Recently, my Gay Old Soulmate and I took the scenic High Road from Santa Fe to Taos. The Santa Fe Official 2014 Travel Planner marked the route in blue, noting Chimayo only as “a small church built in the early 1800s.” It did not mention pilgrimages, multiple chapels, or holy dirt. We did not know we would enter a different world.
Not long after, I would be asked to preach on chapter 9 of the Gospel of John. There, Jesus thrusts a man born blind into a different world by giving him sight. The ensuing conflict most likely reflects tensions between the author’s community and the religious authorities of that day. But I found myself wondering more about the experience of the man who the Gospel says received Jesus’ form of holy dirt.
How would one born blind experience the world? Space would function through physical sensation, time, and auditory clues. How would one compute distance—from the nature of sound traveling? Would one mark the time it takes to travel from one felt point to another? Certainly one would not feel a lack of vision because vision, for such a man, never existed.
How then would the man experience sudden sight? A gift? A curse? Just overwhelming data? Most of us learn to interpret visual references too early to remember how we learned that a certain green shape was a tree. We “just know” that the tiny, hazy red shape is a barn in the distance, because it’s size and the dust in the air between here and there tell us it is far away. The brain of one born blind would be unable to compute the information fed to it from the retinas. The man in the Gospel would have been confronted by an abstract canvas—and one in constant motion. Shapes, colors, movements, and shades of light would have possessed no associations. Jesus never even asked him if he wanted to see. Jesus simply thrust him into a world of sight.
How do we respond when we are thrust into new worlds?
As my Gay Old Soulmate and I turned into Chimayo, I expected only a historical church. My cynical, white, protestant eyes saw, instead, a vintage tourist trap. Here in Chimayo, one holy site seemed tacked upon another. The Vigil Store (established by J. M. Vigil 1948) advertised carved Santos while a sandwich board proclaimed, “We Ship Chile.” A portrait of Jesus smiled above a sign that urged us to “Eat More Chile.” There was the church, visitor center and gift shop, garden of Madonnas, Native American Cenacle, shrine to the Santo Niño de Atocha, the Santo Niño chapel, Santo Niño gift shop, and Seven Days Creation picnic area—just to begin.
The path from the main parking lot took us past a row of bulletin boards plastered with photos. Friends and family had posted these visual request for intercession for loved ones in need of healing. In the Madonna Garden, a rather western-looking Our Lady of Sorrows looked over at Our Lady of La Vang from Vietnam. The wall of a small chapel depicted Native American Jesus at Last Supper with Native American Disciples. It seemed a mishmash to me, but then, as I entered the Santo Niño Chapel, the stillness struck me silent. In the main church, pilgrims kneeling in supplication, transformed the atmosphere. It hushed cynics and gawkers such as me with the air of devotion.
In a small room off the main sanctuary, pilgrims and tourists alike knelt to reach down into a hole in the floor, scraping up holy dirt. The story goes that on this site a penitent found a crucifix representing Our Lord of Escuipulas. Removed several times, the crucifix kept returning to the site where it had been found. So petitions were made and permissions given to build a sanctuary there. Native American tradition also remembered the spot as one where a curative spring had dried up, leaving dirt, efficacious for healing. That is how the Santuario de Chimayo was built. It became a place of pilgrimage. As we visited the various shrines, moving from place to place, we moved with people from multiple cultures and ethnic backgrounds alongside us. We moved from Native American Jesus to Vietnamese Mary to Hispanic santos. In one small place, cultures flowed, collided, and mixed. We met the Divine with multiple accents.
As we left, past the Seven Days Creation picnic area, we noticed, woven into the chain-link fence, cross after cross after cross. One or two were made of sturdy wood and painted. But most had been fashioned on the spot from twigs, branches, and the grasses growing nearby. With reverence, my Gay Old Soulmate and made our own small twig-and-grass cross. We wove it into the fence in remembrance of our friend, Fred Lindkvist. Fred, who with his partner Bill Cohea, built Columcille, a Celtic megalith park near Bangor, Pennsylvania, had recently passed, his voice no longer audible except through the mystical veil that separates the dead and the living. Columcille, in its own way, had become a site of holy power for the two of us.
My logical—even cynical—side tells me not to trust places like Chimayo and Columcille. They do not quite fit the usual modern constructs for reality. Still, my spirit resonates with their energy. Whether or not I could accept literally Chimayo’s story of a persistently returning crucifix or could scientifically verify the efficacy its dirt, it was holy ground.
In the Gospel story, the man born blind was thrust into a new world. His experience did not fit within the parameters acceptable to authorities of his day. They questioned his experience—even whether he had been born blind. They challenged its details. He stuck to his story, embracing his experience and becoming more insistent the more they confronted him. Finally, the religious cast him out.
Spirituality involves entering new worlds. This has less to do with religion or mysticism than with seeing the world in a new light—often involuntarily. What is life, but continual movement into new experience? What is spirituality but a constant pilgrimage (perhaps mystical, religious, or even secular) to places of deeper meaning that integrate those experiences? We may not understand. We may not even welcome it. Like the blind man, we may perceive it only abstractly at first.
In spite of everything, that man insisted on telling of his experience. “Once I was blind, but now I see.” He told the truth and suffered the consequences.
What experiences thrust us into new worlds? What forces us to see things differently? How do we deal with situations that transgress acceptable understandings? Do we claim our experience? Do we walk into it, allowing it to change our lives—even against the pressure of familiar authorities (economic, social, religious, political)?
I wish now, that I had been a bit less fearful of the authorities of my age. I wish I had not been reluctant to feel foolish. I wish I had knelt at that hole in the church floor, reached down into “el pocito,” and scraped up a little of Chimayo’s holy dirt. I wish I had taken it with me to help me integrate new worlds opening before me each day. Perhaps it might heal me in some unexpected way.
So I pray that, next time, the God of Chimayo may give me the spirit to embrace the new world as did the man born blind. May that divine energy move me deeper into unexpected reality. Next time, may I not hesitate, but pray the prayer of the faithful: “Ready or not, here I come.”