One Wild Ride

I frequently make retreats to the Lebh Shomea House of Prayer on the old Kenedy Ranch near Sarita, Texas.  My destination, combined with my purpose, pulsates with irony.  I’ll explain.

Lebh Shomea sits in about the middle of the Wild Horse Desert, a sun-tortured stretch of mesquite shrub between the Nueces and Rio Grande rivers.  Historically it has more in common with a gang-infested ghetto than a peaceful resort.  In the lawless days of Texas’ independence both Mexico and the Republic asserted a right to this land.  Mexican cavalry patrolled the area and Texas, with no army and no money, authorized vigilante outfits to enforce sovereignty.  In practice these amounted to privateers who plundered peaceful merchant caravans and earned reprisals from the Mexican regulars.  A “get away” in those days had nothing to do with a vacation and everything to do with throwing the law off your trail.  And this is where I go to pray.  This is where I go to be silent.  This is where I go for a “retreat.”

But that makes more sense than might at first appear.  The desert fathers understood their flight into the Thebaid of Upper Egypt as both a withdrawal from imperial society and an invasion of the kingdom of Satan.  Athanasius records that when Abba Anthony first journeyed into the badlands the demons contested the manifest destiny which would plant the flag of the Kingdom of God on their soil.  “Get away from what is ours!” they bellowed, “What do you have to do with the desert?”  Like the Marine general who said a retreat was just an attack in a different direction, the archetypal anchorite fled a compromised state church for uncompromising battle with an implacable foe.

So history and hagiography overlap nicely when I settle into my solitary dwelling for a few days of asceticism.  When I made my first pilgrimage there I viewed it as a sort of spa, and my sojourn as a vacation.  Instead I found myself troubled by unsettling thoughts and, worse still, troubles which ran so deep I couldn’t consciously think about them.  I did not realize that, like Anthony of old, I had tagged the Devil’s turf and invited reprisals from his band of heaven-banished Crips.  Oh, I didn’t have any actual visions or locutions, none of the stuff the abbas saw and heard - no gold or silver strewn in my path, no invasion of wild beasts on the one hand or voluptuous temptresses on the other.  My demonic battles took more the form described by Henri Nouwen in The Way of the Heart:

As soon as I decide to stay in my solitude, confusing ideas, disturbing images, wild fantasies, and weird associations jump about in my mind like monkeys in a banana tree.  Anger and greed begin to show their ugly faces.  I give long, hostile speeches to my enemies and dream lustful dreams in which I am wealthy, influential, and very attractive - or poor, ugly, and in need of immediate consolation.

I learned indeed that principalities and powers are unimpressed with the passage of time, however much we little calendar-worshiping mortals may make of it.  They insist on remaining just as real as ever, unexorcised by Sigmund Freud’s theories or Richard Dawkins’ scorn.  Quantum physics and compact discs don’t change the truth Anthony told when he said of our spiritual foes that “the mob of them is great in the air around us, and they are not far from us.”  Every believer who dares consider solitude should linger long over Gruenwald’s Isenheim Altar piece depicting the saint’s struggle with the evil ones.  I don’t advise taking the images literally; the situation is much worse than that.

The answer, by the way, says the unified voice of ancient Christianity, is simply to stay at one’s post.  In one of his early encounters with the desert, Abba Anthony took such a pounding that friends hauled him back into town and began checking prices at local funeral parlors.  Anthony awoke and, like Rocky Balboa coming out of the corner again and again to face Apollo Creed, limped back to the battle ground and shouted, “Here I am - Anthony!  I do not run from your blows, for even if you give me more, nothing shall separate me from the love of Christ.”  Nouwen updates the description, “The task is to persever in my solitude, to stay in my cell until all my seductive visitors get tired of pounding on my door and  leave me alone.”

When I head into the Wild Horse I do not fear robbery at the hand of irregular troops or reprisals from counter-attacking armies, but I do indeed enter contested turf where I become a pawn to one side and a prize to the other and must play an active role in living out my own redemption.  Henri Kinney came early to the Nueces Strip; his trading post might have been the origin of Corpus Christi itself.  As a wise buisnessman in uncertain times he played his cards close to the vest and developed agile loyalties.  He corresponded with president Mirabeau Lamar of Texas and General Mirianna Arista of Mexico.  The spiritual desert allows the saint no such dual citizenship but insists we declare our loyalties.  Neutrality becomes the first casualty of solitude.

“Contemplative prayer,” writes Thomas Merton, “is, in a way, simply the preference for the desert, for emptiness, for poverty.  One has begun to know the meaning of contemplation when he intuitively and spontaneously seeks the dark and unknown path of aridity in preference to every other way.” 

So beware the desert, the solitude and the silence.  The Kingdom has come in Christ, but it is also still to come, and the writ of Christ does not yet run in all places where Christ is, in fact, king.  When we enter contested territory we find ourselves caught in the crossfire of a battle which allows no neutrality.  So beware the desert but, for all that, go there.

This entry was posted on August 11, 2007 at 4:48 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.