Phillip and Good Friday

Now that I’ve placed the issues around saving Hopscotch in the hands of my very competent attorneys, I’ve agreed to remain silent about our plans and actions. This is essential for the success of our endeavor. All of you who have responded so generously over the past weeks, please rest assured that we are fighting the good fight. Keep up your supportive emails which are so important to me and will remain important no matter how long this battle takes—and it may take a while! Fortunately the wheels of justice do grind, even though they grind slowly…

For today, a few thoughts about Phillip and Good Friday. He’s a raggedy bearded man I see from time to time on the mountain road here, hauling a wagon with all his earthly possessions and waving a cardboard sign on which he’s painted, “JESUS IS LOVE.” It strikes me as amazing that a man who has camped in the wilderness here for eighteen winters, enduring sub-minus winters and snow, can still with the greatest enthusiasm and joy proclaim his faith. The world—our world—does nothing for him; no social security, no Medicaid, no shelter—he won’t go to the shelters because of his worries about behavior there—his only human contact the rare driver, flying up the mountain to ski, who deigns to stop and give him a dollar.

Phillip is for me the symbol of Good Friday. Even those many of us who lack for any form of religious faith, perhaps taking shelter in that amorphous term, spirituality, might agree that the image of the man hanging on the cross is replicated in the many in this country who roam our woods and mountains. Our lack of charity towards “the least of these” is palpable on Good Friday.

This is also the day when the roads North of here, leading to the ancient sanctuario of Chimayo, are thick with the some three hundred thousand pilgrims who make the journey from Santa Fe, Albuquerque, and points north and south. Some carry heavy wooden crosses, some make the pilgrimage every year. Police guard them, people who live along the way offer water, and at the end, they troup into the little old church with its hole in the ground filled with blessed sand. It is said to heal all kinds of afflictions and the entry way is thick with crutches and notes of gratitude and snapshots of the healed. I have no doubt that the pilgrimage heals, even if it is the mind that is made whole; Phillip will not be seen here, but his daily trudge down the mountain is its own form of pilgrimage.

Truly, we are blessed.

In New Mexico, Kentucky Hopscotch House Faith Kentucky Foundation for Women