Author: krinvan

An icy wind strafes the South Texas desert as we grab our backpacks and walking sticks. Our guide, Kelly Timmons, has just briefed us on the steepness of our descent to see the White Shaman Mural, a famous example of prehistoric rock art. Kelly volunteers with the Witte Museum which now oversees the preserve, and her sense of responsibility for all of us is palpable.

As we turn to go, she notices two service pins on my jacket.

“You’re a Master Naturalist?” she asks.

“Yes,” I reply. “I completed my training last year.”

“I’ve done the training also,” she says. “I just need to finish my volunteer hours. It will be great having you on this hike. I don’t know as much as I should. I’m sure you’ll be able to point out a lot of features to us.”

I smile, but inwardly I wince. Unlike many other Master Naturalists, I am not a walking encyclopedia of taxonomy. I often rely on others to help me identify animals and plants. My specialty is to offer a strong back at work parties, as well as my writing and editing skills for our newsletter. I’m learning but I often feel inadequate.

As we begin the decline into the canyon, two things are clear. One, Kelly is at home in the desert, walking with a lively, athletic stride. Two, she is modest about her knowledge. Though she apologizes for not knowing the names of a few species, her other observations enrich our hike. She shows us resurrection plants brought to life by recent rain, as well as leatherstem, also called sangre de drago (dragon’s blood) because of its red sap. She describes the many uses of the agave lechugilla by native people. She points out clear imprints of rudist and turritella fossils.

“It’s amazing,” I say, “that we are standing on what was once the ocean floor.”

She nods, scans the vista, takes a deep breath. A huge smile comes to her face.

Down we go, then up a ladder-like set of steps to the cliffside alcove sheltering the mural. It is stunning! Only its original creators know the fullness of its meaning, but Kelly and her co-guide, Lacy Finley, describe the prevailing theories—part origin myth, part solar and lunar calendar. What I find fascinating is that the celebrated central figure is most likely the Lunar Goddess, decapitated and adorned with snakes. The Aztecs had a similar violent myth that described the triumph of the sun over the moon. Lacy recounts how archaeologists climbed down to the mural on the winter solstice. Exactly at sunset, a shadow fell across the neckline of that goddess. It gives me shivers!

Just prior to our return, we have a few moments to examine the mural more closely, taking turns photographing and marveling. I walk to the edge of the alcove and scan the panorama. In the distance, beyond beautiful cliffs, is the Pecos High Bridge—a monumental trestle above the Pecos River near its intersection with the Rio Grande.

Kelly joins me.

“It’s breathtaking, isn’t it?” she says.

Then she sighs contentedly.

“This is my happy place,” she says, and the depth of her love for this desert environment—its  plants and animals, its human and geologic history—is nothing short of contagious.

I think to myself: this is the heart of the matter. Master Naturalists can share copious head knowledge about the natural world. That’s important. The science is not only fascinating; it is key to understanding ecosystems and their preservation.

But on a deeper level, what we impart is our joy of immersion in nature. We communicate our gratitude for its rejuvenating power. As pioneer environmentalist Rachel Carson once said, “It is a wholesome and necessary thing for us to turn again to the earth and in the contemplation of her beauties to know the sense of wonder and humility.”

Back in the parking lot before departing, Kelly and I bump elbows (COVID-style) rather than shake hands. I thank her for the excellent tour, but later I regret not praising her for conveying that deeper love at the heart of the matter.

Hopefully, she’ll read this post. Thank you, Kelly!

In the summer of 2020, my crowdfunding campaign for this book supported the Cibolo Nature Center in Boerne, Texas. It was a creative way to volunteer during the pandemic, and I’m grateful to everyone who joined that effort. Now, I offer the volume for free. The first link allows you to view it as a flip book. The second link will give you a PDF download. The front cover image is below. I hope your future is blessed with many hours of rejuvenating time in nature!

The Necessity of Wildness (flip book version)
The Necessity of Wildness (PDF version)

Despite the cautions about discussing religion or politics at family gatherings, my relatives recently served up a heaping helping of both. Our debate was lively, and a consensus gradually emerged. Religion in any form can breed fanaticism, closed minds, judgment of others. I use this italicized word on purpose: no one’s religious truth should trump someone else’s.

One of my sons said, “It can even be risky to take children to Sunday School. They might get indoctrinated before they learn to make choices for themselves.”

That’s a mouthful from someone raised as a preacher’s kid. And, he has a point!

