There is so much to write. But, after a packed weekend, I am too tired to write it, yet too entranced not at least to begin. It wasn't intended as a spiritual weekend. But, for me, it ended up being one. One of my friends, and a friend of hers, wanted to see the Dead Sea Scrolls which were being featured in San Diego. We had been talking about this potential trip for months now. None of us seemed to know that the Scrolls had been shown in Los Angeles, the Bowers Museum, a few years ago. But we did know that such opportunities don't come often. And so it was more or less set. The day before we were to go to San Diego to spend the weekend (since our Saturday tickets were fairly early 9 a.m. at the Natural History Museum), I had some trouble with my eyes. I had been having a small infection that ebbed and flowed for a few weeks. It was more irritation than crisis, but it was damping any desire for travel of any kind, even two and a half hours south particularly after a full work day. Truth be told, I am not much of a traveler anyway. I like being in a place, but I hate the getting there, so I tend to avoid the process, and I guess foolishly avoid the rewards of the destination. Bad habit. My friend is persuasive, though, and my guilt spoke to me anyway--so I went. I get car sick when others drive, a resurfacing of a childhood problem, so I originally intended to drive by which I am spared nausea, but ultimately, I became the front seat passenger, hoping that my problem would not surface. It didn't. The whole weekend was kind of like that from my point of view, for I speak for no one else, things sort of just went right, more or less. By the time we got to San Diego it was after 12 a.m. and not being a morning person, an 8:15 call to be in the lobby of the Sheraton Suites, particularly as I woke up cozy in my suite's (with living room courtesy of Priceline.com) bed, was quite the test. But there I was with my coffee, on time, and ready to go. The trip out of the serpentine garage took longer than the trip to the museum, but we were there fifteen minutes ahead of time, security checked and in on time. We joined the Essenes at Qumran for two plus hours,-- that meditative, monastic set of Jews who pre-dated and co-existed at the time of Jesus. They hid in earthen jars discovered only in 1947, Aramaic, Hebrew and occasionally Greek versions of the Torah they transcribed and prayed over. Or, as some, less entranced, scholars speculated, the scrolls were brought in from elsewhere to what was nothing more than a pottery plant. There is Isaiah, Ezekial, the Psalms in the steady hand of a long dead scribe, demanding the purification of the Jewish community in anticipation of the Messiah to come. We stand before fragments bathed in dim light, papyrus, and parchment, delicate, cracked, faded, and painstakingly translated by a competetive community of scholars of different faiths who did not want their foundations shaken. Jealous and guarded they did not share to the professional public for so many years after the finding in the 40's to the late 1990s. What was found by a simple bedouin shepard in a cave in 1947 became a complex cause celebre. But reading the words and just a glass away from the ability to touch the ancient texts, I felt something, no more, perhaps than a spiritual vibration, but also a sense of the power of the idea, of the word, of the Word, and its many permutations that lead at once to contemplation and to confrontations unto death.
There was so much to absorb and I found my mind awash such that only a book or two could quell and organize all that I had seen. I have yet to read these books. And hope that I do. I only know that we are brothers in the same search as that of the Essenes. The search that some, including me, think was jump started mightily by the act of Christ on the Cross, if only we cooperate and join and accept, but a search that life itself commands per se whatever the philosophy or faith, even if that faith is atheism, the fight against belief.
I had no further plans or wishes for the trip. Anything was fine, but when someone suggested the Mission of San Diego de Alcala, the very first mission in California, founded by Father and Saint Junipero Serra, I was intrigued. I did not push, but I hoped for the visit. I know the controversy over Serra, and his treatment of the American Natives. But I sometimes question the insistence on judging someone from, in this case, 1746, with the sophistication (and are we really all that sophisticated, let alone different), and retrospection of 2007. And then, we were about 4:30 in the afternoon, strolling the gardens, and taking in the simplicity of the church itself (the third Church is from the 1800's, since the earlier ones were burned down), and the history from the small museum bearing the name of Serra's successor at the mission, Father Jayme, martyred on a space on which we stood (we did wonder, skeptically, how they KNEW that was the spot). All seemed so quiet and perfect there. Even the grass and the flowering shrubbery had a peace about it, perfect in form, well tended.
I had no idea that this was not only an active, but a vibrant, modern parish. Where most parishes seem to be reducing the Masses celebrated on Sunday, this one has nine between the SaturdayVigil and Sunday. I had no particular intent to go to Mass there, and hold up my friends from our next activity, but I could not stand the idea of not attending, the more I saw the red candle that, as always, marks the Presence of Our Lord, amid the breeze washing through the old adobe church, the birds, the setting sun that streamed through the wooden windows. I had to stay. My friends, who had loved the place as well, drawn by what, the simplicity, the beauty, the sense of peace, were receptive to waiting for me not far away. And sitting in a pew right by the door that opened into the garden with its statues of St. Francis, of Father Serra, I felt safe, secure and happy. My friends and I had been discussing faith, and spirituality and I had been unsure of my points, because it is unsure in this Cloud of Unknowing, but for forty five minutes, no proofs were needed and I did not have to try to articulate anything. I just had to be there and accept the Presence accepting me (this thought comes from a book, so let me give credit to it, "The Strangest Way" by Robert Barron). I had no sense of foolishness in seeing myself a sinner and less in those moments of simple ritual prayer with a crowd that seemed so joyful in its praying of the prayers that in my own parish seems lethargic. It was packed. They sang. They participated. It was good. And I was grateful.
There was so much else in the weekend, but these events alone set the tone, and today, returned in the early afternoon, my heart has been singing. My heart so rarely sings. And I am grateful.
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