I write here in Austin Texas at the library of the Seminary of the Southwest. It is about seventy degrees outside at about 20% humidity. We don’t know about twenty percent humidity in Mobile. My sinuses are confused. There’s not a cloud in the sky and around noon we took a drive into the Texas countryside mainly in search of barbecue brisket…but also the landscape: random breaks of wind tossed mesquite; siverado sage; cacti in full bloom… red, yellow and orange….old native cemeteries along this ancient trade route etched among the sandstone trap rock…there a grotto carved into the rugged landscape with the figure of the Virgin of Guadeloupe inside….She the God of Mexico then and now, long before the white man God…Mexico, the name of this very land just some one hundred and seventy years ago…. Then, the Mexican Hat, Indian paintbrush…bluebonnets in and among the roadside culverts would have been called by very different names.
None of these species of plants flourishing along the way could even survive in the climate of Mobile just six hundred miles away at roughly the same latitude. If one wanted to bring camellias, sasanquas, hydrangea, ginger lilies; bananas; elephant ear to central Texas…the things that grow without effort for us…one would be sorely disappointed…they would wither and cease to exist. Both out of context.
Life adapts to the particular; Life forever an improvisational enterprise….setting its roots taking into account the context of its engendering. The life force forever mindful, conscious of the incomprehensible iterations in time and space of the particular beauty that shapes its improbable destiny…a destiny not pre-ordained but still becoming in mystery, in particular contexts…not as a sweeping universal reality….but a reality intimate and close and particular…the end of things in this particular becoming always a speculation about which God Godself can only wonder and marvel and dream and hope.
Resurrection is the name, within our particular religious and cultural and socio-economic heritage, that we give to this life force that forever renews itself within the most improbable circumstances….this is the life force that in every particular cultural and socio-economic context, every corner of human community, brings dignity and mercy and justice and nonviolence and new hope by whatever name it is given….Its gods have many names around the world…the Virgin of Guadeloupe, she the earth mother…Krishna, the go between of earth and heaven…the Tao in its enlightening aesthetic….different manifestations according to the particular milieu, that is its own fertile soil…the matrix within which truth and life may flourish… myriad means of redemption…but still wherever there is dignity brought to bear…wherever justice and kindness… wherever sacrifice for the greater good…there is life and life abundant, and the world, in one particular at a time, is raised into its fullness….life always improvising a way…being always engendered anew….by any faith…by any name….but for us, in our particularity: Christ is risen and in our significant soil…all is made alive.
