Fifty years of time

There were at least a half dozen of these juggernauts buzzing around the feeder when we spotted them, jumpy and nervous and wary.  I don't know if I could have taken home a better picture even with my best camera--I had only a little one--given time and space.  But he's here, caught in a moment in which his own quest for food has been interrupted a bit by a bee--see him right there at the spout where the hummingbird would like to get his own fill?  Dang bee.

There's a little drama here, going on quite beneath human radar.  Bee and bird, hunger pains, a day's work. A tiny, tiny drama in the middle of a trip in which every day it's not hard to believe that time itself is plainly  immaterial.  Look at this--

Most geologists estimate the time it took to create this massive masterpiece in gadzillions of years.  Creationists may well differ.  I'll let others slug that one out. What's undeniable is that this kind of massive sculpture wasn't done yesterday.  That little hummingbird and that busy bee know absolutely nothing at all about a millennium. 

And neither do we, really.

Last night a veteran missionary gave us his take on an undeniable difference between cultures.  Anglos worship God on Sunday between ten and twelve, he said; Navajos worship God on Sunday.  I suppose it's a mark of our accomplishment as tour guides that our guests chuckled, understanding.  

At a forum two days ago, I listened to a woman speak passionately about her education as a girl on the reservation, a recitation that went on and on and on and on.  I was the appointed moderator, the one who had to administer control, and I realized, even as she explained her life in thoughtful ways that I wish I would have recorded, that right there at my back was time's winged chariot. The clock was ticking.  My clock.  Not hers.  I had to watch it.  She didn't.

Thoreau claims, in Walden, that time is to blame for our "quiet desperation," when to him, he bragged, it is "but the stream I go a-fishing in." Sure.  Must be nice.  Even now, at this moment I write this, I'm glancing intermittently at the bottom right corner of my screen.  There's no sweeping second hand, but the digits march along in a way that make me nervous because the day's orders are implicit in the way the numbers change--there goes another minute in fact:  get this done, get in the shower, get breakfast, and get going.

Today, we'll visit the Anasazi ruins, the ancient pueblo people who carved their dwellings into the sandstone. No one on the face of the earth knows exactly what  happened to them, the men and woman who built these astonishing apartment buildings, the children who once played in their dusty neighborhoods. 

They're long gone, of course, as is all their joy and pain, all their losses and gains.  We know what little we do about their lives--their food, their comforts, their deaths--from what they quite inadvertently left behind.

It's easy, I suppose, to get escapist about all of this--about the tedious energy of a hummingbird flitting around a backyard feeder creating a drama I wouldn't even noticed if I hadn't enlarged a digital photo.  It's similar maybe to my own life, ours, amid the pageant of endless centuries.  It's tempting, really tempting, to say, "this world is not my own--I'm just a passin' through" because we are no more substantial in the scope of things, I suppose, than that bee in the feeder who happened  on a free lunch.  

But that equation is not the whole story.  If it were, why enjoy a dawn or try to paint God's grandeur or make it as real as we can with the gift of language? Why build a house on stone or sand?  If what we do and say and think and feel is only dust in the wind, then why raise a fuss at all?

Right now, one of the couples on our trip is arising to a very special morning--their fiftieth anniversary.  Fifty years is but a pittance, of course, when compared to the timelessness we've been witnessing in so many ways.  Fifty years flits by like those nervous hummingbirds I could barely catch with a camera.  

But fifty years of love, I'm thinking, ain't nothing to sneeze at; and if I figure that God almighty sees the sparrows and the hummingbirds and even the bees in this vast and timeless world, then it's impossible to imagine that right now, this morning, some part of his own gargantuan eternal nature isn't itching for a bite of the cake we'll use to celebrate that wonderful anniversary of love.  

Time is a gift, Abraham Kuyper once taught me.  It's a splendid beautiful gift he gave us, but it's not real.  It's only a means to an end, a construct, a management tool.  Only eternity is real.  

But it's still a gift.  I wear around my neck right now a necklace designed and created by a good friend who,  just this week, gave it to me as a gift--for my retirement, he told me.  It'll be a while before I take it off.  It's a gift, something to treasure, like time itself.

For all of us, I suppose, the only way to even begin to understand the nature of eternity, the only way we know, is by looking and listening and watching and loving here, in this world, in what we determine our time.  What's of substance here is our taking note of his love and doing what we can of that love ourselves. 

And fifty years of that--fifty years!--by golly, is worth one grand celebration.

