At three in the morning, the moon over the San Pedro River Basin has set. The stars shine, and Orion is a bright as I have ever seen a constellation. It makes its laborious journey across the sky. I too, have one last laborious journey that I must make.
The starlight is enough for me to see the landscape, but as I look down, and there is no shadow, which cautions my stride. You may have noticed in the photos I have taken this year that I sometimes place my shadow in the photo on purpose. I began the practice after I found a painting of the Annunciation in Rome in which the angel Gabriel was the shadow of Mary. It is a comment on the closeness of God in our lives. The angels are as close to us as our very shadow.
I am nervous by my shadow’s absence. Have I been abandoned? I entertain such a thought briefly, and consider going back to the warmth of my room, but I know I can’t turn around. I press on. This journey is something I have felt that I needed to do.
Today is my birthday. Normally, the occasion is celebrated with wailing and mashing of teeth, but I thought a thirty-third birthday required a more unceremonious tambour, so I decided to take a twenty-three mile walk through the desert. If you have downloaded Google Earth onto your computer, you can view the trail I walked and the few pictures I took by clicking here.
The San Pedro River has been a corridor of migration for Mexicans traveling north for centuries. The river flows north, down from the mountains of Mexico into the United States. Before the earthquake of 1887, the lush waterway and surrounding vegetation made the journey easy. Now the dry river bed is a visible landmark to follow when illegal migrants travel north into the United States. Even some distance from the river, the line of trees that grow along its bank can be seen as they rise above the shallow bushes of the desert floor.
“You were hiking in the river at night?” The abbot of the monastery exclaims at the end of the day, “Lots of bad things happened down there! I’m surprised you weren’t arrested, or at least harassed by them.”
‘I am too.” I reply. I try to stand up, and the ache of my muscles pinches as I reflect upon my feelings about “them.”
The “them” to whom the abbot was referring was the Border Patrol.
The Border Patrol swarms the river bed at night, looking for migrants who are illegally crossing into the United States. The migrants prefer to move at night, using the cover or darkness so that they won’t be seen. The San Pedro River attracts the Border Patrol because it is a likely choice for migrants. It is easier than attempting to journey trough the desert on the other side of the mountain. In that desert, a migrant has less of a chance of encountering the Border Patrol, but there are no easy landmarks to guide the trail, and that particular desert has a reputation of being a graveyard to those who try to pass.
During my hike, I never encountered a single border guard. The monastery is about thirty-seven miles north of the border. Perhaps I was seen by the patrol, but the fact that I was rather noisy, rather tall (for a Mexican), walking in the wide open, with a flashlight, in the wrong direction (towards the border), probably broadcast that I was not an illegal migrant. I could see the tracks of the Border Patrol’s vehicles which seemed to be as recent as a couple hours, but for eleven hours of hiking, four of those hours in the accompaniment of starlight, I only encountered one human being, and I can only assume that he was an angel. He came five minutes after I made the only wrong turn during the entire hike, and he helped to correct my course.
That isn’t to say that the adventure was uneventful. Walking in the darkness was like walking into my own fear. I could rationalize that I was free from the poisonous bite of rattlesnakes because they were hiding beneath the ground where they could retain the slightest bit of warmth for their cold-blooded bodies. I was safe from snakes, but the deer that took off when I approached, or even the rustling of small birds terrified me so much that I would need to take a minute to recover before moving on. The unseen branch which would strike my face as I cautiously pressed on would also send me into a mild hysteria, but my deepest fear was to encounter a Coyote, the name given to the smugglers who receive money to carry migrants across the border, or possibly the exact opposite, a Minuteman Vigilante, the U.S. citizens who arm themselves with guns and “protect our borders,” whatever that means. They could have been treated me rather harshly.
Compared to what could have happened, the hike was uneventful. The scariest moment came when I turned on my flash light and heard the footfalls and breaking branches of two migrants rushing off in different directions.
“Amigos!” I yelled. “Ah… never mind.”
Unknowing my benign character, they were only concerned about their own flight. They were running for their lives, which means the scars that would be left behind from the thorn bushes, and low level branches in the thick, dry bush, were relatively unimportant in comparison to the threat of being captured and deported.
“Why was I out there?” You might ask.
Well… there is something important about going out into the desert. Before Jesus began his ministry, he journeyed out into the desert where he was tempted with possessions, power, prestige. I can’t help but recognize the discipline that the desert has in preparing a person, and can’t help but draw the comparison - Jesus was thirty-three, and now, so am I.
