So I'm driving on I-40 today on my way back to CO and I notice an exit sign for Groom, Texas. I had never heard of this place before. Immediately after the town-exit-sign, there is a big white billboard announcing the presence of the largest cross in the northern hemisphere. The billboard invites you to exit and have a most significant "spiritual experience." The photo I've attached shows you the big cross. Well, I didn't take the exit, but I did slow enough to see a parking lot full of cars and trucks and their drivers walking around the base of the big cross in a "stations" type arrangement. Although I was quite some distance away, the best I could make out is that they were having a spiritual experience.
A little further down the road, I come upon a feed lot. This photo is not the greatest, but hey - whaddya expect at 75mph? This was a fairly significant enterprise with cows everywhere and white-pipe fencing keeping them, well, fenced in. And if you weren't certain whether or not it was feed lot, then rolling down the window would confirm your intuitions. Cows walking around, bumping into each other, probably performing cow-apologies: "Hey, I didn't see you there standing there making a cowpatty. Sorry for walking right into you." "Look, no problem. The way everybody acts 'round here, you'd think it was a feed lot or something."
These two images stayed with me for miles - the northern hemisphere's largest cross and the feed lot. One promising a spiritual experience and the other promising your cows are fed. I've gotta tell you that the feed lot won out over the big cross for sheer spiritual experience. Why? Well, I believe that anything truly spiritual, as in Jesusy-spiritual, is going to have an earthy element to it - in other words, it'll be incarnational.
The big cross was all white and purty and huge. It reached up toward the heavens and towered over all the little people at it's base having a supposed spiritual experience. It reminded me of a missle, about to take off for, well...heaven, I guess. It was so out of place along the highway there. Now sure, I believe that the cross never "fits" but this thing had no desire to fit; it was totally other by design. On the other hand, the feed lot make me think about earthy things - cows, fence, hay, feed troughs, watering tanks, and manure. It fit the landscape hand-in-glove and had no aspirations of pretense. No, this was cows, a bunch of 'em, just cowing around. Seeing those cows and smelling their aroma caused me to remember my granddad, which caused me to think about my dad, and that made me tear up and thank God for his goodness toward my life. Seeing that cross didn't make me feel any of those things. I just kept wondering how high it was and who constructed it and who would get sued should it fall over and crush those folks below having spiritual experiences. The whole thing miffed me, to say the least, because it perpetuates this crazy notion of spiritual experiences always being big and transcendent and otherworldly and nice and white. I believe most spiritual experiences take place among stinkin' cows and crying babies and struggling to pay your bills and getting teary-eyed over fireworks on the fourth of July and paying over $3 for a gallon of gas and kissing your wife goodnight and sleeping in your socks during the winter months and hugging your parents good-bye after a brief visit and kids farting in the minivan, forcing you to roll down the window and then lo and behold, you smell the feed lot and thank God your kids aren't cows. That big, shiny cross didn't make me think of any of those things.
No comments:
Post a Comment