DAYS 60 & 61 - Douglas, WY - 1147 miles from home
- Esther Lisa Tishman
- Sep 3
- 4 min read
Updated: Sep 4
A requiem - before anything else - before I share about the restorative two days we've spent at a vibrant community church in Douglas.
A requiem for all the beautiful no-longer-living things alongside the road.
A requiem because, as much as this pilgrimate is a walk of love and life, it is also - necessarily - alert to loss and grief.
And, so. The litany of lost and gone:
Road kill that I've come to expect: deer, skunk, racoons, swallows, magpies, nighthawks, butterflies, mormon crickets...
And the road kill that breaks my heart to see. A pronghorn, a young buck still with velvet on his horns, a small bat, a weasel, a redtailed hawk....
And just this Sunday, an enormous Golden Eagle, it's body complete and intact, its eyes still moist.
And the near-ghost towns with shuttered windows and empty playgrounds; the perhaps aptly named Lost Springs, population 6. The lone goat in Powder River.
And yesterday, remarkably, 3 miles of abandoned boxcars alongside Highway 20. Empty and obsolete. Here in the vast spaces of Wyoming, especially, why not just let the cars rust again into the earth?? Thousands of miles of abandoned railroad track. The cost of scrapping the metal far exceeds the value of doing so.
We are now only about fifty miles from the easternmost border of Wyoming, and the vastness of the prairies, the emptiness of the horizon is hitting me with special force. Life and death speak loudly here. This vast space, this unending landscape cradles wealth in the form of energy and minerals. Coal. Oil. Natural gas. Wind turbines. Trona - the source of soda ash (Wyoming is the world's leading exporter of such). Economically Wyoming relies first on mineral extraction, and secondly on tourism and agriculture (livestock, hay). This is land that knows the extractive value of land.
Meanwhile, here in Douglas our host has been Pastor Sarah Phillippi - leader of a remarkable nondenominational church, The Gathering: "a church for those who don't do church." The vision of a former Baptist minister - Pastor Frank Wiederrecht - who imagined "a 'school of love,' where together we learn to love God and love others."Pastor Frank died in 2022, but Sarah carries on his legacy. This is "empowered evangelism" at its most robust: gentle teachings by word and deed; food pantry; back to school supplies; meals served every week; overseas ministries, including after-school programs in Belize for underresourced youth ('tutoring and discipleship' - especially important for girls at risk for trafficking) - and an endearing coffeehouse atmosphere here in Douglas. And the congregation seems to be growing; at their biannual baptismal celebration in June, 15 young and grown adults were welcomed into cool river waters in the Laramie mountains.
Sarah is bivocational, still working as a substitute teacher while leading her church. She reminds me of the many other powerhouse women of faith we've met on this journey, from Karen and Nancy in Walterville - to Jalet in Mitchell - to Kay in Payette - Sylvia in Caldwell - Pastor Mia, Terry and Ginny in Kuna - Amanda-Gayle in Gooding - Tena and JoAnn in Richfield - Mary in Mud Lake - Kelly in Ashton - Charlotte in Shoshoni - and Jamie in Casper. Women of open hearts and countenances, who listen and speak deeply. Who bring food and shelter. The heart and the body can't help but revive in their presence.
Sarah received her ordination through the Vineyard - a movement that some call a middle way between Pentecostalism and traditional evangelism - and she speaks eloquently, welcoming us lovingly, sharing with us the vision of "the Third Way of Christ." This third way reminds me of what I've sometimes called 'neither for nor against,' drawing on Zen teachings of faith. It's the 'middle way' of Buddhism to be sure: an acknowledgment that the peace we seek requires foregoing us vs. them, and even the certainty of right vs. wrong. It is a radical path of love. It is perhaps what Judaism understands the path of Torah to be; what the book of Proverbs describes as Wisdom: "Her ways are ways of pleasantness, and all her paths are peace."
It's not easy, this path of peace.