Early experience of a faith community can be wonderfully grounding for children. We can expose them to concepts of unity, service, and love for all the human family, especially those who differ from us.

But let’s face it. Critical thinking skills fully emerge during adolescence. Until then, when we present myths and absolute truths backed by authority figures, how can children sort it out? How can they know that the pathways prescribed for them are just examples of the many options on our planet?

Scottish psychiatrist, R.D. Laing, often spoke of the “post-hypnotic trance” induced in childhood. The weight of what we are taught and how we are treated too often numbs us to our authentic identities.

My parents (God bless them!) had me confirmed in the Lutheran tradition. The task was to memorize and confess the right beliefs. The presiding pastor never encouraged us to think for ourselves, to test every truth in the laboratories of our lives. No one spoke about the sanctity of individual conscience.

That’s why, in my years as a pastor, I approached confirmation classes from a vastly different perspective. Yes, we surveyed the history of Christianity. We examined the scope of the Bible and its genres. We even outlined the polity of our denomination. But we clearly emphasized some central truths. Question authority! Think for yourself! Don’t adopt someone else’s faith unless it makes sense to you!

Which brings me to Christmas. The quaint stories of a pregnant virgin, choirs of angels, and a star spotlighting Bethlehem, arise from ancient wells of legend. In my childhood, these myths were enthralling. I could feel the breathless expectation of the Messiah’s birth, as if nothing in history made sense before that moment. The birth narrative, and later the cross, became portals to ultimate meaning.

With a subterranean sigh, I think of how much time and energy it took to unlearn what they taught me. To realize that all faith systems are attempts to apprehend this mystery in which we live. To critically examine holy writings from historical and literary viewpoints. To move from an exclusive faith to one that embraces the journey of every human being, no matter how different from my own.

Yesterday, I saw a familiar sign on someone’s front lawn: Jesus is the Reason for the Season. I don’t know the residents of that home, but I have met too many who insist on this slogan fanatically. They consider part of their culture war, and we all know their litany. The myths of scripture, including Christmas, are inerrant historical truth. Jesus is the only way to God. Being Christian means being right. Be saved or be damned.

It seems so primitive, doesn’t it?

For me, Christmas is a time to reclaim what it is about Jesus and his message that still inform my journey. His anti-materialism. The way he challenged his own people’s nationalism and religious arrogance. His counterculture stories that still burrow into our souls. His love for the disenfranchised. His victory in forgiving his enemies who condemned him for blasphemy and treason, then executed him on a hill outside the walls of Jerusalem.

In good conscience, I can still enter into some of Jesus’ story. But I would certainly reshape the slogan displayed in my neighbor’s yard.

Jesus is the treason for the season!

HBO’s Lovecraft Country, based on Matt Ruff’s provocative novel, is not for the faint-hearted. Part sci-fi, part horror, it features savage monsters and a copious spilling of blood. But its plot, its cast, and its exposé of America’s horrific racism are gripping!

One of the characters is Hippolyta Freeman, a brilliant woman adept in mathematics and astronomy. She is also a devoted mother and wife to her late husband George, having worked with him to produce The Safe Negro Travel Guide, a fictional counterpart to The Negro Motorist Green Book.

After George’s death, Hippolyta embarks on a multidimensional voyage of self-discovery. She unlocks the secrets of an orrery, takes the key it offers, then travels to Mayfield, Kansas, the place where George died. There, within an observatory, she finds a machine right of out of H.G. Wells that fits her key. It launches her to what seems like a space ship, where a towering black woman looms above her.

“Who are you?” asks Hippolyta. The woman answers, “I Am.” “Am I in prison?” asks Hippolyta.  “No, you are not in a prison,” responds the woman. “Name yourself! Where do you want to be?”

What follows is a beautiful journey of a soul becoming unbound. Hippolyta first goes to Paris to dance alongside Josephine Baker, letting the sisterhood and bohemian nightlife unwind her. She tastes new freedom, and at first it angers her. She describes it this way to Baker:

“All those years I thought I had everything I ever wanted, only to come here and discover that all I ever was was the exact kind of Negro woman white folks wanted me to be. I feel like they just found a smart way to lynch me without me noticing a noose … Sometimes I just, I wanna kill white folks. And it’s not just them … I hate me, for letting them make me feel small.”

Hippolyta then zooms to a dimension where she learns swordplay, preparing her to command a band of Amazons (fitting given her name). She leads her sister warriors into a savage victory against Confederate soldiers. Finally, she revisits George in a touching bedroom scene, this time confronting him with an awareness that she diminished herself by always putting him and his activities first.

