Monday of Holy Week, April 11, 2022                    (click here to read today’s scriptures)
New Mexican highway to Jerusalem
Hail to you, our King! You alone are compassionate with our faults.
When I drove through New Mexico two weeks ago I felt heavy with my carbon footprint, with the comforts of my Prius, with my incipient old white guy guilt. Sometimes these unnecessaries push me down and beat on me.
The Orthodox Church’s Jesus Prayer helps: Lord Jesus Christ, son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner. Repeat three thousand times, and come back tomorrow (page 7 of the linked book).
I believe that I shall know and see the bounty of the Lord in the land of the living. Wait for the Lord. Be strong and courageous, and wait for the Lord.
In what Jim Finley calls my “traveling hermitage,” I listened to The First Eagle, one of Tony Hillerman’s novels, and thought of Hillerman, another overweight white guy, who became a brother of the Navajo Tribe. He walked the trails near Shiprock and climbed as much as he could of the four sacred mountains that mark the corners of “Dinetah,” the country where the Navajo live (Mts. Blanca, Taylor, San Francisco and Hesperus). He sought to grasp their religious concepts and listened to their religious stories. For him it was not difficult to merge them with his own.
I am the Lord who created the heavens and stretched them out, who spread out the earth with its crops, who gives breath to its people and spirit to those who walk on it. And here is my servant, my chosen one, upon whom I have put my Spirit.
Isaiah’s mystical knowing, poetic and practical, calls out to be heard and believed.
My servant shall bring justice to the nations, not crying out, not shouting, not making his voice heard in the street. A bruised reed he shall not break, and a smoldering wick he shall not quench until he establishes justice upon the earth.
Tony Hillerman edges into the atmosphere of Navajo religion in most of his writing and sometimes becomes very specific. Here, for example, he writes about the Navajo attitude toward money and property:
In the Emergence Myth, the name the Holy People put on evil was “The Way To Make Money.” And the Hero Twins decided to spare the lives of the final monsters, so The People would learn from living with them. Those monsters were named Fatigue, Old Age, Hunger, and Poverty. (Poverty, one suspects, is as much a permanent resident of Dinetah as is enduring Ship Rock – see picture above). But there is also the stark, austere, everlasting beauty of the land.
In the Nightway Ceremonial, the singer chants:
In the house made of dawn,
in the house made of sunset light
in the house made of rain cloud …
with beauty before me, I walk
with beauty behind me, I walk
with beauty all around me, I walk.
If the landmarks of Dinetah have helped form the Navajo religion, it seems equally certain that its beauty has helped form the Navajo character. (from “The Very Heart of Our Country,” in The Great Taos Bank Robbery and Other Stories, reprinted from New Mexico Magazine, March 1973.)
The Navajos descended from the Mongols. The Mongols descended from the Israelites. (Well, maybe. I admit it’s kind of a stretch.) Before the six degrees of separation, I’m imagining that one of Jesus’ disciples was a Navajo ancestor. Jesus’ words, as Isaiah’s, are reflected in those of the New Mexican Indian nation.
And Jesus said, “Let her alone. Let her keep this perfumed oil for the day of my burial. The poor you will always have with you, but you will not always have me.”
The day of Jesus’ burial will not be long in coming. Today on this Monday of Holy Week, already I cringe, dreading what is soon to come.
(Isaiah 42, Psalm 27, John 12)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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