Of Holy Dirt and other Musings

I just read my dear sister-in-law's email to me about the famous Loretto Chapel in Santa Fe. Rosemary was born there (not too long ago!) and grew up hearing the people around her talk about the mixture of old-world catholicism and indian mysticism that permeates the area. The .pps she sent was very interesting - there are three mysteries about the Chapel's Miraculous Staircase, two of which I knew. 1. The staircase is built without a central support (which, it must be noted, there are other staircases built today without central supports) BUT without any nails or glue. It's perfectly balanced. 2. The nuns prayed for 9 days to St. Joseph to fix their staircase issue with the mysterious master carpenter showing up on the ninth day. Apparently, the nuns were suffering from the eternal dilemma of all new home owners who decide to go the contracting route - their original builder guy left after building their chapel but neglected to give them a way up to the choir loft. (See - this is just another case for the argument of certifying contractors... and making sure they're bonded. Yes, I know, this was in the early 1800s, but still...)

But the third mystery is about the wood that the staircase is built of. Amazingly - and you gotta remember, this strange dude just wandered up, started building without help and then walked off without being paid - NONE of the wood that went into the staircase came from anywhere near the Santa Fe area. Whoa. Freaky...

What a delightful story! I need to do some poking around on the 'net to understand it all, but how delicious it is to have such a lovely mystery available to be pondered and marveled at. I almost *don't* want to poke around and have the story's loveliness explained away!

This reminds me of my Big Trip around the country in 1998. Charles and I were seperated, going through what I euphamistically refer to as our "relationship calisthenics." (it was absolute hell.) I'd decided to air myself out a bit and took 6 weeks off to go tour the country and be a vagabond. It was a delicious break for me in so many ways. I'd worked to put us both through school and it had taken me 8 years to get my degree. The relationship stuff hadn't been fun for a while... I was pooped and really needed the break.

I started traveling in a westerly direction and found myself in New Mexico. My friend Sean had asked me to bring him home some Chimayo holy dirt if I ended up nearby, so, after a few nights in the local Santa Fe hostel (ewwww. Gets 1 star!) I headed up to the chapel to check out the miraculous site for myself.

It's a dingy little chapel in the middle of nowhere. It's been there since the early 1800s. (Here's the wikipedia entry on the site: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chimayo. It's got the whole story on the chapel's miraculous founding.) I went in, read the didactic info, admired the wonderful architecture and dutifully dug up a film-canister-sized serving of holy dirt for Sean and headed down the road.

A couple of weeks and a few states later, I was cruising over the Saratoga pass just north of Yosemite national park, trying to get to Mom's house from the East. (I was avoiding Bakersfield. Blech!)

What an amazing drive!! By this point in my travels, I'd seriously started gathering lots of stuff... Books, books, books. My favorite traveling companions! They were all over the back seat, their characters acting as virtual compatriots in my travels. I had all kinds of goodies from Santa Fe and Flagstaff (Flagstaff Rocky Mountain Hostel - 5 stars!) and had already filled about 5 rolls of film with the things I'd seen. The scenery around me was totally mindblowing - stygian fingers pushed up through the bedrock, with the entire landscape looking more like something out of a Tolkien novel. I expected to see Wizards and Hobbits peering out at me from behind the rocks and trees as I climbed higher into the Sierras.

Slowly, the terrain changed from green grass to melting snow patches and then to snow totally covering the ground. I made the trip with my jaw permanently dropped - each curve revealed another incredible vista more beautiful than the next. I finally decided to pull over to take a break and eat something. The ground at the rest area was totally covered in snow. I had most of the area to myself, except for a couple of guys standing outside their car... and one of them was hopping around funny, holding his butt while the other was trying to calm him down.

Hopelessly curious (not to mention nosy as all hell) I walked over to see what was going on... "My friend got stung in the ass by a bee," said the black guy about his white friend, "I don't know what to do for him..." "AND IT HURTS LIKE HELL!" interruped the other guy.

"Well," I said, "what you need is a mud poultice to pull that out."

The black guy looked around at all the snow and said "and where we going to get dirt??"

I pondered that for a moment...and then I rushed to the car, dug through three weeks of precious souvenirs, and finally found the little canister of Chimayo hold dirt under the driver's seat. It was just a matter of seconds to whip up some mud using the snow and I was back over to the two guys.

"Okay, drop your britches."

The white guy's face was priceless. He had to have been in oodles of pain, because he actually gave it about a second's thought before dropping his pants for the strange white girl with a handful of (unknown to him) holy mud. I dabbed it all over the bee sting, wiped the remainder off my hands into the snow, and said my good byes before heading back down the mountain.

I've often wondered about that guy. I wonder if his butt healed. I wonder if a mud poultice really worked. But more than that, I wonder whether his life changed after that...after having holy dirt daubed on his tukus by a strange woman on the Saratoga pass one day in June, 1998. Did he find happiness? Did his life change? Or did he need a healthy dose of antibiotics when he got home? I guess I'll never know...And I wonder about the strange carpenter who built the staircase. What odd set of circumstances led him to wander into Santa Fe at just the right time when the nuns needed him most? It could quite possibly be argued that the miracle isn't in the mysterious identity of the person - St. Joseph my foot! - but in the timing, which is something that no man (or woman!) can control or explain away. That's where God's work is really done, in bringing us together to help each other in our time of need. It's just somehow the Right Person, at the Right Time, with a nice set of tools or a film canister of Dust.

I still have some of the holy dirt, but it's from a second trip which I took several years later while visiting my darling friend, Brenda. I lost that first canister - I made it through all 10,000 miles of that trip (honestly - 10 thousand miles in six weeks!) and somehow lost my stash of dirt! I guess it had served its purpose. I made a deliberate trip to gather Sean's dirt when I had a chance to go back. My portion of that second sample is in my God-nook, on my icon wall, along with my Columbian nativity and my Tibetan prayer bowl. Maybe it's time to pull that stuff out and see if the juju is still there...So, if you see me walking around with a little smudge of mud poking out over the right side of my t-shirt collar, you'll know I'm just looking for a little bit of my own miracle...or I've just been stung by a bee. :)