This service is something of a bricolage. Stuff thrown together with some unifying principle in mind. And it is this.
San Antonio lies on northern edge of the vast plains of South Texas, plains that stretch from here to the Rio Grande. Over the past, say, two centuries, Hispanic and Anglo cultures have launched tendrils across this plain and the border itself, intertwining in ways partly parasitic, but mainly symbiotic. These cultures are so thoroughly intertwined in this city that life here can never be like life in Corvallis or Ithaca or Davenport. If you don't believe me, spend a few days of Davenport or some other city north of San Marcos.
So it's natural, that I sometimes find myself wanting to head south, not necessarily physically, but spiritually. In Mexican culture, I see, from a distance, love and passion, humor and darkness that I don't see in my own upbringing. I'm an Easterner, raised in Dallas.
Now, if you're like me, and you are indeed like me, a spiritually impoverished liberal Anglo, if you decide to head south, you'd better take a guide. That is if you want to go beyond De Colores (the musical equivalent of a Starbucks or MacDonalds in Mexico City) looking for something like the soul. And your guide had better be an Anglo, because, after all, a search for a soul, any soul, is a search for something inside you. There's nothing better than a good mirror for charting this sort of landscape.
My bricolage this morning is a small collection of guided tours, border crossings in both directions, songs and stories. Some are funny. Some are dark. All speak to the spiritual tangle marking the border between Texas and Mexico. I offer no interpretation of my own, but here is a short list of attractions.
Our head guide is Robert Earl Keen, a great spiritual leader, right up there with Ray Wylie Hubbard, and Kinky Friedman, really. The prelude was his story of a border crossing, entitled a honeymoon, but in fact a pilgrimage. The invocation was a track that I stole off a Tom Russell album, that he stole off an old vinyl. Our first story was that of another pilgrimage, taken by my parents over 60 years ago.
Coming up-a reflection on narrative that introduces one of the many soul searches in Cormac McCarthy's dark border trilogy, meant mainly to entice you into reading the rest of the work. This followed by another Keen story of a crossing in the opposite direction.
We'll take communion during Keen's story and after he's finished, if there's time, you may have some crossings of your own that you'd like to share. Then I'll let Keen give us one final beautiful blessing, and those who want to stick around can listen to Tom Russell's famous tale of one particular chicken's border crossing.