In each of these realms she connects with an essential part of herself, naming it, giving it flesh, setting it free in the constellation of her personality. And each time, what sparks the transition is her acclamation of “I am Hippolyta. I am Hippolyta. I am …HIPPOLYTAAAAAA!” 

Yes! I am!

Discovering the sacred nature of our own humanness is at the core of our planet’s best spiritual teachings. This dawning realization awakens our unique identities. We learn to cast off shackles, employ our gifts, actualize our destinies. It is from this sacredness that we come to cherish and protect the Imago Dei, image of God, in other human beings. Symbolically, this clarity arises as we voice the name of God given to Moses at the burning bush, claiming it for our own lives: I am what I am!

Part of the blasphemy charges leveled at Jesus in the Gospel of John came from his well-known “I Am” statements. We usually translate the Greek words ego eimi as “I am,” but they carry the connotation of “I am what I am.” One of my favorite professors, Herman Waetjen, often said that Jesus was not only intentionally voicing the name of God; he was calling each us to say “I AM” with power and dignity.  

On this level, Episode 7 of Lovecraft County, speaks to all of us in our struggles to rise above the acculturation that clips our wings and does violence to our personhood.

May we all learn to say with Hippolyta, “Now that I’m tasting it, freedom, like I’ve never known before, I see what I was robbed of back there.”

May we all learn to say with Jesus, “I am what I am!”

(For further reading, I wrote a poem called I AM that you might find interesting)

Our neighborhood has a Facebook page, and when I saw Republican politics shaping its posts during the 2020 presidential election, I could have ignored it. Instead, I shared this comment about a sign in my neighbor’s yard that I found especially disturbing.

“One of the things I love about our neighborhood is the presence of our children and youth. We see them playing in the streets, riding bikes, walking to catch the bus. Now they encounter this message: ‘God, Guns & Country.’ Three words strung together as if they make perfect, harmonious sense. I respect freedom of speech, but I keep wondering. What does this teach our youth about the state of our nation? What does it teach them about faith? Powerful words of Jesus come to mind, ‘Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.’”

As expected, I got a flurry of comments. They are familiar but nonetheless chilling.

• It was Christians that miraculously founded our country, and the Democrats want to cancel that history.
• What about abortion? The thought of a baby’s neck snapping at nearly nine months makes me sick to my stomach.
• We have the right to bear arms, especially to defend ourselves against a government that wants to force socialism on us. Leftists will take our guns!
• The ungodly protests in our country are happening in cities controlled by the Left.

One woman requested a session of private messaging. She asked me to explain what I meant by my post. I told her it would require a longer conversation, but here was the gist:

“There is a brand of American Christianity that believes their god favors our nation more than others. It allies itself with gun lobbyists, calls for increased expenditures on military and police, and turns a blind eye to the nonviolent message of Jesus. 2,000 years ago, Jesus himself challenged the nationalism and violence of his people. These yard signs teach children that God is partial, and that God protects certain Americans by any means necessary, including violence. I believe in a Creator of all peoples, all nations, who ultimately desires unity and peace.”

She responded with a host of internet links cited out of context, including a ranting letter-to-the-editor published online in The Intelligencer: Wheeling News Register. I have to hand it to the author. His words remain a masterpiece of religious bigotry. At his frothing crescendo, he blamed Democrats for divorce, school shootings, riots, rape, unwed mothers, gangs, and the “Sodom and Gomorrah” abomination of same sex marriage.

The woman summed up her position by saying: “The Left is trying to take our God!”

Her abject fear struck me, and I understand the lamentable psychology behind it.

In his Stages of Faith, James Fowler called Stage Three a “Synthetic-Conventional Faith.” It is often enculturated into children and becomes part of their tribal identity. This can be religious faith, adherence to a philosophy, or alignment with a particular political party. People find comfort in belonging to their tribe. When its precepts are challenged, they often lash out in anger and fear. They hunker down and become defenders of the faith, as if their god, their truth, their party needs a champion to protect its fidelity.

Where does this fear come from? Fowler put it this way:

When we are grasped by the vision of a center of value and power more luminous, more inclusive and more true than that to which we are devoted, we initially experience the new as the enemy or the slayer – that which destroys our “god.”

I believe that for a moment, many true believers get a scary, vertiginous view of something grander, something that tugs at the threads of their conviction. Rather than moving forward, mustering the courage to explore and understand, they patently reject this new knowledge and retreat to militant orthodoxy.

