Ashley & Dave’s Story
Ashley Asti & Dave Bieler
Moving to Tucson was not our plan. My fiancé Dave (who’s now my husband) and I were living in Northern Virginia, just outside Washington, DC. We had a favorite yoga studio, a Saturday morning farmers market ritual, we were a short metro ride from his office and just a few hours, by car, from both of our parents. And we had a community of friends.
But about a year earlier, I got sick with a virus that escalated years of chronic illness. I could barely work—even the work I craved as a writer and storyteller. My joy and sense of clarity shrunk. And I felt disconnected from my creative channel, my spiritual muse. When none of the doctors could find explanations or effective remedies, we were told that maybe a new—and drier—climate could help. We felt desperate. A few days before Thanksgiving, Dave packed up our car and drove us nearly 1700 miles to Denver while I slept in the passenger seat. We planned to try it for a month. We dreamed of a life with spruce and pine trees, of elk sightings on hikes. And, mostly, of healing.
I did not heal. Denver’s altitude proved even worse and, as I braced the near-freezing temperatures in multiple layers of pants, we realized I was not cut out for a Denver winter. We needed to pivot. Neither of us had ever been to Tucson, but my work repeatedly overlapped with people in the city. The only thing we thought we knew about Tucson was that it was a sea of brown. It was before we knew that flowers blossom from cacti crowns. That there is water in the canyons after the snow melts. And that the people of the city would welcome us with care. So Dave packed our car once again, carrying suitcases through the snow-covered driveway of our Denver AirBnb, and set his GPS 900 miles south for Tucson.
That December, as Dave sun-bathed in the 60-degree Tucson sun—a rare winter delight for us—he came across an article originally published in our hometown paper, The Washington Post. It was called “Church for ‘nones’” and it mentioned Aldea, a new kind of spiritual community in Tucson. He must have mentioned it to me in passing; honestly, I don’t remember. We weren’t set on making our stay in Tucson permanent and I had never really been to church. So while I let it go, he held onto it, an invisible string.
*
I didn’t grow up in church. My Jewish mom worked as the Office Manager at the Episocopal church five minutes from our house. Every October, I’d dress my little white dog Snowy in a sweater and we’d take her to the St. Francis Blessing of the Animals in the church’s front yard. As I got older, I went to a few Social Justice Movie Nights in the church’s basement. But in the nearly twenty years my mom worked there, I think I attended only one service. In fact, I was adamantly against the “rules” of most religions and thought, naively, that believing in God meant that I couldn’t be rational or smart.
But by the time I was finishing high school and was preparing to give my class’s graduation speech, something had quietly slipped through me. I look back now and it is startlingly clear, though I don’t think I knew it then. I claimed I didn’t believe in the unseen—and, yet, the line I repeated over and over in my speech was, “We must make the world believe, again.” I was eighteen years old, a self-declared atheist, talking about faith. “We must make the world believe that Earth is holy ground,” I said from the stage. “As governments continue to choose war, we must make the world believe in peace.” I wanted us to believe in recycling, and deep listening, and “finding each other.” And that’s when I said it: “May we believe in a magnificent god, again.” I had never claimed a god and, yet, here I was calling for a god “that cherishes our brilliance, not perfection.” A god that was tenderly watching and rooting for us. A god “of laughter.” And, I suggested playfully, a female god—“Ms. God.”
“Whatever it is,” I said, “find your own magnificent god and believe.”
*
My husband Dave did grow up in church. He was a Christian, which means he was handed certainty—though he never felt certain. His doubts started early. As a little kid, he remembers laying awake at night, questioning how our loving god could send millions of people to Hell. It felt like a false binary: “Either you believe in this version of God,” he told me, “or you’re an atheist. So, as a kid, I thought that was my only option. There was no gray.” It was confusing; Dave felt loved by his parents, but God’s love felt transactional. Eventually, his questions ballooned into bigger doubts. The god he was taught to believe in, he realized, wasn’t his god.
But as he fell away from his conservative Christian roots, it’s like he was wandering lost; he didn’t want a rigid Christian worldview, but he wanted what church, he says, does better than anything else: it kindles intentional community. He wanted to be with the like-hearted.
