Nestucca Sanctuary News
September 15, 2008 Nestucca Sanctuary Road Update
1. Recently, the federal government closed the lower gate on the road to Nestucca Sanctuary. So, those coming to the Sanctuary will need to enter a pass-code in the small code box. This code will be available to all those coming for retreat. Exiting does not require the code, but the gate opens in, so those exiting should leave enough space for the gate to open safely.
2. A new law-enforcement officer has been hired by the Fish and Wildlife Service, who will be overseeing road safety and driving speeds. The posted limit on the road is 10MPH, and the officer will have radar equipment, and will issue tickets. Please drive with reverence.
Thanks for your attention.
David, S.J. and Colleen
Nestucca Greetings 2008
Greetings from Nestucca. The season of Advent and Christmas provided an opportunity for each of us to relish the power of time and change. We emerged from the busyness of harvest time, whether the literal labor of gathering the last of nature’s gifts of food, or the urban equivalent of wrapping up the things of summer and preparing for winter. We were presented with a period of reflection in which we anticipated the coming of a new year and all that it might hold for us. Now we have moved through the often grey and stormy days that mark the season of rest for the earth, and anticipate a time of new planting and the promise of springtime and rebirth.
Here at Nestucca, we have indeed undergone a long time of harvest and remembering. Since the loss of Andy Dufner, we have been gathering up the fruits of remembrance and gratitude. It has not been an ‘easy’ harvest, but has certainly been a rich one. The seeds that Andy and Colleen planted over so many years still bear much fruit in our Nestucca family, as so many continue to gather here with us. We are indeed a community of the promise of spring and the fulfillment of Easter!
We are here to greet you warmly in this and every season, and welcome you to join us. Having shared so many memories of heart and soul, we each have so much to bring to the promise of Nestucca. The community continues to build the haven of spirit that has always identified us as a healing home, while gathering the resources of time, talent, and materials which will help us create and maintain a true sanctuary for all. Such work is sometimes slow and measured, but the generosity of this community is enduring! We are grateful to you for being part of that enduring generosity.
We look forward to welcoming you home to Nestucca in the near future. There are so many stories to share and to sustain us, and an emerging dream that will help us all move into our new time of planting and growth. With blessings from us and from all earth’s creatures who share this place, may your emerging 2008 be radiant with peace and a restful spirit.
With love and blessings for peace,
David Robinson, S.J. and Colleen Dean
Gary Smith's tribute to Andy Dufner
DUFNER
Sunday, November 20, 2005.
1:30 AM. The call came a half-hour ago as I was sleeping under my mosquito net. Andy Dufner is dead. Colleen Dean, his Nestucca Sanctuary assistant for years, called from the hospital in Portland, Oregon. Funny, after hanging up I thought that Dufner would have liked such a swift technological finessing of the distance—Portland to Adjumani, North Uganda. Then I wept. So he is gone, three weeks after I left Portland. The Bob Dylan refrain keeps bouncing around in my head:
In the end, my dear sweet friend, I’ll remember you.
I wrote this during a home visit in August, September and October:
Wednesday, September 21, 2005 Jesuit Colombiere Residence, Portland, Oregon
Coming home from northern Uganda and South Sudan, seeing death and near-death everyday, I now face the reality of one of my best friends in a cancer battle. Dufner (we always called each other by our last name) looks gaunt, but full of love and wisdom and laughter. His attitude is encouraging. I worry. On discussing the sickness with one of my Portland street friends yesterday he put his arm on my shoulder and said, “Hey, Father, it is going to be okay; maybe he’ll beat this shit.” But he has been on chemo for so long.
He has the interior life of a saint and the brain of a scientist (Ph. D. in high-speed particle physics), making him a unique patient who understands better than most the high stakes of colon cancer and the high language of oncologists and the high consequences of aggressive chemotherapy. He is now being assaulted with chemotherapy in an effort to cage the monster. In that frail and thin body a guerilla fight rages: chemo fire power, administered to tumor sites; the enemy stunned, then slipping away into another part of the body, chased by weakening defenses, mutating along the way and becoming—minute by tortured minute—a more efficient killer.
It is seeing him in such stress that knocks me out. It is not like he is whining, god, never, not Dufner. It is the look on his face, that face I have seen in a million ways over thirty years. This time there was something different, a cloud that occasionally slips across the sun of his optimism. Maybe I am reading into it. Maybe it’s my cloud.. But I don’t like the feel of this relentless regimen of chemicals he is being given.
