Secularly Spiritual

Riverside is not a place I normally go to. It is about an hour and a half away. You have to go through Roubidoux, as Steinbeck or Faulkner seedy as can be, with nearly falling wooden homes and dust all about. Today I had to go. I did not want to. But I had to, in connection with my work. That part is really irrelevant, except for the part I HAD to go.

I got there. I did my job. And I was hungry. And in Riverside, there is one place I knew to go, The Mission Inn. It's been seven plus years, probably since I was last there, with a good friend, now residing in Missouri (the friend that is), to redeem a brunch I had won, for two. I still recall that afternoon, a lazy afternoon, having lunch in an outdoor patio with a European flair, and one of those figures actually move around. I don't know much about the Inn except that it took years to build and it was in the 19th century, positively old for California

I made a B line for the outside patio restaurant. It was nearly empty and I figured I had missed lunch time service. I hadn't and I picked among the many empty tables for the place I could best observe the bouganvilla, the birds, the fountain, the stone walls and balconies. The few that had been there left and I was alone. I could imagine this was my home, my courtyard in which I was having this leisurely salad lunch and lemonade, feeding the birds crumbs of bread and comfortable in a space of utter suspension from responsibility and trouble.

There are a few other places I have felt this exquisite peace. I believe, perhaps it is silly, but I do, that it is God showing us a little bit of what Paradise is like. One is in the Bronx. Really. It is called the Cloisters and is just on the edge of the Hudson. It is an art museum but it is styled after a monastery. In fact, art and actual pieces of a monastery that Thomas Merton used to visit, when it was in France, is now there. It is not a religious space, per se, but it feels ethereal. In Joshua Tree, some years ago, I was in the middle of the National Park sitting on a smooth large boulder and I felt it. A complete sense of safety, as if nothing bad could happen. As if I was touching Something of God. Certainly, in some ways, I am touching His Creation, in these moments, even if the stone was laid by man, man himself is a creation of His Hand.

So, I may have resisted today's hegira to Riverside, but it provided a priceless opportunity. I did not have to try to be meditative. I was, by the very act of sitting in that space, having that lunch, being meditative. I said I was reading the work of this monk, named McNamara. He talks of the Earthy Mystic. I don't know that this is a bit of what I experienced, but it's nice to think so.