Pilgrim in the Southwest

Christian Century, June 21, 2000 by Talitha Arnold

WHEN I MOVED back to the Southwest, the first thin I noticed was color. Green is not a dominant color in New Mexico. The landscape is brown and red and sometimes golden at sunset, but not green. There is very little that reflects the Christian hymnody of "field and forest, flowery meadow, flashing sea." This is a land of little rain, and of life that adapts to that scarcity.

The second thing I noticed was the age of things, especially sacred things. Catholic churches predate New England meetinghouses. Pueblo kivas were built long before the Catholics came. The ruins of the Anasazi or "Ancient Ones" date back to the time of Christ.

When I moved from Connecticut to New Mexico, I wasn't a complete stranger to this land. I grew up in Arizona and learned to love saguaros, palo verdes and desert vistas. I remember the power of the Indian dances at the state fair and the mystery of the Catholic mission churches with their candles and statues of saints and virgins.

When I decided to go to seminary, I went to New England, but made sure my mother sent me care packages of tortillas and green chili. I returned to the Southwest in 1987 to serve in Santa Fe. It's primarily an "Anglo immigrant" community. If our members have a church background, it's generally Reformed Protestant. Compared to either our Native American or Hispanic Catholic neighbors, we are the new kids on the religious scene.

My ministry and faith, as well as the faith and ministry of the church I serve, have been enriched by interaction with the Native American and Catholic traditions of this region. Two lessons stand out. One, I have learned a deeper appreciation of God's presence in this wilderness land, and two, I have learned to appreciate sacred things and sacred places alongside the Protestant emphasis on the sacred word.

The early Protestant immigrants to the Southwest generally saw their mission as taming the wilderness and converting the heathen. They came to civilize and save, not to learn from the land or its peoples. Coming from the more populated lands of the East Coast or the cultivated farms of the Midwest, the Anglo-American settlers experienced the West as wilderness. The desert was a strange barren land filled with strange frightening creatures--rattlesnakes and scorpions, Roman Catholics and Indians. A young Congregational girl from Connecticut was heading west with her family in 1870. "Goodbye, God," she wrote in her journal, "we're moving to Montana."

Once in the Southwest wilderness, the Protestant pioneers immediately began to re-create what they had left behind. Biblical imagery shaped their vision as they worked to "make the desert bloom." The Arizona Salt River Project quoted Isaiah in literature that encouraged water projects and urban development. The new westerners' favorite hymns included "The Little Church in the Wildwood" and "Shall We Gather at the River?"--interesting selections for an area with fewer than ten inches of rain a year.

For the Navajo, Hopi, Papago and other Native Americans already living in the Southwest, the land was sacred. Like the Christians, they cherished their own stories of creation and of human movement from one world into another. But unlike the Christians, they did not mourn a lost Eden or exile from an idyllic garden to a harsh wilderness. Instead, they told of a gradual progression from one world to the next, with each world being more beautiful, more harmonious and more abundant than the last. For example, the Navajo creation story ends in the Fourth World, or the Southwest. The terrain that eastern and midwestern immigrants experienced as wilderness and wasteland is the Navajo's Eden.

The Native Americans farmed and used the land, but unlike the Euro-American immigrants, they did not have the driving motivation to improve, transform or change it. Instead, their primary goal was to live in harmony with creation as they found it.

To the Native Americans, the Southwest is holy ground. As Jews and Christians have stories about Mount Sinai, the Jordan River or the Red Sea, the Navajos have stories about Pedernal Peak, where Changing Woman emerged, and Canyon de Chelly, where Spider Woman lived. The Southwest tribes still live in their sacred land in sight of their sacred places.

The Hispanic Catholics held a similar understanding of the land and its sacred quality. Like the later Anglo immigrants, the first explorers and settlers of New Spain saw the land through utilitarian lenses. They came looking for cities of gold and abundant land for farms and ranches. But their Iberian peninsula was similar in topography and climate to the new lands of the Southwest, so by the time East Coast immigrants arrived two centuries later, the Southwest was home for the Spanish. A hymn of the Chimayo region from the early 1700s reflects this sense:

   From the earth I was made,
   And earth shall eat me,
   The earth has sustained me,
   And at last earth I shall be also.

Even with air conditioning and swimming pools, the move to the Southwest is still a move to alien territory for many people. As one East Coast friend said, "It looks like the moon." Some newcomers experience fear and disorientation in this wilderness land, the same fear and disorientation that made our ancestors want to dam the rivers, build artificial lakes and otherwise tame this desert.