Week 2, Day 12, Thursday. Zuni, New Mexico

Woah.  Sorry for the small print on the last post!!  I’ll blame it on the Mac computer I was using in the school’s library.  J

 

We had a few hills on our route today, but overall it was a great ride with only 52 miles.

 

This was the  beautiful view coming into Zuni, New Mexico.

 

We’re staying at Zuni Christian Mission School in, you guessed it, Zuni, New Mexico! They have been wonderful hosts and have opened the entire school for us to use.  This is the entrance to the "old gym".  They are seeking a building permit to build a new gym as Phase 2 of an expansion plan.  The new classroom building we stayed in was very nice.  The Christian school there is truly a mission school as 75% of the students come from non-Christian homes.

 

This afternoon we went on a walking tour of the Old Town area.  They asked us not to take pictures because of the sacred nature of the square. 

We stopped at a church built by Catholic missionaries from Mexico in the 1600s.  The cemetery filled the enclosed front yard.  Our tour guide explained that because of its age, the graves lie on top of one another to the point that the front yard of the church leaves the original front door half underground.  There are steps going down to the front door, but no parishioners darken that door since they built a new side entrance.   The catholic mission was eventually abandoned because of its distance from the rest of the Pueblos in the Southwest.  Currently, there are paintings of Zuni gods covering the interior walls.  They, too, according to the tour guide, are very well done but are falling into disrepair because there is no money for upkeep.

We viewed a 40’x40’ square on a rooftop where they held a ceremonial rain dance on Monday to celebrate their summer solstice.  Had we been in Zuni then, we could have viewed the dance from the surrounding rooftops.

We are riding Sea to Sea to raise money and awareness to fight the cycle of poverty.  Our afternoon tour guide compared the poverty here in Zuni to that of a third world country.  There used to be farming but the climate has changed and now only a few hobby gardens exist in the town.  It is so dry.  Powdery dirt lingers everywhere.  One of the riders received a donation of $2 from an unemployed, local town person.  Let that sink in.  . . .  a gift to fight poverty from an unemployed person.  I’m guilty of stinginess.

The Christian Reformed Church is the only protestant church in this town of about 6,500 miles.  The other religions are Mormonism and the Zuni religion.  The tour guide talked a little bit about the religion of the Zunis.  Their sacred spaces are sacred.  Before entering Old Town, the tour guide stopped to ask for permission to show us around, even though she had finished with another group just a few minutes earlier.  They said not to take pictures.  There were places we could not enter.  Strangely, something about the way they treated their sacred spaces caught my attention.  I couldn’t help but contrast it with the way much of Western Christendom has emphasized the Jesus-is-my-friend familiarity of God.  I wonder if . . . no . . . I think we are missing something if we let go of the fall-on-our-faces awe and mystery of God.