If this woman and I had a longer conversation, I would say, “No, we are not trying to take your god. The sanctity of each person’s faith and conscience is sacred. But if you mean that we are lifting up a vision more powerful, more luminous, more inclusive than your tribal deity, I can tell you this:

We will not stop!”

As an investigative journalist, I visited the Navajo Nation in 2018. I went under the aegis of the Presbyterian Church (USA), an institution I served for decades, one that still supports “missions” among the Diné.

A question with profound implications guided me. Given how white Christians historically savaged the Navajo—armed attacks, land stealing, forced relocation to Bosque Redondo, broken treaties, reeducation centers—had my denomination learned from its past? Or (inconceivably!) does it still engage in practices that disrespect the Diné’s indigenous identity?

You can read the article here. It grieved me that one of our supported pastors, a full-blooded Navajo, called traditional beliefs of his people “the work of the Devil.” A young Navajo Park Ranger at Canyon de Chelly put it succinctly as she spoke of Christians in her extended family.

“I have attended their memorial services,” she says, “where the message is loud and clear. Unless I follow this Jesus, I have no salvation on this earth and I’m not going to heaven. I cannot accept that kind of thinking!”

One afternoon, I drove out to Shiprock Peak. In Navajo its name is Tsé Bitʼaʼí, “rock with wings,” alluding to a mythic bird that brought the Diné to their present lands. Along a lonely stretch of desert road, I came upon this deserted building.

Decolonize your mind! To the Dine, this injunction has power and immediacy, a call to resist the forces of European colonialism that are still aflame in white America. But it is also a phrase that challenges each of us.

Why? Because history is repeating itself, not only in my home nation, but in countries around the globe. There are still malignant outposts of racism, homophobia, sexism, and nationalism in our collective psyche. It is especially crucial for any people of a dominant class to understand their systemic biases of privilege and to join with others in tearing these prejudices down. Yes, tearing them down!

As we engage in this work, just watch how the colonial beasts rise up! Here in America, witness a former president still stoking racial fears among his followers, many of whom call themselves Christians. People waving confederate flags, blaming the victims of police brutality, or openly spreading messages of hate. Others who think they are tolerant, but who still trumpet American Exceptionalism and the monopoly of their own brand of faith.

Quite simply, our future as a human family is at stake. We must decolonize our minds.

If you are a Star Trek fan, you remember the chilling assimilation of Jean Luc Picard into the Borg Collective. This reasonable, compassionate, free-thinking human being—sworn to protect life throughout the galaxy—becomes Locutus, a cog in the Borg mind hive.

It’s an enduring metaphor, because all of us can succumb to groupthink. It happens in classrooms where history is taught from the perspective of oppressors. It happens every time the incessant ads of corporations convince us to become more materialistic. It happens when any racial or homophobic slur goes by unchallenged. It happens every time a politician gets us to focus on an external “enemy” rather that the inner foe of our twisted thinking. It happens in houses of worship when spiritual leaders proclaim their truth as the only way. It happens when we toe political party lines—right or left—without carefully examining every tenet.

Now, as always…now, more than ever…we must decolonize our minds. Replace hatred with love, privilege with partnership, intolerance with inclusion!

The Dalia Lama is right: “A spiritual practice is a constant battle within, replacing previous negative conditioning or habituation with new positive conditioning.”

Namaste.

On November 7^th, 2012, the day after Barack Obama’s reelection, a cowardly anonymous writer posted some racist vitriol. Not unusual in America. These particular words circulated the internet for years, attributed to various people like Franklin Graham.

I’m embarrassed to admit that one of my extended family members sent the quote to me. It was his reactionary response to what I saw as the positive changes and hope rippling through our nation. I was both pissed off and acutely aware that any reply to my white relative would fall on deaf ears. So, what did I do? I framed them and highlighted a better message! Read the whole quote, then read just the yellow words.

How many times have you heard the advice, Live from a perspective of abundance, not scarcity! It’s a rainbow truth, a call to renewal, the lodestar of many a spiritual teacher. One of my favorites, Wayne Dyer, spent a lifetime liberating people from limited thinking. As he famously said, “Change your thoughts and you change your life!”

The art with any powerful guideline is to apply it daily. This may require a period of painful deconstruction, a dismantling of familial/cultural conditioning that was siphoned into our minds and heaped on our shoulders. In my own life’s trajectory, I have had to unburden myself from two heavy influences.

