Healing Mud and Other Ingredients
If you are puttering around Northern New Mexico and doing some village-hopping on the high road to Taos you cannot miss Chimayo and its healing sanctuary. This is a place designated on tourist maps not only because it is novel, but because it serves as a sacred locale for pilgrimages, and in particular pilgrimages with the hope of healing.
The simple adobe church has been serving in this way since the mid-1800s. The focal point, meditating symbol or sacred object that effects this healing is, of all things, dirt. Some places boast their healing spring or some splinter of the real cross. But what Chimayo has is dirt and they are sticking with it.
Immediately off the side of the sanctuary is a small two-chamber room that you may enter directly from the sanctuary through a door near the altar. The outer chamber has an eclectic assemblage of paintings of Jesus – none original – that serve as devotional icons. Numerous crutches hang on its walls; crutches we can only assume were left behind by those who no longer needed them.
As you bend over to pass through a very small door into the second chamber, a room even smaller than the first, a space that seems crowded if more than four stand in it, you see the most conspicuous thing first – a hole in the concrete floor that is perhaps twelve inches in diameter. As you look down into the hole you see the dirt below, an easy reach if you kneel and extend your arm up to your elbow. There are little hand-held shovels to assist in the mini-excavation.
Some of the devout pray in the sanctuary first, holding their little baggies or boxes up to the altar for a blessing upon their act of faith. And then, when ready, they pass into the side chapel, duck into the little chamber where the hole is, and stand around it.
I was surprised to see how our little congregation of pilgrims regarded the moment when they approached the hole in the center of the floor. It was not like other places of devotion I have been where people pass through a line and then light candles or deposit prayer petitions in an almost perfunctory manner. This was different. People gathered around the lip of the hole as though a Genie might pop out of the bottle at any moment. They seemed tentative, reluctant to kneel and reach for the sandy dirt that brought them in the first place. Was it like reaching into some unknown space under a rock, not knowing what creature lives there and might bite your hand? Or was it some respect for holiness that had eluded me? Did they simply grasp a truth I didn’t perceive, that drawing near to this power was like playing with fire and you had better be more than a little careful?
To be honest, I have a problem with places like this and even with hopes like these. Call me a child of the Enlightenment. I am profoundly suspicious of confusing religious experience with magic. I question how any thing or place can serve as a stand-in for a healing presence I believe is portable and accessible to anyone, everywhere. This reserve of mine draws distinctions between a supernatural expectation and an understanding of the natural and sacred power that is intrinsic to life. In this way, healing is related to the holy, dynamic and purposeful energy of life and we need to find ways to access it, tap into it, and swim harmoniously with it. That’s how I understand it. So I’ve got problems with healing mud and there is no getting around it.
Such was not the case for my compañeros who hovered around the hole as though waiting for a firecracker to explode. We were in the same world and yet not quite in the same world, at least not the same worldview. We stood in the same room but not quite the same reality. And that made me feel a little too much like a religious voyeur. I was an observer when I wish I could have been a full participant. But how can I participate fully in a reality I cannot accept at face value? If I was to go forward I would have to reinterpret it.
I can make the pilgrimage to Chimayo, pray and even go to the mud room in search of healing, as long as I give myself the freedom to carry in a different viewpoint and expectation. For me, I have to begin with the mystery and grace of God that transcends anything I think I know about God. That is followed shortly by an affirmation that God is not limited to particular places or things understood to effect spiritual power and transformation. But once I state and accept those realities I am freed to embrace pilgrimage, ritual, and symbolism as avenues through which trusting faith can respond to the freedom of God to act in this place, too. I can pray for healing and for the healing of every soul who comes in search of it, too. I can embrace the brokenness of the world that is found in every crutch on the wall. I can wait for the unknown powers of God to unite body with spirit, and overcome despair with holy hope.
I am not sure why the skeptic was the one to break our little pact of group procrastination, but I wordlessly stepped forward, kneeled and picked up the little shovel inside the hole. I rose with a handful of dirt which I shared with two others in my group. They looked at me like I had just handed them a magic totem. Obviously they had been struggling with some of the same things I had.
Two others in the room were strangers to me. And when I turned in their direction I immediately noticed the face of one young woman. She had been badly burned, no doubt receiving little attention at the time and no reconstructive surgery. As with so many others of the poor, she simply lived with the scars of her life.
And why was she there? Did she believe that healing would mean removal of the scars that covered the most public part of her body, her face? Would this go away along with the past that caused it? Or did she hope for something altogether different? Would she arise with cheeks as smooth and supple as those of a baby?
When I turned to her, the dirt filling my hand, I smiled. I suppose it was the kind of smile that comes from being together in the same moment and sharing some lofty hopes. I’ve shared similar smiles with people at the communion table, choosing just the right peach at the fruit stand and in the midst of a common experience that only two intimates can understand. In that smile I hoped and prayed that she would be given exactly what she needed, more than she needed, in ways she had not yet imagined. And when I smiled she responded with a broad smile of her own, a deep, shining smile that erased the scars from her face as though the light of some secret happiness had airbrushed them away.
It is often the case that what we come looking for in the first place is eclipsed by some gift we did not expect. A story that begins in the dirt of one moment often unfolds in the dirt of another. There is a mystery to be found if we pass through the door at the entrance of the little chambers of the heart, if we dig deeply enough and then hold and share what is found there.
