Column - Cheryl Berzanskis: There's nothing like a good church

El Santuario de Chimayo blends divine, human

Posted: Wednesday, August 11, 2010

CHIMAYO, N.M. - On the High Road to Taos in a room the size of a walk-in closet a hole the size of the circle you make with two arms punctures the concrete floor. The pit is filled with dirt. Very special dirt from the nearby hills.

El Santuario de Chimayo, called The Lourdes of America, draws about 300,000 visitors each year to the room with soil trusted to heal believers who've lost faith in all but God, and sometimes that's a little iffy, too.

At the end of July, my cousin, a friend and I were on a quick trip through northern New Mexico and we stopped at the adobe church, which was completed in 1816. While we sat in a small prayer room off the sanctuary absorbing the sights around us, believers walked reverently and almost a little hesitantly into the small room called a pocito.

A man in a touristy plaid shirt and khaki shorts removed a plastic cup from his pocket and scooped up some of the red dirt, capped the cup and pocketed the package. A woman in a wheelchair, her bald head covered by a scarf, and accompanied by three other women, rolled up to the narrow door. She sat silently just outside the pocito before her friends rolled her into the church's sanctuary.

Others in the prayer room sat silently, also, with the only sound being that caused by the friction of sand on adobe under our feet. No one talked. I think it's fair to say that all marveled at the testimonies to faith - eight dozen abandoned crutches, walkers, braces, a dozen pairs of baby shoes, piles of photographs on a tray, homemade crosses, saintly icons, and a photo collage of soldiers, 234 pictures of uniformed men and women.

My belief is that there is nothing like a good church, whatever your theological stripe. They draw people like flies to honey because something inside speaks to the deepest fears and devotions of the human heart.

In this case, pilgrims, face down, seek mercy for body or soul, hoping the rusty clay contains a mysterious healing balm that eludes them otherwise in the 21st century.

I don't think humanity will evolve beyond needing the Mysterious Something of the Universe, but in the old churches like Chimayo, the human representations of spiritual things - the crosses, the loving hands at home, thanksgiving gifts and the abandoned crutches - reinforce the notion that the spiritual and the temporal can and do become one just for a moment.