Vacation in the Middle of Lent

...I used to give a play by play of my vacations as they were happening, under the misguided impression that everyone was fascinated by what I was doing and what I was thinking while I was doing it.

Lately, I have realized that this is probably not the case. And, to be truthful, we do about the same thing every year when we go to Arizona.

The only thing different this year was that we visited Arizona in March, smack dab in the middle of Lent.

I'll be truthful, this was a nice break, but it also made me a little nervous, because Lent just doesn't stop because I went away. Holy week is still the same number of weeks away.

I had hoped that the desert would be blooming here, but it is not quite so. There were a few buds, but no blooms yet. I have seen the desert bloom, but it was long ago, and it is barely in my memory now. However, there were many blooming wildflowers at the Botanical gardens, and the butterfly garden was open also. This is not the case in January.

One of our first days on vacation, we ended up at an unexpected place: The Scottsdale Fashion Mall. We were there searching for a pair of pants for my husband. We weren't sure he had enough warm clothes for our overnight trip to the mountains. So we were wandering around through these ritzy stores. Even for one familiar with the Grand Canyon of Malls, which exists in my state, the Scottsdale Fashion Mall is something special, in a wretched-excess sort of way. For example, there is not a Sears store in the Scottsdale Fashion Mall.

So we were wandering around the Fashion Mall, and I was looking in store windows (often a big mistake), and I suddenly realized that I was wanting things. I was wanting things that I did not even know existed an hour before that. I was wanting a pair of really good-looking tennis shoes, for example, that I was sure would make me run faster, jump higher and instantly be healthier and thinner. I was wanting a pretty brightly-colored purse, some fashionable sunglasses, earrings.

I thought, when I didn't know these things existed, I didn't want them. I don't think I need a bicycle until I see someone riding one. I think I need a cell phone because I keep seeing people all around me, flipping theirs open and talking. Suddenly I feel lonely. There must be someone I need to talk to, I need to connect to.

I came to the desert during Lent this year. I spent a week's vacation in the wilderness. But I am not sure where the wilderness really is any more: is it really in those barren places where I am tempted, or is in the places where there is so much I see, so much I didn't realize that I wanted?

Or maybe the wilderness is really within me?

"I will make a way in the wilderness...."

Every Desert Is Its Own Place

The season of Lent begins with Jesus going into the desert for forty days, to be tempted by the devil. Well, actually, the scene is "the wilderness", but the wilderness and the desert have a lot in common.

The first time I came to visit my sister here in Arizona was shortly before I would be leaving for Japan, and about a year after she got married and moved away, permanently. I had barely been out of the Midwest before this; soon I would be traveling to a small island in the Far East to teach for three years.

We did a lot of sightseeing in about ten days -- to the ghost town of Tombstone and to the Desert Botanical Gardens in Phoenix, down to Tucson and across the border into Nogales. We stopped in a town called Florence one day and toured the ruins of Casa Grande. It was exotic to me, this desert landscape where I was stopping to reflect before another, greater adventure.

My favorite place, I think, was the Desert Museum, just outside of Tucson. We spent a long time learning about the history, the geology, the animals of the deserts. The museum not only told us all about the Senora Desert, but about the other deserts of the southwest, and compared them to other deserts throughout the world, deserts much more famous: the Sahara, the Gobi, the Kalahari.

Every desert is different; there are cold deserts and hot deserts, deserts with sand and without. The Sahara's sand looked like oceans; the many small southwestern deserts claim beautiful moutain ranges and exotic animals.

Every desert is different; every wilderness holds its own temptations, unique to the time and the place. Every desert holds its own temptations and its own lessons to be learned: You shall worship the Lord your God, and serve him alone. Do not put the Lord your God to the test. You shall not live by bread alone.

Every desert is different, just as the geography of each of our lives is different. And yet we all walk through the same forty days, from death to life, from despair to hope, from loneliness to community. Because even though the deserts are all different, they all need one thing: water.

Every year in Lent we go into the wilderness. And each wilderness is different, each struggle is different, with different temptations, and different gifts, too.

At the end is water.

Fine Tuning

It's been an potpouri of a vacation so far. We've been up to small-town Prescott and back, over to the Desert Botanical Garden and done some moderate antique-shopping. Plus, I met a blog-friend who lives in a nearby town (I will say more about this later). Husband has been listening to Alan Hovhaness' Mysterious Mountain; he says it's perfect for driving around here. I've been reading Clyde Edgerton's novel The Bible Salesman.

On the way over to the Botanical Gardens today my husband gave me a mini-overview of 20th century music. This was in response to my question regarding Hovhaness, about whom I knew very little, except that I love his piece, And God Created Great Whales. (Our dog, Scout, seems to like this piece, too.) It seems that 20th Century composers felt that they had a dilemma; what could they do that was new and different? After Wagner, everyone felt that "you couldn't get any bigger." Wagner had taken the genre about as far as it could go. So the 20th century "new thing" was to be atonal, and "not pretty", at least in the way music had been "pretty" before. Composers like Hovhaness and Vaughn Williams are considered less serious composers by some because they composed pleasing music. (I realize that many music scholars may disagree with this.)

On the way to the Desert Botanical Gardens, then, we were listening to Mysterious Mountain, and I was reading The Bible Salesman, a wonderful little novel about a young man who in the early 1950s South who is an unwitting accomplice to a criminal. He also is selling Bibles, and, coincidentally, really reading them, as if for the first time. This Bible-reading theme is a background, a curious counterpoint to the story of the naive and earnest young man and how he grows up. He's asking questions about the Bible that he has never asked before, and wondering about whether it is true, and how it can be true. In the end, he finds comfort in different truths that he discovers in the Bible, and in his life.

I thought about how our ears need fine tuning so that, in each age, we can hear God's word -- in the strange words of the Testaments, Old and New, in our words to one another, in the soft or loud voices of those on the mountains or on the margins, speaking a counterpoint to the big and brash news of the day. I thought about how my eyes need fine tuning so that I can see the beauty in the desert, where, the land is big and barren, and it takes a sharp eye to capture a quail walking through the brush, or fairy dusters, small bright red spots among muted browns and greens. Some beauty is loud and brash, and takes my breath away; some beauty skirts along the edges, or even hides; I need to fine-tune my eyes to see it, just as I need to fine-tune my ears to really hear the truth.

In a few days we'll leave the warm and barren land to come back to the frozen north where we live. I hope I can fine tune my eyes and ears again to see the beauty, and to hear the truth of the strange and familiar place where I live.