GHOST RANCH, NEW MEXICO—At Ghost Ranch—a beautiful and historic education and retreat center of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) in the wilds of northern New Mexico—just about anything other than traditional, orthodox Christianity is reverently venerated. The earth, mountains, the sun, the voice within me, water—all of this seems to have great meaning. The Bible, Reformed faith, conversion, the Lordship of Jesus Christ, classic discipleship, the worship of God—these seem as neglected as the weeds behind my room. Ghost Ranch is the kind of place where novel spiritualities are prized, while orthodoxy merits pursed lips and a raised eyebrow.
This log cabin and the Ghost Ranch locale were prominent in the 1991 Billy Crystal film “City Slickers.” |
While the vaguely spiritual, indistinctly Christian, but definitely artsy and intellectualized atmosphere at Ghost Ranch seemed to make the Advisory Committee on Social Witness Policy feel right at home, it kept me faintly on edge: all that beauty and all the resources of people, land, history, and buildings, yet so little fundamental Christian formation to show for it all. Ghost Ranch seemed like a superb art studio or Elderhostel site or New Age investigation hub, but not particularly a Christian conference center. And at 6,500 feet in elevation, what passed as lofty thoughts sometimes seemed as thin as the air.
The staff at Ghost Ranch was friendly, kind, and helpful. They seemed on site obviously because they value the place and its work. Smiles abounded. A general heartiness and outdoorsiness pervaded the Ghost Ranch lifestyle. People were laid back and down home. At the same time, a distinctly Christian or even Presbyterian quality to the place was virtually non-existent. This was evidenced by the events scheduled and by the little clues such as signs, activities, and announcements. There were no prayers at meals. No stirring Bible passages raised high on banners. Scarce talk of faith. No stacks of well-worn Bibles in meeting rooms. It could have been a YMCA camp or a community college outdoors center, for all one would get from the visual clues. On second thought, a Y camp might have more prayer.
Ghost Ranch Describes Itself
The mission statement in the Ghost Ranch course catalogue says a lot about the place:
Ghost Ranch, an ecumenical and interfaith education and retreat center of the Presbyterian Church (USA), is grounded in spirituality, seeks to hold in reverence all of creation, to extend hospitality to all persons, to practice environmental responsibility, and to serve as a responsible neighbor in northern New Mexico.
Uh-oh. That mission statement is as lame as the grammar of its nonparallel construction. Try this: Substitute “Church and School of Wicca” for “Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)” in the mission statement. It works, doesn’t it! So would Baha’i or Krishna Consciousness. That’s the problem.
Consider some of the elements:
- This national Presbyterian facility is an interfaith center? Really? We build and support retreat centers in order to propagate other faiths? Is there nothing unique and true about Christianity or the Reformed faith, and we might just as well bundle all the faiths together and promote the whole bouquet?
- The place is grounded in spirituality? What does such generic spirituality mean—Hindu spiritual practices, Zen philosophy, New Age shamanism, animist rites, Baal worship? What spirit? Whatever happened to being grounded on faith in Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior? Is Ghost Ranch embarrassed to be so specific? Is it ashamed of Jesus?
- We find reverence at Ghost Ranch, but not necessarily for God. Reverence is reserved for “all of creation.” Has creation displaced the Creator God in this mission statement? It seems that we ought to value creation, preserve creation, appreciate creation, restore creation. But reverence is due only to our triune God!
- The next three elements—hospitality, environmental responsibility, and neighborliness—are decent enough in themselves, but should they dominate a mission statement that conspicuously leaves out such worthy conference-center missions as worship, evangelism, discipleship, world mission, or stewardship?
The Tone of Events
So what goes on at Ghost Ranch? I’d have to say, not much in mid August. For the ranch, the summer was over. While the ACSWP was on site, some flutists, a handful of artists, a couple of family reunions, and some sundry other individuals and small groups were there—maybe 75 people or so in the dining hall, including staff. Parts of Ghost Ranch were more like a ghost town. One would be hard-pressed to find much Christian formation happening that summer week.
Ghost Ranch needs to hitch its wagon to Someone. |
Looking at a catalogue of course offerings, art is really big, music stands out, peace and justice are obviously deemed important, and Southwest themes abound. Over the year, you can learn to weld. You can walk desert paths. You can probably learn more than necessary about artist Georgia O’Keeffe, a former Ghost Ranch resident. You can learn geology and history at Ghost Ranch. You can learn nonviolent resistance and even wear sackcloth and ashes at a Los Alamos demonstration. You can “find your own prophetic voice in the midst of the empire.” The course offerings are a candy store of progressive goodies, making one think that this is a conference center for about one-fifth of the denomination that would consider itself liberal.
What about basic Christian programs? Well, looking under the “Religion, Spirituality, and Theology” section—approximately half the length of the Art and Writing sections—one finds such courses as “Golf in the High Desert: Seeking the Hole in One and the Holy One,” “Discovering Spiritual Connections Through Pueblo Pottery,” and “The Spirituality of Religious Pluralism.”
Want to go deeper? Participants in the “This I Believe” course will “share stories that shape our spirits and engage in contemplative practices that take us to the center of our stories.” It gets better: “In the process, we’ll write an essay that could be submitted to the National Public Radio series, ‘This I Believe.’”
Just where is Jesus Christ in this me journey? Occupying nature, apparently. A Ghost Ranch retreat house, Casa del Sol, considers itself called to be, among other things, “An open-hearted setting where seekers find refreshment and a heightened awareness of the landscape as teacher.” It is to be busy “celebrating Christ and Creation as one, coming from the heart of God.” Apparently Jesus is not eternal, not the Co-Creator, and no more special than creation, since he and creation are supposedly one, deriving from God. So much for Reformed or even orthodox Christology!
