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Roman Catholic Cathedral in the central plaza of
Cuiabá, ca. 1967
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The
connection between place and the sense of the sacred has intrigued me
for a long time. I remember, even as a child – a child raised in a
fundamentalist missionary home that rejected Catholic Christianity, being drawn to the sense of mystery that emanated from the large
though simple Catholic Cathedral facing the central plaza in the city
of Cuiabá (Mato Grosso state, Brazil).
Within my own faith experience
as an adult and as a student of religion, I have reflected on the apparently easier or more likely access to the numinous that
characterizes certain places. On the other hand I have concluded
that it is not just about the place
but about the perceiver
as well.
Anthropologists
tell us that the geography in which people live influences
significantly how they perceive the spiritual or divine.1
They say that Spirit/deity tends to be more localized and specific
for people who live in a closed microcosm such as a dense forest. I
suspect this may apply to folks living in more dense urban
surroundings as well. By contrast, for people who live in an open
microcosm such as grasslands or mountain environments with vistas,
the spiritual/deity is perceived as being more expansive, transcendent.
My
own sense of Spirit has roots in this latter perspective of an
unobstructed geography. Growing
up in the open grasslands of the Brazilian cerrado,
a core part of my sense of the numinous is connected to grand vistas.
Following
dirt paths west through the knee-high grasses and scrub trees of the
region where I grew up, as young boys my brother, friends, and I
would hike to a flat-topped butte2
about 5 miles from our home. Reaching its base, we would begin the
ascent, picking (and at times slipping) our way across ever-steeper
graveled slopes, around ragged boulders, scrub, and an occasional
cactus, slowly making our way to the very top. While the open plains
of the cerrado already offer an expansive view with broad horizons,
the vista several hundred feet higher, from the top of our butte, was
even grander.
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| View of the Brazilian cerrado of central Mato Grosso State |
From
this elevated vantage point, the savanna-type landscape dotted by
trees and shrubs extended across the rolling terrain in every
direction, as far as the eye could see. In the rainy season, the
canvass of multiple shades of green would be decorated with bright
yellow, purple, white, and red clusters of flowering trees as well.
Etched on this expanse, like lines on a gigantic human palm, was a
clearly defined network of winding dark green paths, gallery forests
revealing the course of streams and rivers. Springs and narrow
rivulets gathering water from the highlands in the south joined
larger streams that eventually dumped into rivers, all of which in
this region flowed north to pour their precious liquid contents into the
Xingu, a major tributary of the Great Amazon. From the top of our
butte, looking out above and beyond the grasses and trees, we could
see in every direction the shaded blues and lavenders of distant
hills that gave shape to the horizon. Allowing our gaze to rise
further, we could follow the brilliant curved expanse of the
sky, looking much like a giant sapphire bowl set upside-down upon
the earth. In the rainy season towering cottony clouds – of the
type that provide the imagination with images of faces, monsters, and
castles -- played across this glorious stage. And when these billowy
giants released their torrents, you could watch grey-white sheets of
rain race their way across miles of grassland, offering their cool
and quenching drench to all in their path. At night the deep blue
would give way to a pitch black canopy awash in an unfathomable
number of pinpoints of flickering light, further brightened, at
times, by the cool glow of a magnificent moon.
Like
the trees and grasses in these youthful memories, in a very deep
sense, who I am - my very being - is rooted in this sprawling cerrado
soil. In one sense this is literally true, as I was physically
nourished for much of the first fifteen years of my life by food nurtured in this soil. But in another sense this is where I am
rooted spiritually as well. As I shared in an earlier post, this
place is for me, like no other place, truly home.
But more than that, it is the lens through which my world is framed.
The rugged simplicity of the land and its inhabitants, the
dependability of natural cycles of death and re-birth, skills for
survival in what at times could be a harsh and threatening
environment, the value and beauty of the earth and its creatures, the
sense of a big-sky/big-earth God whose reach is over-arching yet
tender: these are the memories and visions that form the core of who
I am. I, David Crump, am spiritually rooted in this land known as
the Brazilian cerrado.
1 The
thoughts shared here are based on a class in African Traditional
Religions taught by Dr. Anthony Gittins, C.S.Sp., Professor of
Theology and Cultural Anthropology, Catholic Theological Union.
Theologian, Belden Lane, speaks of the “intersection of faith and
geography” in his Landscapes of the
Sacred,
New York: Paulist Press, 1988 (p. 74).
2 Such
buttes are common formations of the cerrado terrain and plateau
country covering much of central Brazil.