But why THIS desert? I have already completed the mission of visiting 365 churches. There are plenty of places that I can get exercise if I just want to hike. There are even plenty of deserts to choose from if I absolutely must hike through the desert. This desert is near the border, so hiking in this desert unavoidably puts me in contact with the issue of illegal immigration in the United States in a way that is dangerously confusing. Are my opinions about immigration so important to me that I would make it the last thing I do on this pilgrimage? And on my thirty-third birthday no less?
This pilgrimage is a pilgrimage of solidarity, not of political ideology, and even where the two paths cross, I almost chose not come to THIS desert, specifically because I did not want anyone to confuse my personal beliefs on immigration with my approach about pilgrimage. A pilgrim comes to pray, to witness, and then to give testimony. There is a certain charism of appreciation at stake in the activity of pilgrimage that I feel is vital, not political commentary. As a pilgrim, I have visited many people, even if I disagree with them, in hopes of appreciating their perspective, and that is why I am out in THIS desert, to learn to appreciate the experience of the migrant.
And yes, after today, I definitely appreciate a migrant who has made it to St. David Arizona, probably a three day hike from the border. S/he is a person who has a very, very strong will. Their journey exceeds what I could myself endure. I had the proper shoes, high performance clothing, energy bars, a backpack with proper weight distribution, and sufficient water. I had trusted people who knew my route and arranged to pick me up when I reached Tombstone, AZ. I’m in pretty good shape, and after all that, I can safely admit, I barely made it. The extreme cold in the morning had turned the soft, moist sand bed of the river into hardened ice. I nearly twisted my ankle a hundred times, on the rounded, loose rocks. When I would reach down to pull thistles out of my sock, I discovered that the bottom of my pants leg was frozen solid from the blistering cold air. By mid afternoon however, my jacket and thermal clothes were shed, as the weather topped out at seventy degrees Fahrenheit. Again, I had the proper equipment to store my excess clothing for later use, and keep moving, the typical migrant does not.
Still, there are thousand of people who make this journey every year, through conditions that are extraneous and severe, no matter the season.
In my life, no matter what happens, and no matter what I believe, I have found an appreciation for the challenges that a migrant faces that exceeds what I could read about in a magazine article. I don’t understand the plight of a migrant entirely, and I probably never will, but I appreciate them.
All said, if there is one thing I wish I could get others to see by what I did today, it isn’t the struggle that migrants make, it is the importance of taking time to see things from another person’s perspective. This entire year has not made a sympathizer for every radical cause even if I visited with people who held radical views. On the contrary, this year has actually tampered my own ideological approaches and taught me that there is always another way to look at the world that is completely legitimate, and quite possibly works better than the approaches formed by my own limited perspective. Solidarity does not call me to surrender my own beliefs in the vain attempt of forging a counterfeit agreement with someone, but it does call me to appreciate them and the challenges that they face. Journeying with someone forces me to make the most vital journey of all, I have to recognize their dignity.
The journey that I made today coincided with the celebration of the Christmas Novena known as the Possada, a nine day celebration recalling the journey of Mary and Joseph to Bethlehem. No one would accept the Holy Family into their house. Their journey was a journey that has been repeated in the lives of migrants for centuries. Humanity bears a regrettable history of closing the doors on those who are different than us, whom we don’t understand.
There is another way.
We can live in solidarity. We can commit ourselves to the practice of being mindful of others. We can seek to appreciate others. We can celebrate their joys. We can learn to mourn their sorrows. We can reawaken the divine within us by abandoning envy and celebrating the Godness that dwells within other people.
It doesn’t mean that everyone is called to make a mildly dangerous excursion into the Arizona desert as I did. Such practices are the calling of a precarious, slightly maniacal few, but all of us are called to grow in our appreciation of the giftedness of others. In my journey of appreciation, I was asked by a friend to do one thing while I was in the Arizona desert. I managed to fulfill her request.
She asked me to use my time in the desert to pray for the sins of Mexico and the United States, the sins we perpetuate because together, the two countries have failed to find a more just solution to the issue of migration. There are families who are separated from each other by this desert. Many have died trying to cross this desert. Many lives have been improved because they were strong enough, but by doing so have weakened the rights of workers on both sides of the border, and undermined the ability of both nations to care for their citizens. While there has been plenty of finger pointing, there has been very little appreciation for either side, and very little prayer.
For that reason, it was very easy for me to make the choice of making one last journey. I needed to make that prayer in the land which currently divides us, and someday, I hope, will bring us together. It was a tough journey, but for me, summed up the reason such journeys are made.
I went to learn, and I learned.
I went to pray, and I prayed.
The journey has changed me in ways I never knew that it could.