A HISTORICAL (AND STILL POPULAR) FORM OF CHRISTIANITY: I know many Christians whose theology begins with the essential goodness of Creation. They believe we are created in “God’s image” with an inner core of goodness. Sure, it’s easy to view our world and see how human goodness has mutated – obscured by greed, power, lust, and self-centeredness. We can even say that our planet is poisoned by the presence of our species.

But does this negate the essential nature of our souls? Does it deny the inner presence of healing light within each of us? Don’t we need spiritual leaders who remind us of our inherent beauty, not our ugliness?

The Christianity I grew up with—a faith practiced by millions—focused on “the fall” of humanity, repeating its incessant mantra that we are born sinners, we remain sinners, and that we need a savior for our redemption. Many churches claim to celebrate victory—the past is gone, the new has come—but it is only because an external character, Jesus of Nazareth, “paid the price” for their freedom.

My daughter calls this an “outsourcing of authority.” I agree with her. It’s a clear message that we are fundamentally flawed, lacking the inner fountain of life that will set us free if we take the time to release it. Too many institutions (including historical Christianity) have trafficked in doctrines that prescribe, control, and limit. We ALL know what can happen when we cede our power to others.

I raise a different banner. We are unique and wondrous beings! We hold within us the keys to our enlightenment. It may take many years to peel back the layers of acculturation that mask our divine identity. It may require herculean focus to overcome and release our self-destructive habits. But the effort is worth it!

Bestselling novelist and feminist theologian Sue Monk Kidd, who did the hard work of emerging from theologies of scarcity, says it beautifully with her own set of metaphors.

“Here is where our real selfhood is rooted, in the divine spark or seed, in the image of God imprinted on the human soul. The True Self is not our creation, but God’s. It is the self we are in our depths. It is our capacity for divinity and transcendence.”

THE DISEASE MODEL OF RECOVERY.  A Twelve Step group helped me rise from the ashes of addiction. For this, I am eternally grateful. I enjoyed the no-bullshit atmosphere of people who had experienced the bottom and were now increasingly grateful for life.

However, there’s a moment at the beginning of each AA meeting that makes me cringe. A member reads from their “Big Book,” including this phrase: “We are like men (sic) who have lost their legs; they never grow new ones.”

Read that again. Whoa! What a crippling declaration of scarcity and woundedness! I have a heartfelt response to this cursed phrase.

I am not an amputee. I am not a prisoner of my disease. I am a man who has realized a stunning new power and freedom. I am flawed, certainly, but the spiritual process of my daily growth has revealed this metamorphic truth: I am not only growing new legs; I am growing new wings.

I urge you to transcend ANY familial, societal, or religious notion of scarcity that is holding you down. If a person or institution is communicating that “you are not enough,” shed those lies starting now.

A friend, colleague, and co-author of mine – Heiwa no Bushi – offers these words in our collaboration entitled The Six Medicines of BodhiChristo (downloadable here).

“What were you before you were told everything that you are now? Can you uncover the sacredness of your own humanness? Many of us never have the chance to discover this. We are born with a name that is not our choosing, then christened or baptized into a tradition that makes us one of ‘them.’ We are told that ‘this is what a real man does,’ or ‘this is how a real woman should act.’ The problem is that many of us have been so deeply assimilated into ‘the code’ that we don’t know we have become part of the problem.”

I pray we will ALL learn to extricate ourselves from any code or conditioning that weighs us down or obscures our essential identity. I pray we will ALL learn to soar!

I first heard the word “elegy” in a high school class called Great Books. Our teacher, Bill Cole, introduced us to Thomas Gray’s beloved poem from 1750: Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard. The poet wanders among gravestones, pondering the unsung virtues of people who lived and died in obscurity, summed up in these beautiful verses.

Full many a gem of purest ray serene
The dark unfathomed caves of ocean bear:
Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,
And waste its sweetness on the desert air.

I have a deep affinity with those outside the limelight, people faithful to the values they cherish, fighting their version of the good fight, running their courses with courage and fidelity. During my three decades as a pastor, I gained privileged admittance to their inner circles.

An elegy is too somber on this Father’s Day, 2021. Instead, I offer this tribute to unsung fathers everywhere. Your love and labor may go unnoticed, but your character matters in the lives of your loved ones!

I had a powerful experience this week. I sat and read the entirety of my father’s memoirs, notes begun in 1950. It’s a remarkable odyssey. He grew up on a Wisconsin farm during the Depression with no running water or electricity. Decades later, he would rise to be a key player in America’s Apollo Program, then serve as the CFO of a multinational corporation.

