On a city block in Clinton Township, Michigan there's an encased piece of land that is frequented daily by those who go there to calm down, to be quiet, to say a prayer, or, to pause from the hectic and frenetic life that engulfs them.
A pastoral place of plush greens marked with a splash of autumn yellow and brown, it is a favorite spot of mine for looking, gazing and being for a moment apart from the driven life I lead.
At each station of the cross there, the Jesus Christians believe to be God, I pause to ponder the divinely human model of living life fully and well today. I stop. I wonder. There at the first station, for example, I recall how Jesus the Christ is condemned to death.
I think: An innocent, loving human being is condemned to die. I wonder. Mystery merges with the misery he must have felt at the hands of leaders who seemed threatened by Jesus' every move and every follower he attracted by his life.
Countless black squirrels reside there alongside the stations that depict defining moments in the life of Jesus up to his resurrection from the dead after his carrying of a cross that he was nailed upon before. What anguish must have enveloped him. Such pain poking and penetrating deeply.
I'm told God did this so the Maker's lone Son, Jesus, would redeem a fallen and fractured world.
More mystery merges with the misery he must have felt as an innocent man who loved so completely as he walked the earth.
Rain spills on the pathway of the next few stations showing the route of Jesus to his death.
Wet from water, I recall the sinking of the Titanic and the instruments that play an Autumn hymn as wonderment and anguish filled the feelings of humans going down fast.
They are scary thoughts. Seasonal perhaps, as All Saints and All Souls, is celebrated these next days of November.
I gaze at his face drawn in pencil. It's a gentle and easy look. Far from gawking, I let the etches speak to me. I try to simply be there. I am one with him. The encounter is serene.
The beauty overtakes me. It is a quiet place. The Creator speaks volumes, however, in the silence. The silence is golden, for sure. And, more.
Tomorrow, as Catholics join for Mass at 11 am or at 7 pm, noise of cars and voices will drown the silence some few moments as they unite in communion. Striking contrasts. Yet, some will gaze while others gawks at who fills the pews this damp, autumn day.
The Trappist monk, Father Thomas Merton emerges in my mind, on his own thoughts on silence.
"The deepest level of communication is not communication, but communion," Merton notes in his Asain Journal.
Merton continues:
"It is wordless. It is beyond words. It is beyond speech, and it is beyond concept. Not that we discover a new unity. We discover an older unity. My dear Brothers, we are already one. But we imagine that we are not. And what we have to recover is our original unity. What we have to be is what we are."
The true self that the mystics speak of comes to mind, beyond the false self.
Indeed, we are one in communion with creation and with the Creator.
And Cher and Joe come to mind from their marriage vows earlier this afternoon in Saints Peter and Paul Jesuit Church on Jefferson in downtown Detroit, MI.
They both are vegans. Both are united and in union with planet Earth's creation and animal life. Their wedding dinner this night consists of a menu of pasta, free of foods with animal fats.
One.
One together now in marriage. And, with God's earth for these past couple years since they decided to become vegans during Lent, the forty-day penitential season where Christians
stand with Jesus and his own communion with God by way of intense fasting, prayer and almsgiving.
Solidarity.
This couple committed to gaze at the earth and be one with it. Far from gawking, they stand looking, noticing, contemplating creation. Two attorneys turning, gazing, giving, inspiring us.
They choose not to harm the earth.
One with it. Awesome. Another gaze at another station. The sun peeks perhaps a final ray before the dark covers these shorter days of autumn.
And, a good gaze.
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