God-Haunted Lands

If you haven’t spent much time in the American Southwest, you might think it’s an odd place to locate a festival. Why not New York or L.A. or Chicago?—why not one of the more widely known festival cities? Why should this be an Albuquerque event?

I’ve found an eloquent answer in a passage from Lost in the Cosmos by Walker Percy, National Book Award-winning novelist of the twentieth century. If you don’t mind me quoting at length, the full extent of his description is well worth it:

…it is a magical place.

Over there is the squat adobe church of San Francisco de Ranchos de Taos. But here in the vast open plaza there is also the sense of the mysteries conducted within the old Great Kiva, of which hardly a trace remains.

The setting sun is already reddening the upper slopes of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. Not far away, nestled in the pines of the same Blood-of-Christ Mountains is a small shrine commemorating D.H. Lawrence, with a monstrance purporting to contain his ashes. Atop the shrine is a queer-looking epicene eagle with breasts: Lawrence as Phoenix rising from the ashes.

All manner of artists and writers, mystics, dropouts, and peyote-poppers live in the foothills. But a little farther north, at Los Alamos, an elite group of scientists is conducting an experiment which will fatefully alter the entire course of human history.

It is as if all the forces of the Cosmos had intersected here. The old cosmological gods remained even after the new God came. The new God remains even after the transcending spirit of science and art has come. Even the old Brahman self-god of the East has lately arrived.

It is a haunted place, haunted by old gods and now by new people possessed by spirits all their own.

Albuquerque is a meeting place, the center of a land that is God-haunted, where beliefs old and new are drawn together, and art forms ancient and modern meet and kiss in the street.

It’s a perfect place to gather and reflect on our world and our active place in it. How can we live in our time and respond to our world with loving, courageous activism? How can we envision a better world ahead for all people—and illuminate that vision for our communities around the globe?

The American Southwest is not just a backdrop to our time together this year; it’s a context that encourages our dreaming, reflecting, healing, working, partying, revitalizing, expanding.