The title of our latest podcast is “Before, After, and the Atomic Bomb.” Dave Denny and I begin our conversation telling you about our recent visit to Sedona, Arizona for the first time in over a decade. We discuss the “before and after” of our life there with the Spiritual Life Institute and the Atomic Christ which originally hung in Holy Cross Chapel. Then we relate our early life in Sedona to Christoper Nolan’s new movie, “Oppenheimer,” about the father of the atomic bomb.

Every year I commemorate the anniversary of my move to Sedona on August 17, 1967.  Although I lived there for only sixteen years, it remains the most pivotal time and place in my life and the “homeland of my heart.” I fell in love with the desert there, began my contemplative life, and first learned about my vocation as a Carmelite.

We were forced to leave Sedona in 1983 because of encroaching land development. Our beautiful Nada Contemplative Center, formerly an old homestead called Big Park Ranch, became the Sedona Golf Resort and Vacation Homes. Next to it sits an enormous Hilton hotel complex with tennis courts, more vacation homes, and the Hilton Spa. The only trace left of us is a little stone wall we built in front of the hermitage we named Thomas Merton. Painful. But on this last visit, the Sedona Historical Society, created in 1998, generously welcomed me and the Spiritual Life Institute archives I brought them. The director even suggested I return to the Museum and do an oral history. Healing. If you missed Dave’s Sedona reminiscences last month, you’ll find his reflections at “Wabi: A Fertile Memory.”

Dave’s newest post, “Turning Points: Christ and Hiroshima,” takes our podcast conversation even further. My meditation on the Atomic Christ from Holy Cross Chapel in Sedona seems more pertinent than ever. The blackened Christus looked like it was burned by the bomb the U. S. dropped on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, Feast of the Transfiguration, and another anniversary this month. Is this why the Atomic Christ was taken down, chopped into pieces, and scattered in the Mohave Desert? Are we trying to escape this terrible episode in our history?

Oppenheimer and his team tested the first atomic bomb on July 16, 1945, a significant date for  Carmelites around the world: the feast day of Our Lady of Mount Carmel. This convergence is so uncanny,  I wrote my latest post on “The Yin-Yang of Carmel,” describing the long and venerable Carmelite tradition in terms of critical masculine-feminine balance.

In 1977, Denise Levertov wrote a poem about the horrifying human shadowgraphs left on the stones of Hiroshima: “The shadow’s voice/cries out to us to cry out.” Levertov challenges us to wake up. So does Christopher Nolan’s film about the father of the atomic bomb. As did Oppenheimer himself after he woke to the devastating moral consequences of what he had created.

Don’t miss the film. Listen to our podcast. Read our reflections. The atomic age we live in creates anxieties, yet our podcast ends in hope, “radical openness for surprise – for the unimaginable,” as Brother David Steindl-Rast describes it. We conclude with a meditation on the healing “truth of Earth” from the wisdom of the Ute Nation: “Earth, teach me regeneration, as the seed which rises in the spring.”