Gibraltar of the Navajos

On January 6, 1864, Albert A. Pheiffer led a column of troops under the command of Kit Carson into Canyon de Chelly in an attempt to bring in all the Navajos who’d taken refuge in the canyon’s innumerable hidden crevices.  Given the nature of the canyon, the task was impossible, so the mission changed to simply destroying the Navajos means of staying alive.  The Navajos were destitute and dying, Carson knew; cutting off their food supply would either kill them or bring them into his jurisdiction so that they would—as planned—be forced to march off to Bosque Redondo, on the other side of the New Mexico territory.

Once Pheiffer’s column of 300 men entered the valley, the Navajos, their supplies gone but their spirit unbroken, hurled stones down at the cavalry from the immense walls of canyon, screaming insults.  They were almost powerless against the invaders.

Pheiffer rode into the canyon, burning and food supplies wherever he found them, killing whatever livestock he could locate.  Here is his report:

"Here [in Canyon de Chelly] the Navajos sought refuge when pursued by the invading force, whether by neighboring tribes or of the arms of the government, and here they were enabled to jump about on the ledges like mountain cats, halooing at me, swearing and cursing and threatening vengeance at my command in every variety of Spanish they were capable of mustering.  A couple of shots from my soldiers with their trusty rifles caused the redskins to disperse instantly and gave me a safe passage through this Gibraltar of the Navajos."

Carson himself added this:

“Having accomplished an undertaking never before successful in wartime, that of passing through the Canyon de Chelly from east to west, and this without having a single causalty in his command. . .he killed three Indians (two men) and brought in ninety prisoners (women and children).  He found the bodies of Indians frozen to death in the canyon.”

The fields at the edge of the canyon were then laid to waste, taking, Carson reported, 300 men the entire day to destroy a field of corn.  He determined to scorch everything in sight—including 5000 peach trees, the pride of the Navajos. 

By the time the “cleansing” of Canyon de Chelly was over, 200 Navajos had surrendered, 23 were killed, and another 34 had been taken prisoner.  By February 1, 700 Navajos were prisoners at Ft. Wingate, soon to be marched across the territory, banished from their homeland.  There was more and even greater suffering ahead.

Canyon de Chelly is a wonder.  The beauty takes your breath away.  Awe abounds.

And yet, the place is even bigger than it appears because here, as elsewhere, there's always more than meets the eye.

Music of the Spheres

Pardon my lousy theology, but it seems to me that the real losers at Babel were the architects and the construction industry.  Well, and maybe the dreamers; but then few of us get paid to dream.  I'm sure that for a while good friends had to struggle through confusing new languages, and the Rosetta Stone business went gangbusters; but the rest of us came out of that apocalypse pretty nicely, outfitted as we are today in a wondrous tapestry of language, culture, and race.  Diversity--despite what happened at Babel--is a real blessing.

Our trip to New Mexico is all about diversity, really: the diversity of geological eras, each of them producing astonishing forms and colors that give New Mexico its own famed enchantment: the diversity of people and their stories and legends that give meaning to a way of life.  Navajos celebrate a baby's first laugh with community picnics, for pete's sake--whoever heard of such a thing in Iowa?  Zunis make bread in humped ovens that would give you sunburn even if you never saw the sun, and the local convenience store stocks Wonder Bread.

Red and yellow black and white, male and female created He them, hairy and hairless, thick and thin, gruff and sweet, righties and lefties, big and tall, short and small--we're all part of the kingdom, and the Kingdom.

I've learned to get along with those who believe that praise songs are the best things to hit the church since a padded bench.  I mean, I even like some choruses.  But me--and whole lot of other geezers--often miss part-singing on some golden oldies.  You got people carrying the air, right?--a host of  them, some of the men trailing along an octave lower; then you mix in just a couple of altos and the musical line gets somehow fuller.  Tenors are shiny with a bronze-like color that makes you stop and listen, and then there's basses, holding down the whole effort lest it get too ethereal.  Add 'em all up--even if they aren't accomplished like the Mormon Tabernacle Choir might--and you've got something people call harmony.

Harmony, I think, is among those very rare words in the English language that doesn't have much of a dark side.  Righteousness can get spooky because the perfect is often the enemy of the good.  Justice is a virtue except when it steps on innocent toes, and freedom is a real blessing, as long as nobody yells fire in a theater. But tell me, what's the downside of harmony?

