Culture Making in Santa Fe 3 comments

By Ann Conway

I was in Montana at the beginning of June. In the tiny Helena airport, I saw a man reading Tony Horwitz's A Voyage Long and Strange. I later picked it up. It's an engaging account of America’s history between Columbus’s landing and the Pilgrims’ debarkation at Plymouth Rock—which is, if you’ve ever seen it, a great disappointment, a worn gray boulder surrounded by a granite, colonnaded cage, which the locals call “The Greek Outhouse.”

As I traced Horwitz's “quest for gold,” traveling with him from Viking sites in Newfoundland, through the obliterating brutality of the conquistadors, to the territories claimed and reclaimed by the French and Spanish in Florida, I thought of Andy Crouch’s 2008 book, Culture Making: Rediscovering Our Creative Calling. This was also the subject of the seminar I recently attended (led by Crouch) at Image’s Glen Workshop in Santa Fe.

Crouch's premise is that Christians typically engage culture in identifiable ways: critiquing, condemning, copying, and consuming. These postures evidence themselves in all Christian denominations.

In class discussions, we explored culture through music, visual art, and writing. One day, we took an early morning hike through an arroyo. The ineffable scent of the Southwest—juniper, sage and piñon—drifted through the shimmering greenery. I watched lizards slither through the extravagant colors of wildflowers whose names I do not know.

Another day we visited the Georgia O’Keefe Museum downtown, which was packed to the gills with tourists, mostly Anglos dressed in Southwestern gear. Blonde women jostled me, absorbed as they were in their audiotapes, which told them what they saw.

I stared at O'Keefe's depictions of pueblo life and thought of that life as it existed in her day, the slow days, the grit of the earth, the brown skin holding maize, the colors of the bowls, a yellow dog nosing around the corner of the pueblo. The actuality of it, and the memory contained in buildings and land and faces, who now sit in the shadows near the plaza, a presence silent and dark, as the tourists walk by with their color and kindness and need.

On the plane coming here, I read a New Yorker short story whose setting is near Sante Fe. “The Five Wounds,” written by Kirsten Valdez Quande, has as its protagonist Amadeo Padilla, of whom it is said, “you name the sin, he’s done it: gluttony, sloth, fucked a second cousin in the dark bleachers at the high school.”

Now his pregnant, estranged daughter, Angel, has come back to live with him. He’s playing Christ in the annual Good Friday procession and is worried that the hermanos, the older men who run it, will kick him out.

Like many Americans, the characters in “The Five Wounds” live in two cultures—the old ethnic and racial heritage and the new American one of anomie and transience. These are encompassed by Amadeo’s participation in the passion play and his family life of trailers, parenting classes, and occasional jobs.

Quade's setting reminded me of the village of Chimayo, with its healing shrine, a southwestern Lourdes. I didn’t visit this year, but have before, rubbing its holy dirt on my malfunctioning ears. It has done no good thus far, but one always hopes, despite the caprice of the miraculous. This I also know from my public health career, for the county surrounding Chimayo has one of the highest rates of prescription drug abuse in the United States.

So, as Amadeo struggles on the way of passion, receiving and bearing his wounds, he also bears those of his community, which is marked by tragedy as well as transition. He lives in our culture, as do we all; his life resists commercialization and romance. As Christians, Crouch's seminar has taught me, it is our task is to know this culture and to speak truth to it—not through polemics, but by cultivation and creation.

Santa Fe has been a lovely interlude, but my quiet life in Maine beckons me, offering as it does the beauty of the common, rooted life. In my study there, I go to cultivate memory as well as a presence. In that room, I feel Christ with me amid Maine's harsh landscape, as I recall the soft wind of a far-off desert land.