What to say? It is important for me to be with him. This guy has seen me and welcomed me in laughing and despairing, in howling successes and near meltdowns, when I was brilliant and when I was so stupid it defied description. I love him. Deeply. We never finished a conversation on the phone over these past six years since I have been in Africa without telling each other “I love you.” And when he is here in Portland to do his chemo thing, staying overnight, we often have early coffee together. There is, of course, the talk about death as you would expect of close friends. He is ready for death or life, whatever God gives to him. And joyfully transparent in his readiness. Always has been. We finish with an embrace. Ah, the Dufner hug.
Tuesday, November 22, 2005 Adjumani Refugee Settlement, Uganda
So he’s dead. I am still standing naked before this death. Lots of grief and tears today. I keep commending it all to God, knowing that, in the end, he was a gift to me from God so whatever I feel I place in the hands of the One who gives me all gifts. When I held Andy in my arms in the Colombiere parking lot a month ago on a crispy Portland Fall day shortly before I returned here, we both knew that it would probably be the last time to see each other in this life. I flashed on the words of the poet, Raymond Carver, writing after his diagnosis of terminal cancer:
Back home we held on to each other and, without
embarrassment or caginess, let it all reach full meaning. This
was it, so holding back had to be stupid, had to be insane and meager. How many ever get to this?
I am at peace tonight. Now he is dead and knows our eternal loving God face to face, whose creation he, as a physicist, spent his life explaining and whose Heart he, as a lover, spent his life extolling. It is enough for me.
THE RINGS OF THE SITKA SPRUCE
We met in Oakland in the seventies. I was a hot shot community organizer, on a leave of absence from the Jesuits and badly in need of spiritual direction, and he was on the Board of Directors of a fledgling organizing project in impoverished East Oakland, an organization which employed me. That leave lasted for seven years, and for part of it, probably once a month—as I worked through it all—I would see him in Berkeley where he was in key administrative positions facilitating the Jesuit School of Theology. There I would uncover as much of my soul as I could and ramble through the latest Smithonian crisis. I was so full of anger in those days, taking most of it out on slum land lords and an out-of-touch Oakland City government. Dealing with me was like handling a pile of burning charcoal. Dufner could do it though. We continued to talk in the years after Oakland. One snowy night from a phone booth in Toronto I called him at Seattle University where he was teaching. I was approaching the decision to finally leave or stay with the Jesuits and the priesthood. He said “follow your heart, Smith; it is a good heart. Know I love you.” Over the years he was my mentor, my spiritual director, my brother, my friend, my main man. His friendship is one of the finest things I can say of myself.
Little things about him come to mind. For example he used to explain things to me scientifically with this towering patience as if he really believed I could understand (I was a washout in junior college physics and calculus). There was an episode as he microwaved this strange breakfast gruel that he liked—a combination of grains, water, fruit and one “mystery element (changed each day)”—when I asked him: how did the micro blasting and elements produce the end result? He answered over his shoulder as he was extracting yet another morning masterpiece, “it is a function of atmospheric pressure and humidity.” Simple. I gave him my best gimlet-eye stare and said, like I had said to him countless times before and after, “I don’t know what the hell you are talking about.” Laughter. And then off to breakfast where he ate his risky, awful-looking mush and I ate my safe, attractive Raisin Brand and we talked as the sun came up over the Nestucca. I couldn’t tell you how many times the two of us sat at that table and had our crack-of-dawn, heart-to-heart summit conferences. Once Colleen sent me a card featuring two green, bulging-eye tree frogs gazing at each other with unspeakable love. She titled it: Dufner and Smith talking in the early morning.
Like all individuals who open our hearts, he remained in me, and in others, whatever the separations of time and distance. There is this giant Sitka Spruce that benevolently dominates part of the road which leads into the Nestucca Sanctuary. I used to ask “how old do you think that tree is, Dufner?” He would eyeball it and give me the scientific Dufnerian answer, “about five hundred years.” “Nope,” I said, “you are wrong; it’s at least a million.” We’d have good laugh. Either way you calculated, it is an oldie and a goodie. It’s a beautiful tree, massive, craggy, and the undisputable elder of the Sanctuary’s entire tree world. What mysterious moments of forest life over the centuries that tree would disclose if we looked carefully at its rings? For those who knew and loved Dufner, we can look at the interior in the tree that is our life and discover rings which have his name on them. In our growing process he was there.
THE HEART OF NESTUCCA AND THE HEART OF CHRIST
Nestucca was a Dufner dream realized with a handful of others. It was lived and developed in large part with Colleen, and the two of them mastered the art of hospitality. It became a simple retreat house in the forest that has attracted thousands over nearly two decades. Down that approach road came individuals beaten by life and running on empty. And down the road came people overflowing with self-confidence, like fire flies lighting up the darkness. And there came also every sort of individual who fell in between. Nestucca offered a space where all could take themselves into their own arms, and be taken into those of others.