So last night, we found it, led by a talented and friendly guitar-picker who graced a gorgeous New Mexican evening with a few songs of his own, but, often as not, just three-chorded us through some old favorites--"Blessed Assurance," "Leaning on Jesus," "I Will Sing of My Redeemer"--you name 'em.

Didn't hurt that we gathered in a juniper grove beside a hogan that sits way up above an enchanted New Mexico-only, red rock landscape that, no matter what season or time of day, snatches what little wind the high altitude allows you and leaves you staggeringly breathless.  Didn't hurt either that we'd just had something akin to the feeding of the five thousand with a multi-cultural mix--mutton stew, ribs, barbecued chicken, brats, and tube steaks--and a whole tub of fry bread.  And it certainly didn't hurt that the grace of our lovely hosts was perfectly saintly, or that the weather was plum perfect--just enough clouds to take the edge of a burning sun, no wind, temperatures straight from a dream.

It was, even when we weren't singing, the harmony that blessed us all, the tie that binds--harmony that rose from hymnal-less singing, because even when a few of us didn't remember the words of the second verse, others did, and led when they had to.  You can find your way through a whole museum of old songs if you sing like a relay team. When the lines fill in magically and the praise swells, you don't s'mores to taste perfect sweetness.

Ancients used to believe that somehow, some way, if you hit it right, the planets and the stars line up perfectly to create harmonic convergence they called "the music of the spheres."

Last night, the campfire popping, I swear I heard it--and I don't think I was the only witness.  The whole lot of us were making music.

There's isn't much to say about that, I guess, even though I have now tried and probably gone on too long.  Really, there isn't much to say, but thanks.

Sunday morning sermon

Once upon a time, forty years ago, I sat in this very church with about a hundred kids--red and white--and listened to a good preacher, the Rev. Jim Lont, hold forth at a youth retreat. It was then the Rehoboth church, Rehoboth, New Mexico, and it was, I'd say, the very heart and soul of my own church's mission efforts in the region, although there were a dozen other outposts.

I don't know that, right then, I needed my own mission effort any more than any of us ever do, but the truth is I hadn't been in a church all that often in recent years before that; but once my wife and I had moved to Phoenix, I'd become a regular again, just as I had been for most of  my life.  I was back in church, at least publicly, back in church enough to prompt the congregation we were attending in Arizona to christen us youth leaders and entrust us with their kids.  That's why were here--at this place.

I don't think I knew anyone other than the rambunctious high school kids we cameup with, and I had but one ancient memory of Rehoboth, having stopped there to visit when I was a boy, maybe ten, on the way back from a California trip with my family.  

The good Reverend Lont held forth on God's sovereignty.  I don't have a memory like some who can recall sermons as if they were life's most precious passages; but I do remember this one, strangely enough, remember it because, at the time, the old skeptic in me wasn't at all sure that the preacher was making any sense, even though I knew the company line he was taking.  It seemed to me to be a stump speech for Calvinism, all about providence and election and the divine way; and what I'll never forget him saying is that each of you kids--I don't think he meant their counselors--were here for a purpose, that God had ordained this whole event, as he ordains everything, and that they should be prepared  for big things because surely the Lord God almighty had them each in his sights (that's my largely inappropriate metaphor, not his) because after all he had a plan for all of their individual lives.

The upshot was, there was a reason they were here.  Okay, I admit it, in my heart I scoffed.  What he was saying wasn't a new line to me, and I'd driven all the way up with a van full of kids who, to say the least, didn't seem intent on experiencing some kind of life-changing event.  What's more, I'd already seen innumerable faces of kids--white and red--who seemed perpetually bored, sick unto death of this whole Christian thing.

He's got a plan for all of you, the preacher said.  Inside my head, I was rolling my eyes.

And just a word about the church. It's not in good shape, not in good shape at all.  Today, I'm told, here are those associated with Rehoboth who would much prefer it to be out of there--gone.  To get that old building up to snuff would cost more than it would to replace the old thing.

But it was for a long,  long time the heart of the ministry's teaching and healing and worshipping soul, and those who have been most appalled by the possibility of its coming down have been the Native people,or so I'm told.  Excuse a little nuance here, but that old church can easily be perceived as the heart and soul of the kind of cultural violence that some Native people claim happened here in this mission effort--just as it did in every mission effort that included regimentation, strict discipline, stiff laws against Native language, rigorous memorization of doctrine, etc.  This church's history isn't 100% redemptive, and some Navajo and Zuni alive today will be more than happy to point that out.

