Pastor Jeff Sockwell's Ramblings

Death Valley 2008

A recent article in National Parks magazine was discussing the new Imax documentary film of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and anthropologist Wade Davis and their daughters rafting down the Colorado the entire length of the Grand Canyon. 

Said Robert Kennedy, "It's an experience that connects us to the divine. God talks to us through many vectors, through each other, through organized religion, through music, art and literature, but nowhere with such clarity and texture, force, grace and joy as through creation.   We don't know Michelangelo by reading his biography, we know him by looking at the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, and we know our creator best by immersing ourselves in creation."

A more worthy locale to arrive at as we transition from Lent to Easter, I cannot imagine.  A wonderful place of immersion, to know our creator through the diversity of the creation, that is the place of Death Valley National Park.

Death Valley– the name evokes an appropriate Lenten theme.  The valley has long been a place where sustaining life is treacherous.  Scarce water resources, blinding hot sun – hard, rocky, salty soil.  A land of extremes, described as hottest, lowest, largest…  a valley that would have fit right in with Ezekiel’s vision of a valley of dry bones – at first glance all you might see is broken, torn rock, all you might feel is the piercing hot sun.

Yet the Creator’s artistic hand, here in this place of extremes, were life is at its most difficult, is on radiant display.

Textures and colors woven into the very fabric of the land, from sculpted mountains to salt flat desert floor, it is as if the very struggle of life has produced the most brilliant canvas – it is as if the Lenten journey of pain and death and suffering is mirrored in the body of the land itself, and the most extreme journey of this place has birthed the most brilliant post Easter canvas of our Creator.

Such is the journey of life – through our most severe trauma, our most intense struggle, people of the way hold on to the hope that this too will pass, that joy will come in the morning, that the struggle of the day is not the end of the story, that Good Friday is not the closing script.

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