I don’t go to church.
Not like those who go to church on Sundays, dressed up in their Sunday
best, singing hymns and listening to a preacher read from a book written by men
that purportedly tells us how their imagined version of an omniscient,
omnipotent being in the sky says we should think and live and be in order to
gain a holy reward of eternal life, walking streets paved with gold and living
in beautiful mansions prepared for just for us.
But I went to church today. My
church. My church that I can go to any
day of the week, any time of day, dressed any way I want. I don’t sit in a hard pew, and I don’t have
to worry about whether I’m singing off-key or whether I’ll fall asleep during
the sermon. Where is my church? Today it was at Hutton National Wildlife
Refuge. The choir? I listened to the choruses of red-winged
blackbirds, American avocets, Canada geese, killdeer, Wilson’s phalaropes,
willets, and gulls, and my soul sang along with perfect pitch. Who needs stained glass windows when you have
views of the Snowy Range to the west, the Laramie Range to the east, and the
magnificent stretches of the Laramie valley surrounding you? The Easter sermon
of crucifixion, death, and resurrection?
I saw death in the form of antelope bones on the prairie, picked clean
by coyotes, magpies, crows and other scavengers, which allowed them life, if
even for only one more day. I witnessed
real resurrection in the brown, winter-dead prairie grasses beginning to spring
forth from the earth with green shoots and new life, as those grasses have done
each spring for eons. And my soul was
resurrected as well, marveling at life’s imperfect perfection that exists each
and every day, but especially on this day, as my father, my son, and I hiked
around those lakes, basking in the sun, muddying our feet, listening to the
birds, the wind, and the water lapping at the lakeshore, and we experienced
paradise in those moments, right here on Earth.
Sunday, April 20, 2014
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