*
Illness changes you. In Salman Rushdie’s book Knife, he talks about recovering from a near-fatal knife attack. “One has to find life,” he says. “One can’t just sit about recovering.” I think he means that we have to make life, that we have to seek it. That after or in the midst of illness, we must work to reclaim life. That it is here, too, if we want it. It may never be the life we had yesterday, but it is ours, now.
We officially arrived in Tucson on Dave’s 41st birthday, with two cats in tow while a moving truck with the rest of our stuff still made its way across the country. It was March and the gentle warmth and setting sun in Tucson, which illuminated the 360 degree mountain views in oranges and pinks, felt remarkable to us as we ate dinner on a restaurant patio and shared a bright fuchsia cactus lemonade. This move wasn’t what either of us had imagined, far away from the families and green lawns we had always known. But here we were, in the flowering desert, stepping together into a new season. May it be good.
By that time, I was exhausted. In my journal, I wrote, “My tiredness is all-encompassing. Work is continually stripping me of energy. It feels like my world is shrinking.” And it was. I’d awake every day to pressure in my head. “All I want to do,” I wrote, “is dissipate its heaviness.” By midafternoon, it’d feel like my body was crashing, “like I’m hibernating, my body temporarily shutting down in order to keep it going.” I stopped going out at night and tried to cram all my social plans, errands, and work into the mornings.
“This,” I wrote, “is not a life well-lived.”
*
Dave never let go of the invisible string. One weekend in early May, he asked if I wanted to join him at Aldea. Honestly, I had low expectations. But he wanted to try it, and I wanted that for him. I agreed.
Two older women greeted us at the door that Sunday, followed by Arlene, who I would come to know as the face and heart of the welcoming committee, helping new visitors find their way in the community. “Here, we can believe different things,” she said when Dave asked her what Aldea stands for. “But we’re rooted in love: love is why we’re here, love is what’s between us.”
After the message, Dave and I sat in the car in Aldea’s parking lot for nearly an hour, trying to make sense of it. It was unlike anything I had experienced. I was still hesitant. Dave, though, had an intuition: Long before he knew it even existed, Aldea is what he had been seeking. More of this.
*
Week after week, we went back to Aldea. A month in, I wrote in my journal, “Each time we go, I find myself fed by it. Unexpectedly. Deliciously.” It felt like Jake, Aldea’s Lead Pastor, had divinely-gifted charisma, like he was born for this role.
I was still struggling to power through each day, but as Jake delivered messages crafted with humor, and profound curiosity, and care, a perspective-shifting question arose in me: How do I exist fully here? Not just pass the time, but live with joy and meaning? I felt the seeds of possibility.
One Sunday night, hours after receiving Jake’s message, a voice dropped in. I started to write:
For a long time, I have felt estranged from who I am. My ambitions. My career. My home. My imagined life.
But—look. It is here.
It is here, cooking dinner for me and Dave. Washing the floor. Meeting a friend who’s willing to get up early and join me at a bookshop for conversation and tea because morning is when I feel most like myself. It is here, getting to write—I mean, praise the gods of creativity and hope, I feel inspired! It is here, me and Dave on the phone with both my parents in New York and hearing them laugh and how much they love him. It is here, in a city I never wanted but that has grown a community around me. It is here, in the delicious ordinary that’s actually extraordinary.
I don’t have to love all of it and it doesn’t have to be easy and, my god, it won’t look like I thought it would, but maybe I can find myself here, and finally, I can know contentedness. I can see this life and I can bow my head, thank you.
I had found faith, again. The magnificent god of right here, right now. Aldea and its loving community—which embraced me and Dave and invited us into their homes—hadn’t just inspired me; it changed the way I saw—and lived—my life.
*
Shortly after moving to Tucson, Dave and I learned that the Saguaro cacti here begin blooming—literally, flowers emerge from their heads—at age 35. I am one year away from that age but each night when Dave tucked me into bed early, after I had sunken from exhaustion but hours before he’d be ready for sleep, he’d say to me, “Goodnight, blooming cactus.” It was a joke—but it was more than that.
Despite everything, I felt its truth: I am in bloom.
Written by Ashley Asti