Santuario de Chimayo. Image from: 4travel.jp
Being Memorial Day, I took a short car trip North to Chimayo, about ten miles West of the fire; the smoke has died down with a respite from high winds, and the little mountain town looked as empty and quiet as it always does, inhabited by a few hundred people, most of whom have been there for years. Long ago it lost its post office and its dry goods store; the church does not hold services. But the mountains are there, as well as a big graveyard profuse with bouquets of the same kind of bright plastic flowers I saw in abundance in the military cemetery in Santa Fe. The thousands of graves there commemorate our wars as well as the families of these soldiers.
Then, in the little church in Chimayo nearby, I stopped to light two candles: one for my son Will and one for a dear friend who is going through a hard time. The woman selling the candles asked me, “Are you going to take them home or light them?” I wish I’d asked if there was a difference in price, perhaps reflecting a discount if I was actually going to carry the candles into the church and pray.
Which I did.
At the door, a kindly young priest was ushering two dogs out with a wave of his hand. “They’re abandoned,” he said. “I don’t mind them staying inside but not all day.”
This is the same ancient church where a stone tablet commemorates those “murdered” by abortions. The Catholic Church is always ripe with contradictions.
I dug up a pinch of the holy dirt kept in a hole in the ground in a side chapel with convenient trowels laid alongside. It is refilled when empty by the priest; once it was thought to refill itself. It is said to be sacred, commemorating the spot where a mysterious crucifix appeared 200 years ago, inspiring the building there of the church.
On the way out, I looked at a large wall covered with thumb-sized photographs of murdered soldiers, one a woman. I call them murdered because—for me—there has never been a cause that justified killing one human being. A sign asked onlookers to pray for these lost souls.
And in my local paper this morning, there was a large black-and-white news photo of the prisoners in the big Japanese internment camp set up in the barren slopes of the dog park where I take Pip for his run. Wearing dark suits, they were seated on benches in long rows. An adjacent news photograph showed young Japanese Americans in World War Two uniforms.
All this sad stuff, but my mood brightened when a friend encountered on the way told me that his partner’s father—they are two gay men—has inscribed not only his son and daughter’s names but this devoted partner on his tombstone—with metal pipes cleverly inserted in the earth to hold their ashes; and this man is a member not only of a church but of an apparently highly conservative mountain community.
Again, a contradiction, that makes all the others less tragic.
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