizona and headed north on Highway 12 towards the ‘Devil’s Highway’ as the sign said. This sounded foreboding, and as we exited and began driving into the deep night and the barren landscape, it also felt foreboding. Had I known then what was in store for us up ahead, in about an hour’s time, I would have clearly understood this foreboding. We continued driving through the deepening darkness while a light snow began to fall and the temperatures plummeted. I was driving the Taurus with MD in the passenger seat and we were leading the way, while S. was driving the Toyota pickup behind us, then J. in his car and lastly M. and S. driving the Suburban and trailer loaded with all of our supplies. It was a quiet night and I was tired from driving. We had been steadily climbing for a little while; outside it was pitch black and I had no sense of our surroundings. The road crested and then began its descent; not long after that, as we came around a curve, I lost control of the car. It began sliding across the road, gently and smoothly, as if in slow motion, but inexorably we slid in the direction of the utter darkness just beyond the other side of the road. MD grabbed the wheel, and turned into the slide, correcting us, as we had also begun to spin. The car straightened out and I saw the very end of a guardrail up ahead, which we proceeded to slam into, bringing us to an abrupt stop. A moment later we felt the Toyota slam into the back of our car; and a moment after that we heard J. plow into the back of the Toyota and then felt the force transfer into our car. I waited for a few moments more, expecting to feel the Suburban ram into all of us. It was a brief span of time as we waited, and in this moment’s pause I considered our position as the last two collisions had jogged the end of our car loose, and we were aimed squarely into the unknown. It seemed likely, even certain, that when the Suburban would hit us, with all of that mass, we would be thrust out into the darkness, and though I couldn’t see what was out there, I felt as if it would be better not to find out.

Several more moments passed and then, as I looked through our back windshield, I was relieved to see M. pass slowly by, in control, and on the proper side of the road. By God’s grace nobody was hurt and all of the vehicles could still be driven, though they had sustained a fair amount of body damage. Several miles up the road we found a small church and parked our vehicles there. It was very late by now, and we all were very tired from the previous events, so we set up our tents in a flat, open field to the side of the church building and fell asleep.

The next morning we awoke to find that it had snowed quite a bit and we were in the midst of a wide and expansive plain, with little more to be seen than the church building we had camped next to and a few other small homes in the distance, and mountains far beyond that. The church was at a crossroads of the little connecting road that we had been on, and the highway which headed back south to Gallup NM. We were about an hour or so north of Gallup and planned to go in that direction, but before we did, we drove back to the scene of the accident to get a sense of what had happened. Clearly we all hit a patch of ice on the road and lost control; fortunately the weight of the Suburban gave it more friction and connection to the asphalt, enabling M. to keep it going in the right direction. We pulled up alongside the section of guardrail that had kept us from whatever was on the other side, and as we parked, I realized that we had truly escaped death. Just the other side of the guardrail, the earth disappeared and there was only a vast emptiness. A deep and rocky gorge ran alongside the road and it wasn’t clear how deep it went, but it was deep enough. Across this chasm, perhaps sixty feet or so, the rocky face of the other side looked ragged and ominous. The early morning light cast gloomy shadows across the craggy rocks and gave them a threatening appearance. Leaning over the edge as far as was safe, and attempting to see into the depths, none of us could determine anything down below, unable to lean out far enough to see over the edge.

Our next campsite was on a plateau high above the surrounding desert, some twenty or thirty miles to the east and slightly north of Gallup, not far from Hosta Butte. We found a remote area along the ridge of the plateau, amidst the rock faces and outcroppings and settled in for the next month or two. I found a shallow cave to set up my sleeping bag. It was actually more of a deep shelf carved into the face of the rock. It was not much deeper than the width of my bag, and not much longer either; yet it afforded enough additional room to keep my few personal effects, along with my sleeping bag and a groundpad.

Before driving to our new campsite we stopped off in Gallup to buy a few provisions; and it had to be very few indeed because we only had seven dollars between the six of us. We found a discount grocery store and purchased a large bag of rice, a gallon can of honey, a large bag of beans and a substantial package of tortillas to live on until we could find work and make some additional money. We had enough money to get the vehicles to our campsite but not much further. However, the Toyota pickup still had enough to make a trip back into town so M. and I left the others on the plateau and returned to Gallup to find work and earn money for more food and gasoline. The others spent time setting up the camp. Because the weather was so cold and the wind was strong on top of the plateau, they didn’t set up the larger tents or the kitchen, but instead excavated into the earth and created a large protected living space roughly 4 feet deep and about twenty feet across. It was semi-circular, and in the middle of the straight side, they constructed a large fireplace using soil and melted snow. Over the top of this living space they erected large tarps set on branches placed vertically as pillars to raise the roof slightly, which allowed us to walk about the space only slightly hunched over; and then they tied the tarps off all around the perimeter to other rocks or vegetation to hold them in place. The fire generated a lot of heat in this small space and kept us very comfortable against the elements outside.