Yet, ironically and oh-so-humanly, lots of Native people wouldn't hear any plans to rip the place down. It stands there like Shiprock in their own religious iconography.

Today, by the way, it's a thrift store, which is, of course, a whole new kind of ministry.

But the reason I tell the story is that just two years ago I finished a book about Rehoboth--that's right, the late 60's skeptic, who thought Lont's sermon something close to far-fetched, who rolled his eyes at the idea that God almighty had a reason to bring every last one of the retreat folks here that weekend, the youth leader who listened to the preacher hold forth in this old building how God had a plan for each of your lives, ends up, three decades later writing a book about the people whose lives are here and also part of a God's own family.  Good night, Lont was right.  God had his reasons.

Lont wasn't wrong.  I'm a witness.  It happened, just like he said, in this old church that just won't come down.

And that itself is a sermon too for this Sunday morning in New Mexico.

Just pretty much what we are

Let's just assume this is maybe 1917--and the missionary who tells the story and who hasn't been on the field very long, is just now beginning to understand the people he's serving, people who happen to be Navajo.  Because he's a white man, some Navajos believe he has significant powers, so they come to him in medical emergencies, when, perhaps, traditional healers haven't quite made the kind of difference they'd like to see.

So a Navajo man comes to see the missionary, not late, but quite  excited because his wife, he says, is suffering greatly with some kind of ulcer--or two or three.  The missionary, who is not a doctor but gets himself called on more often for medical purposes, more often than he'd like to be called on anyway, responds, leaves his home and, on horseback, heads out to Alvin's place (let's give him a name--the memoir I read didn't).

Once he arrives, the missionary realizes that the man's wife's medical condition requires more than he can deliver. and he suggests, plainly, that they all up-and-go to the hospital where Alvin's wife can receive the kind of care she needs.

Stoutly and unequivocally, the woman refuses.  What's equally amazing, the missionary thinks, is how Alvin now seems vastly less frantic about her condition, even though he knows--after the missionary has looked at her--that his wife's condition is much worse than he originally thought it was.

Still, Alvin says they must go. But his wife says absolutely not. The pain continues. The husband backs down sheepishly.  The two of them talk to each other in language the missionary occasionally understands, but in a heavy Navajo that Alvin uses--deliberately, the missionary thinks-- to conceal something from him.  When Alvin speaks to the missionary, on the other hand, the language is plainly more understandable--and, the missionary thinks, far too broken and English-y for the wife to translate.

It all seems very strange.

Here's what he learns.  Alvin's been having an affair, and his wife will not think of leaving the hogan because she knows darn well that if she does, her husband will go back to his paramour.  That's why she won't go to the hospital. Still, she won't tell the missionary about all of that--not because he happens to be a missionary but because the whole wretched affair, something she'd much rather not talk about, is an affront to her dignity.  And even though Alvin knows his wife's medical condition is worse than he'd guessed, he won't argue as he did when he wasn't in her presence because he's afraid that too much force and volume will only make his wife refuse more adamantly against hospitalization.

Now all of this is a true story, If an old missionary's memoir is to be believed.  It happened out here, on the reservation, to the missionary at a church we visited just this afternoon, close to a hundred years later.

It's hard to imagine really, a distressed husband coming to the door of the preacher for aid the way Alvin did.  Hard to  imagine what life was like on the Navajo reservation, circa 1917.  Hard to imagine the Navajo people themselves back then, the largest tribe in the North America on the largest chunk of reservation land in the West, a semi-nomadic people only recently introduced and harnassed to Anglo ways, an illiterate folk with a rich tradition of oral history and myth, a people only moderately interested in the Christian faith the American government mandated they learn, or the missionaries--Catholic, Presbyterian, and Christian Reformed--who bring it.  It's all hard to imagine.

But what isn't is what goes on between the husband and wife, the deadly domestic dance they choreographed, the dedicated silence of their own denials, the half-truths they so willingly each employ for sheer self-preservation.

What's radically different about this story from something contemporary  is setting--what's undeniably the same is character.  I recognize the husband.  I recognize the wife.

You don't have to be Navajo to understand.  You don't have to be Ukranian or Bolivian or northwest Iowan.  All you need to be to understand is human.

Somewhere beneath all of our rich and considerable differences, we're shockingly similar.

Zuni-Acoma Trail

Thursday's featured hike was a sandy trail that wound through scrub brush and pinons and led up to lava flows that, for all the world look like what's been left behind by scrum of drunk rednecks on fork lifts.  It's hard to believe--almost impossible, in fact--that all that crusty black crud is ancient excess from the center of the earth.

