The most notable of cave culture, however, are the cliff dwellings of the Anasazi people at Mesa Verde, near Four Corners, New Mexico. The complex, urban like village was carved into rock along canyon walls nearly a thousand years ago. It includes a network of intricate stairways, notched out finger- and footholds on wall faces, multilevel gardens, and elaborate road systems. Multi room, multistory homes had doors in the sides and roofs for access to living quarters. Openings in the floor led to ceremonial chambers ornamented with great detail. Although the cavernous openings there had been inhabited eight thousand years before Christ, the Anasazi culture thrived for a hundred years about AD 1350. As a fortress, such cliff dwellings are our continent’s version of castles; the cliff dwellings remain a significant relic of native peoples.
Chimney Rock Pueblo, at a height of 7,600 feet, is built on the crest of a ridge in precipitous terrain accessed only by walking. The rubble, mud, and mortar construction in southwest Colorado appears as though it was built to coincide with major lunar standstills during the moon rise between Chimney Rock and Companion Rock. Today’s American Indian Science and Engineering Society, whose engineer warriors are both builders and thinkers, was organized to preserve past architectural forms like these. They also design new forms of dream homes that facilitate native people’s still-viable way of life.
As I contemplate my own dream home, I would not pursue life in, on, or under a rock—unless it was Kokopelli’s Cave B&B, perhaps. From Kokopelli’s entrance you can view Southwest sunsets over four states! The waterfall-style shower and flagstone hot tub would no doubt redeem the climb down seventy-five sandstone steps and then a ladder. But proprietors say, “You really have to want to come!”
In the same way, I really have to want to manifest my spiritual dream home before I dare to venture into the caverns of my soul. I’ll have to confront my shadow side, that part of me that hides unmentionable needs and fears. That part of me I don’t want to talk about, my shadow side, is cold and jagged and too tight fitting. But exploring its terrain, I may discover something I need to build a soul home that is as beautiful, comfortable, and intriguing as Kokopelli’s.
The apostle Paul’s letters in the New Testament are riddled with insight about our shadow sides. He sums up fairly well the shadow side of human nature in a piece of Scripture we all can relate to: “For the good that I will to do, I do not do; but the evil I will not to do, that I practice… . Who will deliver me from this body of death?”2
There are many different ways to talk about the shadow side, however. Fairy-tale writer Gordon McDonald touched on it in his work Phantastes, The character Anodos suffers a death that is not permanent, then returns to his castle to find he has lost his shadow He muses, “I have a strange feeling sometimes, that .1 am a ghost, sent into the world to minister to my fellow-men, or, rather, to repair the wrongs I have already done.” Anodos eventually discovers that he is able to love others without needing to be loved in return. “Love gives to him that loveth, power over any soul beloved,” writes McDonald.
McDonald is showing that transformation is facilitated by losing our shadow, acknowledging things we would rather conceal. When we bring them into the light of our castle on a hill, our the light. Reframing the human experience of death as a beautiful passage, another describes the day of a loved one’s dying as “The Day She Entered into Light.” Talk about learning to fly! From the lower levels, we learn lessons for ministry we couldn’t learn anywhere else. Our own cave walls may be God’s canvas and parchment.
The entire complex of Roman catacombs winds for six hundred miles outside the walls of that city. It is the cemetery of hundreds of thousands of Christians in the first three centuries, and, experts say, the earliest evidence of a community that changed the course of Western civilization. Expressing its faith while coping with the realities of life, one of which is simply death, the community created an iconographic art form in the catacombs. Most notably Jesus is depicted there as an ordinary man with his hand touching people, offering healing and relationship.’°
Subterranean places such as the catacombs and the cave churches of Cappadocia have preserved the best of Christian art because of their remoteness and protection from sunlight. Should we wonder that the art of our lives—Jesus touching people through us—is being produced and preserved in the darkest times?
In an erosive process, solid rock is being dissolved, so no wonder it hurts. It takes a long time to make a deep cave. What we do with and through and in that cave may change the course of history.