Many come: students, the homeless, lawyers, physically and mentally challenged, grey-beard Jesuits and Jesuit novices, business people, building contractors, ministers of all faiths, physical and mental health care providers, vagabonds, college professors, religious women and men from many communities, poets and artists, community organizers, people who work with their hands and people who work with their heads, individuals who are turned off by mainline religion, peace and justice activists , physicians, veteran groups, and women who feel alienated by the Church. Dufner welcomed and had a special place in his heart for the poor and those who work with the poor. The place attracts people who are easy with the institutional Church and people who are gagging on doctrine and dogma. I sense a common tenderness among Nestucca guests, even among the most wounded and cynical. The place can unleash that quality of the heart.
People can find what they need while respecting the needs of each other. If you want total quiet, you can have it; if you want community it is there. If you want to sort stuff out, if you want to discover the God of the stars and the rivers, there is a place for those needs to be met. At the center of the day is the Eucharist, offered simply and profoundly. The moments around the table of bread-breaking before the fire place drew participants into a mystery that reflected the most sacred level of the heart of Nestucca and—as Andy would say—that heart is the loving heart of Christ enhancing and uniting us all.
It is a holy place.
Dufner never kidded himself about the driving force behind the holiness. He knew that he was only the instrument of the holy—no doubt a most talented one—and every damn nail he pounded and every piece of plumbing he installed and every new conservational energy system that he mounted and every annoying bump on the road he removed with his preposterously little Kubota tractor—all of these things—were part of that holiness scheme. This Nestucca holiness was incarnated especially in the hours and hours he spent with people, accepting them unconditionally and believing in their intrinsic ability to grow and be and claim their lives before God. I think he was especially alert and sensitive to those who arrived marching to the beat of a different drum. He was man for all seasons and for all people. And he loved them. Andy Dufner was really a loving guy. He was an off-the-scales introvert but always had time to open his heart for those who sought him out. Some visitors were holy, others were fools like me, and many were creatively dealing with the million conflicts and questions that attend the human condition. But we were all people who needed a lightning rod to ground the power of the spirit which was compelling our hearts, our lives, and our vision. He was a willing lightning rod.
That so many different individuals came is a testimony to the vision of Nestucca. On certain nights as I looked at those assembled around the dinner table this image came to my mind: the Star Wars bar scene where weirdoes and heavies—from every part of the known universe—came for a relaxing drink and a little ‘so-what’s-going-on-in-your-galaxy?’ conversation. True, we were all human beings, but with such diversity. The designated cook for the night usually had a different veggie dish specialty so the meals were steeped and heaped with the delicious food; plus there was the delicious dialogue of diverse personal galaxies. And laughter. Geez, we laughed a lot. And to keep our feet on the ground after all that wonderful food, out would come the ice cream, cheapo stuff that Dufner liked. I used to sanctimoniously say that artificially-flavored ice cream was not good for us. His response: “Scientific proof, Smith?” Me: “I don’t have any data.” More laughter. Me again: “Uh, could you please pass the chunky chocolate.”
A BRIDGE TO THE OCEAN
We’d sit at that same table, Dufner and I, sometimes by ourselves and sometimes with others, looking at the Pacific Ocean through the big lodge windows and muse about a method of crossing the Nestucca River from the Sanctuary to the small spit of land that separated the river from the Pacific Ocean, perhaps a distance of two hundred yards at high tide. Such a crossing would eliminate a twenty-five minute drive to the ocean. We had lots of goofy ideas, but his were from the high and mighty scientific perspective so they were probably better. My creations of course were immediately recognized by any fifth grader as consummately dumb; although I always tried to be ecologically correct, a quality that caused Dufner to pause for a moment in appreciation before he dismantled the idea. There were legendary beauties: a giant sling shot (negative: might ruin the trees although the construction of a huge pillow on the other side intrigued him); a Star Trekesque Transporter machine (negative: too expensive, although he liked the physics of the molecular reconstitution); an under-the-river tube (negative: might disturb the ecology of the river life); renting a used, apparently inactive submarine that I saw sitting in the Willamette River in Portland (one of my really dumb ideas). And so we went. Honest to god, we used to entertain ourselves for hours—for years—with Dean cheering us on.
But there is a deeper point; this: the perfect extension across the river was a metaphor for our connection, Andy with me and me with Andy. And we never had to figure it out. The two of us could always build a bridge—or whatever—to each other instantly, spontaneously, whether it was in a room, by phone, by mail, in a boat or walking around the block. It could be in silence, in a knowing glance across a room or it could be in a two-hour conversation. No goofy ideas or phony foundations about the nature of this relationship. The connection to the ocean of each other’s heart was real, solid, direct and steadfast. From my way of seeing things, that connection now lives in an eternal arena.
Gary Smith, SJ,
Adjumani Refugee Settlement, Northern Uganda
December, 2005
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