By the Rivers of Babylon: Blueprint for a Church in Exile

Desert Shrines

3 Desert Shrines Liturgy and Life in the Borderlands They often build them where they find rest. –The Reverend John Fife If you were to visit the shrine built by the No More Deaths (NMD) volunteers at the Arivaca Camp in Arizona’s Altar Valley, you would see an upturned tree stump, its root system exposed, almost churning, as if alive, with the things heaped around it. Among these are a half dozen or so white crosses, some bearing the word “Niños” or asking “Cuántos más?” A tall figurine of Mary stands precariously at the upper left edge of the shrine, surveying her cloudburst kingdom of things with uncanny serenity. You might also begin to notice the scattered, bleached bones of animals; the shed antlers of a deer; a cow’s skull, vertebrae, and ribs. You would see other remains too: abandoned shoes and sandals; a purse with a pink floral design; a shirt reduced to rags; a framed picture of a family, its glass face cracked, the photo discolored; a water bottle wrapped in dull canvas, the color of the desert; and an oxidized credit card inserted into a shoe, creased in the middle, Chase Visa emblazoned on it, a few pesos scattered nearby; and at the far edge of the shrine, almost like an afterthought, a broken necklace of white beads, some of the beads loosed from their thread, melting into the memory of the borderlands. Other things are left behind as well, more haphazardly than what migrants leave as carefully arranged shrines. On the migrant trails, both north and south of the border, one sees the shed skins of a life being left behind: a pair of women’s embroidered jeans, opened packets of strawberry-flavored electrolyte powder carrying the image of a smiling baby, empty water bottles, worn-out 49 shoes, discarded food tins. These trails betray an experience of hurry, of danger, of no time to rest, of living in a manner that cannot sustain life for very long. While I walked these trails in the light of day, the people who walked them ahead of me were probably moving at night; they were probably people unused to desert heat; they were people who were told by the coyotes (human smugglers) that crossing the desert would be easy; they were people who perhaps imagined there was only one border to pass, the six-meter-high fence that stretches across 344 miles of the U.S. border with Mexico, rather than multiple borders, the most impassable border being one of fear and invisibility; and they were also, significantly, people of prayer and hope. Arivaca Camp Shrine and migrant trails stirred up a lot of feelings for me, many of them conflicting. Among these was a sense of outrage that people should be reduced to this condition; fear for those who were crossing even at that moment; and a sense of helplessness, knowing that some would die as they attempted to cross, that predators, both official and unofficial, hunted for the poor who made their way along these paths. But it was also the peculiar proximity of creation and financial system, of bones and pesos, that gave me pause. I also felt a sense of awe, of wonder at the spirituality of the desert places and the courage of those who do cross, or try; perhaps it was the sense of being dangerously close to a life, or to a death in life, close enough to touch the clothing once worn by another, close enough to make out the faces held in a pendant, close enough to imagine the girl who wore the necklace, close enough to imagine the girl who wears it no longer. The contrast between the shrines and the trails might be the paradox between pilgrim and migrant, between home and far country, between the furtiveness of shadows and the plaintive, open spirit of prayer. A pilgrim takes to the path with a sense of hope while the migrant takes to the road out of a sense of desperation, danger, or hunger—both take to the road. The road and the forces that haunt it may tear people apart or, as in the case of the shrines, may bring them together, witnessing to the subversive power of the Spirit, insinuated into and disruptive of the powers and principalities, existing where it ought not, crossing boundaries of spirituality and politics, entangling the flesh and the prayer, offering the gift of hospitality and...