It’s not his stellar career feats that I celebrate this morning. It’s a moment captured in these words from 1957. I was 16 months old.

I’m writing this about 9:30 p.m. after watching a program on our 21-inch TV. Marilyn has gone to a church meeting and Krin is sleeping. I can hear the hum of the refrigerator in the background and smell the blossoms of the orange trees from the grove just in back of our house.

Why did this memory move me so deeply? Because it captures a father at home with his sleeping child—ME! —keeping vigil. In the ensuing years, my Dad would sacrifice family time for work, an issue we resolved long ago in our loving relationship. But this moment in 1957 reminds me of his steadfast presence in my life.

All you fathers know what I mean. Changing diapers, braiding hair, helping with homework, reading books, cooking, paying bills, chauffeuring, listening, doctoring scrapes and bruises—all the small things that sum up faithfulness on a daily basis. You’re the best!

I also give a shout out to my ex father-in law, Don Oseid, who died many years ago. He consistently nurtured my interest in writing, acting as a mentor and second father. I remember one evening when he came to me holding an anthology open to a particular poem. It was Those Winter Sundays, by Robert Hayden, the first black American to serve as Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, a title now changed to Poet Laureate.

You can read the entire poem here, a son remembering how his father, after a week’s hard labor, got the fires blazing on Sunday mornings, even polishing his son’s shoes. The final words speak volumes.

What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?

To all you fathers who inhabit these offices, remaining faithful to the daily tasks of loving your children, I say…

Thank you and happy Father’s Day!

On a lonely stretch of highway north of San Angelo, Texas, my wife Donna pointed into the distance.

“Look at that steeple,” she said.

It rose above a smattering of low-slung buildings, its elegance out of touch with its nondescript surroundings. We love impromptu detours in our travels, so I said, “Let’s check it out!”

As I turned, a faded marker welcomed us to Rowena, Texas, clearly a place long past its prime. Shuttered businesses lined the main street, signs faded with age and neglect. No tourist attractions here—just a dusty, forgotten pitstop.

Then we came to the sharp contrast of St. Joseph Catholic Church. It was immaculate, every brick and painted surface reflecting a pride of ownership. Catholic parishes, unlike their Protestant counterparts, often leave their doors open during the day, so we parked and walked inside.

The interior gleamed, stained-glass reflections slanting across the floor and pews. In the center aisle, an elderly white man, his head bowed, was conversing with a younger man who looked Filipino, dressed in shorts and sandals. I doffed my cap in respect and detoured around them towards the altar.

I tried not to eavesdrop, but the gentlemen’s voices carried in the acoustically sensitive space. I couldn’t make out the older man’s words, but the younger man’s voice was unmistakable. As he listened to his elderly companion, he replied with gentle phrases. I understand…It’s going to be OK…I’ll help you take care of everything.

I noticed Donna edging closer to the men, which made me a bit uncomfortable. I exited out the back, sat in our truck, and while I awaited her return, I googled Rowena.

Texas land developer, Paul J. Baron, platted the township in 1888, naming it Baronsville. German and Czech settlers convinced the Post Office to rename it Rowena in 1904 after the wife of a local businessman. Rowena reached its population zenith of 800 in 1930. Today it has less than 500 residents.

I also discovered that Rowena was the birthplace of Bonnie Parker, born in 1910, living there until her father died and her mother moved her to an industrial suburb of Dallas.

With both windows open, noisy grackles in the trees, I glanced right and left along nearby streets: abandoned buildings, rusty cars, old farm equipment, pavement ending quickly as if dissolving into the earth. I thought of how historical figures often rise up from the middle of nowhere. This time, a woman whose crime spree of 100 felonies with Clyde Barrow became legendary, and whose death at age 24 in a fusillade of bullets is seared into our national psyche.

Donna snapped me back from my daydreaming as she opened the passenger door.

“That was so touching,” she said.

“What?” I asked.

“Those two men,” she said. “It was the priest talking to one of his members. That old man lost his wife of 69 years just a couple days ago. Due to COVID-19, he had not been able to see her at her convalescent home for a couple months. But they finally let him back in and he was with her when she died. He and his wife lived here in Rowena their entire marriage. I just wanted to hug him!”

69 years of dreams, joys and sorrows, a wealth of memories lived out in a place that, to me, seems so remote. A loving, sensitive priest, giving honor to his post in obscurity.

“I told the priest how beautiful the church building is,” said Donna. “He pointed east and said there’s another one about 10 miles down the road.

“In the middle of nowhere,” he said.