Kirkepiscatoid

I wish I had as good a picture from Beartooth Pass (the north entrance to Yellowstone National Park) as fine as this one, but I don't, so I want to thank www.naturalsciences.org for showing this one off on their 2007 Yellowstone Ecology Institute trip. I really resonated with the person in this picture, because that is the same emotion I get over a trip through Beartooth Pass!

Today, Fr. Wallace's sermon was not so much about John the Baptist (I have a feeling I like John the Baptist a little better than him b/c wild men in hair clothes in the woods yelling at people are less scary to me) but more about the reading in Isaiah and the business of "preparing a way for the Lord" during Advent.

The minute our lector C. started reading Isaiah 40: 1-11, my mind slipped into a compilation of the five times I have traversed Beartooth Pass en route to Yellowstone. Beartooth Pass lurked in my brain throughout the homily, and never has left me today.

Here is an e-mail I sent to a friend about a year ago, discussing my fascination with it:

This was about 1982. When my grandmother was alive I used to drive her wherever she wanted on vacation.

We were going to Yellowstone but decided to go in on the north route, rather than the more popular and more traveled one that goes in on the east side through Cody. The north one, “Beartooth pass” doesn’t even open till late June. We went in on the first day it was open. It is very narrow, with a lot of switchbacks and at times you are only going 15 mph. The snowdrifts were still 8 to 12 feet high along the road in some places.

At the top of this pass, you are over 10,000 feet elevation. We decided to pull over in a turnout for a while b/c we were getting weary of following this friggin’ truck and could not see past it. So we stopped at a “scenic turnout”.

Now above 10,000 feet you are above the tree line there. So we are out in this turnout that is just rocks and rubble, but you can look out over this spot and see the trees and stuff below, and the other mountains straight ahead. It looks like the moon.

Where we are standing, it is desolate rubble. But looking out into the distance there is color and beauty and big stark rock outcroppings sticking up in it. To see all of it you have to get out to the rail and look down a little...down several thousand feet...so there is also this little edge of fear to see it. From the car you can’t see the whole picture.

We probably stood there, each of us in our own little world, for about 10-15 minutes in silence (which is sort of a miracle in itself, because my grandmother had a habit of telling me, “You gonna gawk at that forever?” ha ha)

But that high up, the first thing you notice is the LACK of noise. Not a bird, not a squirrel, not nothin’! All I could hear is the wind, and the wind made these really creepy singing noises as it whistled around the rock outcroppings. I thought to myself it is sort like the sirens on the rocks in mythology, because the wind sounded almost “female” at times. But other times the wind sounded “male.” It was an odd feeling because never before or since have I ever felt that wind noise had a “gender”. The combination of looking out at the view plus the cool air plus the wind having “genders” made my chest heave hard and I had that sense of being “aerodynamic”. That sleekness, that feeling that this wind was carrying you places and you just rode along. It was kind of like when you see that old stereotype in the movies where the dude is watching an opera and he gets caught in the sound of it to the place he bursts into tears. Although my emotion was different, it has the sense of it carrying you and your emotions bursting open in the middle of it.

As I prepare my way through the wilderness this Advent, one night I heard the noise of Beartooth Pass outside my house when the NE Missouri winter wind howled outside, with only me and my Advent candle in the soft light inside. It brought back that sense of "awesome desolation." I wondered, "Why do I soooooo dig awesome desolation in nature, but am not really crazy about it in myself?"

Is that noise in the wind, those wind noises with "gender", the dance between the Divine Masculine and the Divine Feminine? Is my fascination to hear them both, to take my notion of God further from the notion of God I so intensely dislike, the notion of "God as an old guy with a white beard and a pissy abusive parent attitude, who is going to kick my ass?" To move my notion of God into "divine unified field" in which masculine and feminine and all things betwixt and between work together as equal parts and equal influences? I wonder.