I had never seen a field of wildflowers quite like it. The ground had responded to the spring rains with a fertility that flashed flames of fire: reds, oranges, and yellows dancing in the wind like the tongues above the apostles on Pentecost. My friend, and seminary classmate, Fr. John, sits before the same field on a plastic bucket, himself burning, picking notes on a banjo, a harmony of soul and soil, giving a shred of light to the inexpressible groaning proper to creation and man.
***
“Ohhh, I don’t know.” Fr. George looks down, closing his eyes. He hesitates, like someone asked to share a personal story with an unknown crowd. Then, standing slowly from a well-worn wooden chair, he limps out of sight. He returns with a case shaped like an ancient keyhole. “Well made.” He sets it on the carpet. “I always forget the kind of weight it has.” The buckles are unsnapped. Fr. George sighs; a spontaneous smile etches across his face. “Opening this is always feels like preparing the altar for Mass. Haven’t played for anyone in a long time.” Normally a quiet man, Fr. George, the eremitical retiree, is now tapping his foot,and weaving his head, his mouth a whirligig as his hands slide up and down frets so worn the mahogany itself rolls like the bluegrass hills of Kentucky. His right-hand picks wildly yet synchronistically as metal fingers meet steel wire, the foreground of white drum worn black, a joyful moon shining amid the forest of books in his living room. His wrinkled child-eyes look up at me, chest rising and falling as the notes he had just picked. “You know, I started playing this on a dare.”
***
I am down the road a few hundred yards from the fire-field. Mud squishes up through my toes and to the tops of my feet as I ease my way down the bank of a river that ribbons the desert sand like spilled moonshine. Swallows build a clay settlement on the bridge above, the doors of their humble homes open like trumpets to the water below. I ease into the river; cool water rises to my chest. I can hear the strum of banjo chords beneath the shrill cries of the birds that dance above. Suddenly, my soul becomes an open raft on a river of Precious Blood. Fr. George, Fr. John, and me, with our brothers from up and down the centuries. Minstrels on a mission. Priests forever. Sailors on a dare.
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