Meanwhile, in Gallup, M. and I struggled to find work by day, and slept in our truck bed by night. We found some day labor, unloading hay bales from a semi-trailer and stacking them into a barn, which paid three dollars per hour. It was back breaking work and we managed to make about twenty-five dollars each, after a full day of effort; but we slept effortlessly afterwards. Nights were cold in the bed of the truck, as the snow fell, covering us and our sleeping bags while we slept. During our stay in Gallup, he and I cobbled several jobs together and raised a small sum of money, enough to keep all of our vehicles fueled and enough for food and other essentials.

The desert rock and the towering plateau, from which one could gaze upon the world far below or at the mountains east of Albuquerque in the extreme distance, set the scene for our bucolic and austere life. Frugality was at the center of our existence, yet even closer to our lives’ center, was the sense and feeling of brotherly love and familial caring. The world’s vicissitudes had faded for us long ago, and now we lived simpler lives, hand to mouth, and close to the earth. It was easy here to feel as if the modern world had disappeared and gone away, and we could touch something beyond time, and taste a bit of eternity. It was also a good setting for living out the life that Christ exhorts of His followers; to live as one, sharing all things in common without private property, caring for one another and using our gifts for the benefit of the whole.

In January 1994 I was hired to work as a waiter in an upscale restaurant of a local hotel in Gallup. After weeks of sporadic day labor for little money I was relieved to finally have a job that could bring in steady and good income. I drove back to our home on the plateau to share the good news. The next day MD said it was time for us to move, so we packed everything up and drove southwest to Tucson AZ. I was a little stunned and disappointed and suggested that maybe I should stay for a little while to earn money and then join everyone later but that wasn’t to be our plan, so I quit before I started, and we moved our community to Arizona.

From a practical perspective it didn’t make sense not to keep the job at the restaurant, especially after the struggles of the previous weeks, but then I had to remember that our goals were not worldly, and while we certainly needed money to survive, it was a secondary consideration to the spiritual purposes of our training. In fact, struggling to get my job and then letting go of it immediately thereafter actually fit perfectly with the goal of being detached from the outcome of my actions; and leaving at that precise moment helped me to gain humility in the face of my imagined success, and also through the process of relinquishing my immediate goals and achievements.

(to be continued)

~FS

It turned out I didn’t have very long to wait; several hours later, around midnight, I saw headlights approaching in the darkness and soon we had the trailer hooked up and we were returning to our camp. Not many days after this we broke camp, packed up and began our trek south. We took the two-lane highway leading towards Mt Lassen late one afternoon as winter was beginning to settle across the area. Snow was already collecting in shady hollows here and there along the side of the highway and further up the surrounding slopes, their tops were already beginning to turn white. Just as the day began to turn to dusk we pulled into a remote state park, however, everything was closed for the season and the gates were locked. There were no alternative options anywhere nearby and we had a caravan: our mobile-kitchen Toyota pickup, the Taurus, our Suburban and trailer, along with J.’s little car which he still drove, though we intended to sell it; as he wasn’t yet able to accept the vow of poverty, and he still had attachment to his possessions.

Provision in our community was typically given to each of us, for our particular weaknesses, as we struggled to overcome them. I found that it was significantly easier to battle these things, with the help of MD yet, even so, weaknesses are strong within us and do not disappear overnight. For J. he had more difficulty with giving up personal property than others did, so he was allowed more leniency in this respect, but with the goal still being un-attachment and freedom from possessiveness.

One of the tenets of our training, as directed and taught by MD, was that whatever came between us and the noble virtues, such as selflessness, service, moderation, purity of thought and action, kindness and so on, these obstructions were the very things we must confront and overcome; this being done by experiencing again whatever it was that made us originally choose to cave in to these weaknesses or vices, and then in the midst of the struggle with these experiences, to choose this time, rather to act or think differently, and thereby create the beginning of a new habit that is more honorable and virtuous and loving, and which leads us to freedom from that old “stuff” as we called it. I had a whole litany of issues that I had to confront and work to transform, which I will describe in more detail as this story unfolds, but in brief I was weak in the face of conflict and needed to regain strength of love in the face of violence and anger, I also was very prideful and had thoughts of superiority over others, so I had to confront the pains of humiliation and through that find a new place inside that doesn’t artificially prop myself up by using these things as compensation; and there were many more things, such as lustful thoughts, and avoiding conflict, which I won’t go into now, but will share when the time is right.