But it is and it was. Strange stuff, almost impossible to walk on.  Yet, years ago--like today--it had to be crossed, and it was--the Zuni-Acoma trail.  From a promontory nicely marked, you can stand up on sandstone cliffs and look way down below into what could easily be mistaken for massive river.  It's not.  It's rock.  Amazing.

Some risked life and limb.

I don't know that it's appropriate out here in Navajo country to use the words "long" and "walk" together, given Navajo history, but let me just say that it was, for some, a goodly hike, out and back.  And the sun was hot.

Once out there, in the wilds--the really, really wilds--a wonderful lecture on what it was we were seeing just then.

The desert environment seems almost merciless, even though occasional ponderosa pines can make you believe that life is really an opportunity.  Still, the shapes and extraordinary, mystical, and, as advertised, enchanting.  

And then, maybe something akin to grace itself, lo and behold something flushed with nothing less than the House of Orange hiding beneath a pinion, unexpected as a miracle.

Breathtaking.  Well, awesome.

Laguna pueblo

By far, the most visited pueblo among New Mexico's several is the Laguna pueblo, most visited simply because you can't miss it.  Ever since the railroad came in 1888, the Laguna people, in contrast to their pueblo brothers and sisters in Hopi, Zuni, or Acoma communities, have lived in a fishbowl.  Passenger trains dragged thousands of rubber-neckers past the pueblo years ago--the railroad is gone now; but today I-40 runs right past it, as transcontinental as any railroad ever was.  If you travel west from Albuquerque, unless you take blue highways, you can't miss Laguna pueblo.

Apparently it is the most progressive of the pueblos, at least that's the way it's heralded--and likely with good reason.  Its proximity to thousands of visitors every day means it hasn't been hidden away for more than century.  When that many people simply ride by, it's hard to maintain a fortress, one way or another.

Then again, the discovery of uranium on the reservation created jobs that changed life for the Laguna people by giving them skills in other areas than agriculture, the skills which got them by for hundreds of years (most people date the pueblo itself at 1699--although the people themselves have been around for centuries' longer).  The mine brought in jobs, new and useful skills, and of course, money; nothing changes the face of things like good old coat of green.

So when people say the Lagunas are the most progressive, they're not wrong.  But progress isn't always a blessing, and change isn't always beneficent.  Faced with the decided diminishment of their traditional culture,the people decided to make a deliberate attempt to reinvest in the old ways a quarter century ago or so, with the reintroduction of pottery-making.  Nice. But I'll put my money on greenbacks, for better or for worse.

The words progressive and traditional are--to some Native Americans--fighting words.  It's tough to be both.  So you decide to make pottery and return to the old ways--okay, but if your kids are watching tv at the same time, good luck.

Leslie Marmon Silko, one of America's most heralded Native American writers, is a Laguna.  Perhaps her most famous work is a short story titled "Yellow Woman," in her book Storyteller.  It's an odd story--half passionate love story, half ancient Laguna myth.  But then, as Ms. Silko explains, to pueblo people like the Lagunas, to people trenchantly devoted to a single space, after hundreds of years, every last stone in the neighborhood has a story, every last marker on the path of life itself.  To a people who are as righteously committed to their own blessed acre, everything has meaning--and meaning derives from stories, the oral tradition.

No wonder it's impossible for the tens of thousands of white folks who stream by everyday on I-40 to understand a people who would really want to live there.  All of  us progressives are, as we fly by, on our way to somewhere else.

The price of uranium dropped in the eighties, I believe, making that huge mine up the road from the Laguna pueblo, a ghost town itself. If you ask a bunch of Lagunas today, they'd be more than happy to tell you that the people suffered immensely from their exposure to hazardous materials in that mining effort--in fact, they banned it.

But it changed them.  Those who want to bring jobs of Native reservations today may well have sparklingly wonderful motives.  Lots  of reservations are places where success may well be measured simply by sustaining a life without significant horrors in the midst of what some would call an otherwise desolate world.

But life itself is always fragile, or so it seems, requiring a delicate balance between holding on to something that gives meaning and spirit and strength, and becoming something else because as everyone knows, in this world of ours nothing ever, ever stays the same.

Balance--one of the central doctrines of Navajo religion.  As the Apostle Paul would say, "Everything in moderation."

But Lord knows it ain't easy.