Suffice it to say that one would struggle to find mere Christianity at Ghost Ranch. It must be too passé. You’ll find a youth week focused not on faith formation and discipleship, but on training peace activists. You’ll find mysticism and syncretism. You’ll find a lot of social action. But don’t look for the Bible, don’t look for Jesus, and don’t look for classic Reformed theology. At Ghost Ranch, you would be more likely to find a rain forest!
The Deification of Nature
During its four-day meeting, the Advisory Committee on Social Witness Policy imported a mini-example of a Ghost Ranch course, inviting in Larry Rasmussen for a lecture on the environment. Rasmussen is Reinhold Niebuhr Professor Emeritus at Union Theological Seminary in New York City. “Ghost Ranch wants to be at the forefront of earth-honoring faith,” he began. “We have the illusion that we can control nature, and accelerated climate change bursts that illusion.”
Rasmussen argued that today, we need to back off from our use of fossil fuels and our “built environment“ to enter into “a mutually enhancing relationship between humans and the planet.” He feels that “the world religions are all moving into the ecological phase,” and he wants that to be Ghost Ranch’s project, too.
“What can we bring from the riches and resources of the Christian faith to the work that is before us?” he asked. Then he made a case for “green mysticism,” a sacramentalism, “where all of the earth’s substances are sacred.” (One can hear an echo of the mission statement line: “to hold in reverence all of creation.”)
Sunday worship took place in this Casa del Sol courtyard. |
He named three common strategies for dealing with the environment. First is an eco-justice strategy, which organizes Christian response around nature’s standing as the handiwork of God. Second was a stewardship strategy, which is “organized around obligatory human service to the Creator, who entrusts to human beings major responsibilities for Creation.” Christians are charged with good management responsibilities.
The third strategy was obviously Rasmussen’s favorite: a creation spirituality strategy. This strategy gives its attention is to “the spiritual union and communion of humanity and the earth.” It focuses on what kind of creature we are, “broadening the human sense of person so as to be a member of the full communion of life, a human intimacy with the rest of creation.”
Here is where Rasmussen snagged a theological trip wire. “Creation is really a body of God,” he explained, “and we are in accord with that body. We’re part of an animate—not inanimate—cosmos, a living cosmos.” That was not all. Rasmussen described this belief as panentheistic and argued that “God is in all and all is in God. We live and move and have our being in God, and so does all else live and move and have its being in God.” Rasmussen obviously would argue with the theological doctrine of the transcendence of God, instead making God so immanent that we and nature become a part of God and God is no longer totally other.
“The story of Creation is as important as writing the right [environmental] policy,” Rasmussen contended. “You won’t get the right policy if you don’t foster the right understanding of who we are, and we are friends and not enemies of nature.” A critical question, he says, is this: “Is God intrinsically related to Creation or extrinsically related? Creation spirituality says that creation is the body of God. If God is extrinsically related, then you would probably have a different representation of God.”
Most of us would hold a different representation of God. God is not made flesh in Creation. God was made incarnate in Jesus Christ. But the ACSWP voiced no difficulty with Rasmussen’s panentheistic vision.
What Happened to Worship?
When Sunday rolled around, the ACSWP finished its business prior to the worship hour. The ACSWP met across from the Ghost Ranch chapel, but nothing was going on there on Sunday morning. The only worship service for the entire camp was held at Casa del Sol, a remote retreat house two miles removed from the main camp. The closest town was 13 miles away, and I had seen no Protestant church in that tiny village. There is no neighborhood church in the Ghost Ranch vicinity, because cacti are the ranch’s neighbors. So the “Time of Meditation and Prayer” at the Casa del Sol was my only option.
When I arrived, only five other people were on hand: two very hospitable staff members, a drummer, one ACSWP member, and a young woman “just passing through” who was staying at the campground. Out of a large church conference center with many dozen people isolated in the wilderness, only five other people cared to attend worship? I got the sense that Ghost Ranch was not a highly devout crowd, dedicated to the discipline of worship!
Each of us in attendance was given a job to do in the spare liturgy, called here “a time of listening and prayers.” The service began with silence. Then came the Native American drumming—a pleasant heartbeat with variations—which served as a calming prelude. The responsive invocation seemed so addressed to the sun rather than to God that I didn’t participate in it until the wording got around to invoking the Lord God, too. A long recorded Taizé chant was intended to center our thinking, and it was followed by three readings.
Providentially, I was given an Amos passage to read. It was excellent. But two more readings followed, neither of which was biblical or even Christian, for that matter. Both readings sounded to me like “Deep Thoughts” composed by Saturday Night Live’s Jack Handy—but on a bad day and with theologically mischievous intent. One began roughly, “Don’t worry about being good,” and it went downhill from there into inane self-justification. We sang a little.
After that, we experienced a whole lot of silence. We had no proclamation of the Word in this meager worship service. We, instead, listened to the wind and our inner selves, learning from the language of landscape or getting in touch with our inner desert. Or something. It simply went on a long time. We heard more Taizé chant. We prayed in unison an affected version of the Lord’s Prayer,” the “Casa del Sol Prayer of Jesus” that begins with “Mother of Life, Father of the Universe,” and contains phrases such as “may your longings be our longings” and “lead us into new beginnings.” We sat in silence some more, and then we all hugged.
The people were warm and kind. The setting was beautiful and serene. But the worship was odd and empty; distinctly Christian content was either obscured or missing altogether. As I drove down the gravel drive from worship and out onto the highway to head home, I realized that this description of worship pretty well summed up Ghost Ranch.
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