So there we were, our caravan, far away from any towns, and without a place to park or camp for the night. To the side of the locked gates the hillside was gradual and the ground was hardened by the cold. It seemed possible for our smaller vehicles to weave their way around and past the myriad of trees that covered the hill and make their way through the forest and back down onto the asphalt further inside the gates where we could park and stay for the night. However, the Suburban and trailer combined were easily thirty-five feet long and also quite bulky. It was impossible to get these through the trees, there were hundreds of trees, large and small, scattered over the hillside and they were growing very closely together, and the route was several hundred feet to get around and back onto the park road behind the gate.

Nevertheless MD assessed the situation and told us to drive through and we would make it. The smaller vehicles went first and made it through to the other side without too much trouble, although in some places the angles and space available between the trees were sharper and tighter than I had anticipated, and we did almost get a vehicle stuck once or twice. But when M. began to drive the Suburban towing the trailer, up the hillside and into the trees, I was nearly certain he would end up getting lodged between several trees and it would be immovable. Each of us had a role as M. slowly inched his way through the trees; I was scouting one side and providing information to MD and M as they navigated forward. K. and J. and S. also had stations alongside the Suburban and trailer, and gave information about available space between the trees. All of us had the additional task of pulling branches back out of the way as M. continued to thread his way through the trees, while MD walked on ahead and plotted the route. On several occasions we used ropes and a winch to bend smaller trees aside, allowing passage, and multiple times we needed to unhitch the trailer, move the Suburban into a different trajectory, and then reconnect them again heading in a slightly altered direction. As we inched forward I began to realize that we somehow were actually going to get this camel through the eye of the needle, and then I began to realize another thing; that this was a lesson about facing the seemingly impossible and with perseverance, conquering it; and also it was about teamwork, and the joy of tackling something unimaginable together. Eventually, several hours later, the Suburban pulled off the hillside, out of the trees, and back onto the asphalt far down the road, on the other side of the gates; and moments later the trailer came out as well. We all enjoyed a brief celebration of our victory, and then proceeded to set up camp for the night.

The next morning we left the same way we came in, although we were better at it this time and did it more quickly and with less difficulty. We got back on the highway heading south and after several hours, we cut back west, across the state, and over to the coast. This was the beginning of one of the lightest and most enjoyable periods of my time in this community. I had no idea where we were going, or where we would end up, but we had such a great time getting there. We stopped along the coast to spend the night on a beach just north of Salmon Creek. MD gave me a well-known book to read, Be Here Now by Ram Dass. I found a shallow cave against the cliff-face and retreated to read it, while the rest of the group played on the beach and enjoyed each other’s company. Later in the day I finished the book, since it isn’t long, and then joined the others. In the morning I awoke as my brothers and sisters pulled me, in my sleeping bag, down the sand and into the surf. It was a surprising and entertaining way to be awoken.

We continued driving down the coast of California with our caravan. I was in the Suburban with MD and he began to talk with me in a more severe tone of voice. As we continued driving, the situation became increasingly tense as he confronted me. After several minutes of this he called to the other cars over our walkie-talkies to stop and pull over. He demanded I exit the vehicle, which I did, and then on the side of the coast highway, he began to yell at me and then motioned to pick up a stone to throw at me. I waited to see what would happen, my pulse had become quite elevated, and I was concerned about the possible outcomes of my situation. The scenario ended after a few more moments, then he got back in the Suburban and called me to join him, which I cautiously did; and then we all continued driving south again. This was the first time he had interacted with me in this manner and with this intensity. I was startled, and didn’t completely know what to make of it, though I understood, in theory, what we were doing and why. It was quite different however, to suddenly experience the reality of this type of teaching, and not merely think about it as a possibility.

As we continued driving, I reflected further on what had just happened, and also on my past. I have never been a person to get into altercations, and I have always tried to avoid any kind of escalation of bad feelings. I remember the one fight I ever had, in grade school, and even then I couldn’t bring myself to punch him, but only pushed and yelled for a moment, and then felt ridiculous and apologized. Even so, it wasn’t that I was above anger, but I avoided it because I was afraid, mainly, and didn’t like the idea of being out of control, or of bringing another person to a place of uncontrolled emotion; with the possibility that something bad could happen. I had never really experienced someone yelling at me like MD had just done, and in a strange way it was liberating, because I had always feared what that would be like; in the end it wasn’t that bad. I had survived, and actually felt stronger from the experience.

We continued driving through California and then turned east and entered Arizona. On long stretches of flat, straight highway, when no other cars were around, we would practice passing notes to each other from car to car through our open windows. Mostly these were notes that MD would write for us, with a fun message or lesson, specifically intended and crafted for each recipient. He crafted them to teach, but also to amuse. On one of mine he wrote:

“What is fear? It is the end of freedom, of faith, and of Peace. Do not falter.

Sever the fear besotten threads that have bound you. Do not let the maggots

of fear kick sand into your experience of being. Build up the fortress of the

will. Have faith. God will sustain.”

(To Be Continued)

~FS