WALKING WITH TOM AND THE LORD

 Tom Waits is always with us, and he’s especially with me whenever I walk in a garden and I remember his song ‘Way Down in The Hole’ with the lines that run,

‘When you walk through the garden

You gotta watch your back’

As close as I can get to a picture of Tom Waits in a garden.

 

I assume this refers to the Garden of Gethsemane but I think perhaps it applies to walking in many, perhaps most, gardens.

 

         Of course I knew that the Garden of Gethsemane was where Jesus prayed the night he was betrayed by Judas and where he experienced his ‘agony.’  But lately I discovered there are at least four potential locations for the Garden of Gethsemane.  All of them are near the Mount of Olives, but the Catholics reckon it’s the garden at the Church of All Nations built over the ‘Rock of the Agony,’ or maybe it’s by the Tomb of the Virgin Mary to the north. The Orthodox Greeks reckon it’s to the east.  The Orthodox Russians place it in the orchard adjacent to the Church of Mary Magdalene. I think I’ve got that right but I stand to be corrected by true believers.

Now, I don’t imagine I shall ever walk in the Garden of Gethsemane (though I gather there are plenty of bus tours), and for that matter I don’t think I’ll be following Waits’ advice that ‘If you walk with Jesus, he’s gonna save your soul.’ However, I have been walking among sculptural representations of the Lord, in the Desert Christ Park, on Sunnyslope Drive in Yucca Valley, and I have least peered into an artistic representation of the Garden of Gethsemane.  I shall explain.

      Now, one of the things I sometimes think about while walking in gardens, is what’s the difference between a park and a garden: and OK I agree its not one of humanity’s most pressing questions. However the Desert Christ Park had me thinking again.  

The name would seem to define it as a park, but their mission statement reads, ‘To provide a desert sculpture garden of hope, prayer and beauty; by sharing the Peace of Christ through art.’ So does that mean the place is simultaneously a park and a garden.  Maybe.

 

The Desert Christ Park was established 1951 when a single concrete statue of Jesus was placed there.  The statue was by Antone Martin, sometimes described as a sculptor-poet, who looked like this, which is pretty much the way you'd want him to look:

 

 He’d wanted to have the statue installed at the Grand Canyon but the authorities wouldn’t go for it.  However, the Reverend Eddie Garver who was pastor at the Yucca Valley Community Church, and had acquired five acres from the government to form what he hoped would be a Christian theme park (or I suppose garden), was happy to have the statue on his patch.  

 

Over the next decade Anton Martin made many more statues, most of them created in situ.  Jesus is consistently portrayed as a good looking feller, long hair swept back, a beard, mostly with very serious though a smile seems to occasionally to play about his lips. He does, of course, look very white.

 

Many of the statues are part of tableaux; Blessing the Children, The Last Supper, Sermon on the Mount, and of course the Garden of Gethsemane - Jesus on his knees praying, while the disciples Peter, James and John are asleep.  This kind of thing:

 

Though in fact you can’t get very close because of this stern bit of signage.

 

I’ve been going to the Desert Christ Park once in a while for over two decades now, and there was definitely a period when the place went into decline.  The concrete is formed around armatures of rebar.  Some of the ‘flesh’ on the fingers had fallen off in places off over the leaving Jesus with metal spikes for hands.  To be fair this did have a certain grim appeal.

But when I was there a couple of months ago, a lot of repair work had been done, though there was still the occasional chipped or missing nose, which seems forgivable.

     Contemporary and historic photographs show the Garden of Gethsemane to be dense with gnarled olive trees – some of them reckoned to be 900 years old.  And the Desert Christ Park has some glorious olives trees.  

Some of them are also bedecked with wonderful, architectural birdhouses, an idea I may steal for my own unreligious garden.

 

Now in some ways it’s hard to take the Desert Christ Park entirely seriously.  There is something faintly absurd about the enterprise. And Antone Martin is no Michelangelo. But then who is?

 

On the other hand, having walked around and among Anton Martin’s statues, I find it impossible to find the concept entirely ludicrous. The place is rich with belief, sincerity, spiritual commitment.  You emerge, or certainly you can emerge feeling good, feeling charmed and uplifted. I didn’t even feel that I had to watch my back.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

THE DESERTED WALKER

A lot of people seem to find spiritual solace while walking in the desert.  It makes them feel closer to god, or something.  This has always confused me.  If god is anything he must surely be omnipresent, so the nearest shopping mall must be as spiritual and godly as the desert.  Other people, of course, see the desert as a kind of hell,  which creates a whole different set of problems.

Maybe St Jerome would have understood. In the middle of the fourth century, in order to become more godly, he headed out for “the remotest part of a wild and stony desert burnt up with the heat of the sun, so scorching that it frightens even the monks who live there … this exile and prison to which through fear of Hell I had voluntarily condemned myself, with no other company but scorpions and wild beasts.”  He assumed this mortification would be good for the soul. but when he got there he found himself thinking about the dancing girls of Rome, and that was obviously no good whatsoever for his spiritual ambitions, and so he decided to learn Hebrew to take his mind off things, and that apparently did the job.  St Jerome is also the patron saint of librarians

I’ve often wondered, in an “idea for novel” kind of way, what would happen if a true blue agnostic, not entirely unlike me, was walking in the desert and heard the voice of god.  Would that make him a believer or would it make him think he’d gone insane? Or both?

Probably it’s only a short story, though one perhaps suitable for adaptation into a short film.  In which case the Desert Christ Park in Yucca Valley would be a very fine location for at least part of it.  I went there, not for the first time, at the weekend.

Desert Christ Park is, for want of a better term, a kind of Christian theme park, built on a hillside overlooking the town, a patch of high desert scattered with white statues, many of them arranged in tableaux depicting scenes from the life of Jesus.

The park dates back to 1951, though it’s changed location over the years, and it was conceived by one Eddie Garver, known as the Desert Parson.  The sculptures themselves were made by Frank Antone Martin, an engineer from Inglewood.  They’re made of reinforced concrete and not all of them are in the very best condition, as you can see from the rebar poking through here and there, but that doesn’t really matter.  There’s nothing wrong with a bit of desert ruin.   

Walking there is an interesting experience.  You go there thinking it’s going to be a bit of a joke, and certainly the place is not without its elements of absurdity, but as you walk around you realize it’s rather a decent, honest attempt to express a genuine religious faith, and regardless of whether you share that faith, it’s hard not to be moved and impressed by the effort and belief that went into making it.

If you drive down to Palm Springs and walk around the downtown there, you’ll find on the wall of the Union Bank a kind of bas relief tile mural containing the rather dubious headline – “The Desert is the test of the worth of your spirit.”  Well again, surely the worth of your spirit is tested every day wherever you are, even in a bank in Palm Springs.

The best thing about the mural – it shows an image of a man taking a photograph of a cactus.  Being a cactus enthusiast myself, I took a photograph of the man taking the photograph.  And I rather wished there could have been somebody there taking a photograph of me taking a photograph of the man taking a photograph; but you can’t have everything.

And for those of you who like a good map (and I know some do), here's rather low res one of the Desert Christ Park.