we didn't go to church. our place of worship was multnomah falls, followed by a road trip to hood river and a long conversation from a bench on a hillside with a spectacular view over the columbia river. i won't even try to find words for the majesty of the waterfall, the beauty in the balcony of branches, the dappled light in the forest on our uphill climb... i swear there were fairies in the wood.
and now i find myself in washington dc. at least i hope i will. my body is here and my mind and heart are arriving slowly, thrown off course a little by exhaustion and flying through the night and a change of time zone. this is retreat space, and i have been welcomed so warmly by bill and tara and liam (2) and iona (9 months) and zeus (cat) and peter (rabbit). their hospitality has been a stream of gift and grace, and i intend to paddle here for a couple of days; slowly, prayerfully, thoughtfully... reading, resting, letting go and letting be.
a little quotation from a book which accompanied me in suburbia:
"It would never be for me a question of choosing between a determinate religious faith and this faith without faith that does not know what it believes or who we are, but rather of inhabiting the distance between them and learning how to let each unhinge and disturb - and by disturbing, deepen - the other. For just as faith needs always to be exposed to the faithlessness of confessing that we do not know what we believe, or what we love when we love our God, so this more open-ended and indeterminate love of God cannot subsist in a vacuum, cannot occupy some timeless, ahistorical, and supra-linguistic spot above the fray of time and chance, some pure desert of indeterminacy. On my accounting we ought to pass our days slipping back and forth between the two, giving the desert of the secret its due while all along seeking out the hospitality of our historical traditions and the shelter of our culture, without which we would simply perish. We might think of ourselves as desert wanderers, homines viatores, on the way we know not where, but continually finding respite and hospitality in the determinate faiths, even as the safety of these shelters is haunted by the unsettling thought of the searing desert sun and numbing desert nights that lie outside their sheltering circles."
John Caputo, On Religion. London: Routledge, 2001. 36.
