The Calls of Lent

I fell in love with Barry Lopez’s Arctic Dreams when it first came out in 1986. At that point, preferring fiction, I had not read much “nature writing”, but I found myself enthralled by the majesty of the Arctic scenery which he managed to describe both vividly and lyrically, and by his descriptions of living among the animals and the Inuit people, the rhythm of their days, their survival, physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually in that harshest of terrains. Boundless bright white lands streaming into endless blue-white skies, waters iced or raging or just lapping, fierce wintry storms and unceasing darkness slowly dissolving into brilliant sun filled-days and perpetually glowing summery nights, came alive in his prose – as did the stories and the wisdom of the peoples who lived there.

Barry Lopez died this past December, and so I was delighted to find an article in Commonweal called “Servant of Memory” recounting an interview Griffin Oleynick had had with him in August 2019. I believe what Lopez had to say will resonate with all of us.

Barry Lopez was raised Catholic, attended a Jesuit high school and the University of Notre Dame. I wonder how many of us could relate to this observation:  

“I was ‘educated’ in one sense, but I didn’t know very much about the world because I went to school with people just like me: male, middle-class, Catholic, etc. So I scratched my head figuratively and said, ‘How in the world do you think you can call yourself an educated person, when everything you’ve been exposed to is all about you?’ That’s what pushed me out of my middle-class comfort; I wanted to go and find out what was happening in the rest of the world.

I also began to believe that there was goodness and wisdom out in the world, and that the strictures that are sometimes rigidly enforced in a Christian education or upbringing can be short-sighted. I don’t think you can find wisdom the way the Desert Fathers did, isolating themselves from humanity and developing a pure relationship with the divine. For me the divine began to be that which is found only in the company of other people—and especially in people not like you!”

He talked about what was missing when we limit our points of view – or let them be limited by institutions like the Church: 

“Theologians talk about agape, the love of the divine in another human being. I have been steeped for many years in some kind of intercourse with a non-human world, and for me it too is characterized by this love, by agape—the sense of a world larger than the self. Love can come brilliantly to life in the non-human world, in nature, and that speaks to the fact that we’re all in this together.” 

As critically, he saw how we miss the unlimited perspectives we grant each other if all of our human stories, regardless of gender, race, ethnicity, background, are allowed to be heard and respected. We know this all too well, but Lopez added a deeper insight. When he traveled, he said, he asked native peoples what they meant by “storytelling” and what kind of person is a storyteller: “In the Inuktitut language, the word is isumataq. In English, it means something like “the person who creates the atmosphere in which wisdom reveals itself.”

It’s not just that we all need to be able to create and relate our stories; we need to do so to create “an atmosphere” in which others can receive – or, more importantly perhaps, bring forth within themselves – wisdom. It’s an exchange like bread and wine within a community that makes us one body and blood, more expansive in breadth and depth, and, thus, wiser and more ‘wholly’ holy. 

He told one of his own brief stories, one that had changed his life:

“That day was, and is, a mystery for me. I was driving slowly from Punta Arenas to Port Famine, and it was beautiful—broken skies, the kind of weather in which you would expect to see a rainbow. I just took it in, this panorama of the Tierra del Fuego, looking out from an altitude of eight hundred feet above the coastline.

I was in ecstasy, and I looked up on this dirt road and saw a man walking toward me. I was so riveted by him, I just took my foot off the accelerator, and let the vehicle roll to a stop. As he was walking toward me, determined, and not paying any attention to me a rainbow opened up above his head. I paused, wondering “What’s going to come now?”

I had that feeling that it was a holy thing. I felt that a door had opened, and in that moment I chose not to go through it. I understood the door as an invitation: to step into the wordless, to step into the evaporation of the self, to become one with what lies on the other side. It’s kind of a Bodhisattva thing: you refuse to go into the holy alone, because you want everyone to go in.”

Shaken by the encounter, he entered a roadside chapel. People there were lighting candles, offering milagros—religious folk charms—and praying for succor, solace, relief from the hardships and sorrows of their lives. He recalled the amazing tenderness he felt for them and the unity he felt with them, the assurance that neither he nor they needed to be afraid because “we’re in this together. We will all be taking care of each other, and we are in the presence of the divine here” That realization in a small chapel with simple wooden benches and people unlike – and yet so like – him led him to ask: “What is out there that is calling to us, what is the music that is coming from the far side of the horizon?”

It is a Lenten call, I think, and it takes all of us to participate in talking about it, listening to each other, bringing in our experiences and what we learn from the human and natural world, and also, for anyone so called, lifting the call up in ritual, in consecration and communion, and in benediction. In doing so, we will have created “the atmosphere in which wisdom reveals itself,” and I also think we will have gained an understanding of  why we will not enter into the Holy until everyone can go in, too.