my God.....thank you so much.
never did i think i would have richer and richer experiences of community in each season of my life. i am so grateful for the brothers and sisters around me. my thanks to them for caring, for loving, for having fun. my thanks to God for feeding our souls.

tonight was beautiful...we came before you, God in prayer, in intimacy with each other and a desperation to seek your face

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captive Zion
captive Zion
fly us to that mountain
liberate us toward that fresh air, your healing streams....
God looks with tender compassion on his small warriors, the ones who come before him to sojourn on an unknown adventure.
Where the dignity and lives of your people are profaned, Lord, there your name is also profaned. Would that we taste and recognize the character of our times.
In my mind, in my words and my human understanding, anger can gain a ready foothold when I am confronted with the world's devastation and the temptation to become hopeless.

More than 300 years ago, my ancestors came from Spain via Mexico and stepped onto a land of sacred green mountains, pink deserts and golden flowing plains. They made this place their home, called it Nuevo Mexico, after the vanquished Mexica peoples of the valley a thousand miles to the south. Already at home there were the Dine people (known today as the Navajo) the Apache, the Comanche, the Tewa, the Towa and the Tiwa Pueblos. Also the Zuni and the Hopi. From the beginning there was the fear and hatred of people who are different. Warfare, slavery and genocide marked their early history, but it is that strange paradox of the Mexican soul that these two worlds, alien and hostile to each other, would come together to make a new, beautiful, tragic, heroic, poetic race of people......a people with no home, a people with no people, stuck between worlds and apart from the flow of 'civilized' history. My grandfathers’ grandfathers were the nomadic Indigenous of the Sangre de Cristo mountains and the plains east of the Rio Grande. Their names are forgotten to me, their ceremonies and their laughter i can no longer trace in my veins. They were also the displaced, sojourning Iberians-- bold men who came across and ocean to a new land, to begin their lives again in a strange land with strange new people. They farmed the isolated river valleys in the mountains of Northern New Mexico and Colorado. They grazed their sheep and goats on the plains between Belen and Socorro. They were Spanish, but they were also Indian....and their hearts spoke to them in both languages....
In 1848, their way of life changed. A new nation from the East spoke of a manifest destiny, ambitious designs on the continent. These were whiter people, more European people, a people who did not know the soul of the land like the people of New Mexico did. A war was fought. Treaties signed. Borders changed. But it was more than that. This, in a way, was a beginning for the person that I am today. My ancestors foun themselves subject to new laws, new government, new economics, new social arrangement. Beneath it all, the brokenness of human dignity and relationship, expressed most violently in the form of racism. it was a racism that could be seen and heard in public society, but it was also a racism that imbedded itself deeply into the consciousness of my family.
By the 1930's it was clear that their way of life was going to be gone permanently. Their land taken, their livelihoods altered by industrialization, their culture debased. As elementary school students, my grandparents were punished for speaking Spanish. The schools taught not only reading and writing, but they were places where those children could unlearn themselves, and learn to 'fit into' a society that would never fully accept them. These painful lessons sunk in deep.
Cesario Maxmiliano Chavez, born in 1925, decended from ranchers and farmers from the Rio Abajo with names like Nepomuceno Lopez, Domingo Castillo, Gabriel Pena and Luz Lucero--- was 18 years old in 1943. This government, whose global power had been built on the forcible conquest of land and resources from Brown people, now thought it necessary that Cesario, my grandfather, go to fight a war in defense of a way of life he or his family could scarcely be said to have enjoyed. He was not even allowed to finish high school. The war was for the liberation of the world from evil, they said. It would also ensure that this modern Babylon would be the world's uncontested economic an political power, and that consensus at home would be enforced by any means necessary (suppression of minority groups, political radicals, labor)
On the islands of the western Pacific, Cesario fought against another people who were different...in behavior, belief an appearance. It was easy to convince the common soldier that his enemy was evil and must be destroyed. After all, the powers of this nation had been doing that for generations, even succeeding in convincing the alien peoples within their borders that this was true. Many slaves, immigrant laborers and indigenous people know all too well the self hate of internal racism that leads to self destruction. On the reservation, alcoholism and suicide are the largest social problems.
Maybe it was those lessons of fear and mistrust of the 'other' that my grandfather learned from being in the military that made it natural for him to strive for the normalcy of White middle class Americanism and separate his children from the culture that was already dying in him.
It did not die, however. It lives on. It lives on in him, and in his children and children's children, however faintly.

This is my journey. I was born with two warring worlds already a part of me. I was born in the midst of the death of one world and the triumph of another. In elementary school, I was socialized into the majority culture-- both by the school and by my parent, who were themselves culturally dislocated and trying to know what to do with the tension. Later on in my life, I made choices with the information I had at hand.....the people who looked like me an had the same last names were the ones who are ignored, got in trouble, feared, hated. I would consciously turn away from that part of me an become as 'white' as I could. It was not hard. My parents had done it, and the schools were ample training grounds.

After several years, I did arrive at a liberated consciousness of myself. I began a path of healing. I became angry, I backlashed, got militant, struggled with my identity and shame issues, blamed my parents, looked in many places for answers.
It is another long story about how God met me in the midst of my journey and began to work a powerful healing in me from the inside out.
In that, I am becoming one with a heart for reconciling, for joining others on the path of pilgrimage-- so that we can find our true names and re-learn our true languages. New Mexico is my home, and I carry its contradictions and pains in my blood. But in a truer sense, Zion is my home, and I carry the contradiction and pains of living in a world where I do not really belong.....where I cannot fulfill my destiny, my identity because of sin, my separation from God. We are all sojourners moving toward a land that was promised to us, a land where sorrow will be wiped away and the rightful King will reign with justice and healing. Yet our God builds this kingdom in the midst of a flawed reality.

Why does my brother have to go fight a war with a military machine whose purpose it is to protect with violence and destruction the economic dominance, comfort and leisure of the world’s wealthy few? Why is the destruction of innocent Iraqi cities, families, women, men and children necessary for the ‘homeland security’? Why are prison and the military the only choices men of color in urban areas have in this country?

I am tempted to be hopeless about the world. These questions and questions about my identity come up, and I struggle to know how to cope and understand in a way that God would want me to.

Yet, in my friends, those willing to pray with me and be in solidarity, I have found peace and hope. In God’s promises I find hope. The prophet Jeremiah says ‘Because my people are rushed, I am crushed.’ The exiles in Babylon wept, and hung up their harps when they remembered their homeland, the land of their ancestors that God had been so gracious to give to them. There is a time for grief, for lament.
But remember, brothers and sisters….we will enter Zion with singing!
There will be no more curse
And the Lion will lie down with the Lamb
And our King will sit on his throne.

Let us pray for that day, today and each day.