How should I sum up what my life has been like for the past month and a half? I can only think to say that it has been wild…perhaps even NM WILD (1). But in all seriousness, my days in New Mexico have been wonderfully full of food, friendship, learning, and exploration. I have been so busy that I’ve already broken my promise of posting to my blog once a month. (Honestly if you know me, you really shouldn’t have expected me to be on time. It is not one of my strengths… And I sincerely apologize to everyone I have been late to meeting and for every time I will be late in the future.) So here is my September blog that I started writing October 1st!
After driving with my dad cross country from PA to NM, I floated around the ABQ in a little bit of a limbo as I signed onto zoom orientation meetings and nervously counted the hours until my flight to Atlanta and YAV Orientation. Once there, I spent two and a half days in meetings and community with the other YAVs in my 2022-2023 class who came from all over the country to do this weird and crazy thing with me. We had an incredible and challenging time as we wrestled with the meaning of the word “mission” and the Church (2) in American and global contexts. Unfortunately, more often than not, the Church’s hand in history comes up bloody. This violence is often justified by the Christian mission, which has many times been an excuse to oppress and subjugate others based on some perceived difference. This may be hard to bear witness to, but I would encourage you to remember the Crusades and their persecution of Muslims, the colonists and their genocide of Indigenous peoples, the businessmen and their enslavement of Africans, the KKK and their terrorism against Black Americans, the conversion camps and their torture of LGBTQ+ community members, and the white supremacists who would see all diversity burn. Not everyone guilty of these horrors committed them with Jesus’ name blazoned across their chest, but a vast majority did. This is the ‘welcome’ of the Christian mission - not a love and grace and acceptance extended to all people but a righteousness for those in power to persecute those without. (3)
With this fresh on our hearts and minds, we YAVs said our goodbyes and were sent off into the world of our upcoming adventure having absolutely no idea what we were heading into. A month in and I’m getting the sense that I won’t really have any way to describe this year before my thirties. Perhaps I won’t entirely know what to make of it even then. But that is a future me problem, and I am just trying to embrace the uncomfortability of my now. A lot of that I am learning from my growing community here in Albuquerque.
Having spent much of my childhood shuttling the 8 hours back and forth from
Pittsburgh to Kernersville (and Oxford and much later Charlotte), I became fluent in both Southern and Northern culture. Trust me, there is a difference. One thing I get from a lot of hand-on-their-hip Southerners is a question that goes along the lines of “Why are y’all so rude up there?” On the other foot, Northerners pull a face and ask, “Do those sun birds ever get tired of snorting sugar?” They both have a bit of a point. Northerners tend to be more direct and upfront with their suspicions of others, but when you win them over they are as kind and loyal as can be. Southerners pour out their politeness and snuggle up to strangers but always keep a close eye out just in the off chance a friend is trying to pull one over on them. Yes, these are gross generalizations of entire swaths of people and no, not everyone fits this mold. Yet, there is still some truth to them.
What I am coming to is the idea of “Southern Hospitality” with its pitcher of sweet tea and platter of cookies that the hostess hands out while holding a knife behind her back. I think this is an image we can all find familiar, an image that we are pointed to as the epitome of etiquette and how we ought to welcome all others. I have never liked this personage nor wanted to emulate it. I don’t have the energy to fake niceness. Nor do I think it is fair to assume the worst of everyone I meet until they have proven themselves to me by wearing down my walled heart. One welcome is sickly sweet and the other sometimes downright offensive, and neither serve to actually open homes and hearts to each other.
If we turn to the Bible for the religious image of our call to welcome, I like to think of the story from Mark 2.13-17:
13 Jesus went out again beside the sea; the whole crowd gathered around him, and he taught them. 14 As he was walking along, he saw Levi son of Alphaeus sitting at the tax booth, and he said to him, “Follow me.” And he got up and followed him.
15 And as he sat at dinner in Levi’s house, many tax collectors and sinners were also sitting with Jesus and his disciples - for there were many who followed him. 16 When the scribes of the Pharisees saw that he was eating with sinners and tax collectors, they said to his disciples, “Why does he eat with tax collectors and sinners?” 17 When Jesus heard this, he said to them, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick; I have come to call not the righteous but sinners.” (NRSV) (4)
The first part of this biblical welcome is Jesus intentionally opening up a place for Levi at the table through personal invitation. There is no fanfare, confetti, or trumpets announcing Levi as the winner of the Chosen One’s favor. In fact, Levi was an outsider - a tax collector hated and avoided purely for his job (perhaps we can see in him our modern-day garbage men or fast food workers, whose humanity we often forget). He was not among the crowds following at Jesus’ heels. He did nothing to make himself stand out. Jesus could have invited anyone to walk with him, but he chose to stop and offer a hand to Levi. And perhaps to the surprise of everyone there (who would ever think a tax collector would want something to do with a wandering rabbi?), Levi accepts.
Then, in the second half of the story, we actually hear the criticism of Jesus’ contemporaries. Their spurn could be because they think Levi is too much of an outsider to receive the honor of hosting Jesus. It could be that Levi does not have the nicest house nor can offer the best wine. The Pharisees might even be miffed that they, faith leaders and self-important men, are not themselves welcomed by the people like Jesus is, a welcome that maybe they thought they deserved. Do you know who would never have thought he deserved welcome? Who would have been told repeatedly that he was unwelcome? Levi. Counted as one among sinners, unfitting company for the Son of God. Yet it is with Levi that Jesus chooses to sit. It is those who are unloved that Jesus chooses to love. Some may read this as a call to that historical ‘mission’ I discussed earlier. I would disagree. I read this as a charge to a radical welcome.
It is this kind of welcome I have, to my deepest surprise, come to know in Albuquerque. It is a welcome that is revolutionary in its simplicity, that focuses on being and existing in community, which is even more impressive because of the cultural tensions that soak into the dust of the Southwest and New Mexico. In true Christian fashion, it reminds me of all that the Communion Table (5) promises: love and acceptance. I think this welcome is exemplified best in the song “Crowded Table” by The Highwomen, which casts a dream I hope to live into:
The door is always open
Your picture's on my wall
Everyone's a little broken
And everyone belongs
Yeah, everyone belongs
I want a house with a crowded table
And a place by the fire for everyone
Let us take on the world while we're young and able
And bring us back together when the day is done
And bring us back together when the day is done (6)
ABQYAV Orientation
It’s Monday, August 29th, and Emma and I start to get settled into our new living space after arriving at the quaint Albuquerque airport from Atlanta the night before. With our third housemate, Savannah (7), we negotiate the claiming and then moving of furniture, re-arranging our rooms and communal spaces of the house to really make it our home for the next year. (Part of which involved deconstructing a big armchair that was in my room, carrying it out the backdoor, around the house and in through a side door to be re-assembled in our dining room. Thanks Sav for leading the way on that.) Luke, our site coordinator, comes sometime mid-morning with a Wisconsin cheese mug full of ice-breaker questions and the cheerful start to our year of getting COVID tests post Atlanta and travel. He checks in with us about how national orientation went and our first thoughts upon arriving in Albuquerque. Both he and Savannah had set up homecoming gifts for us for Sunday night complete with ABQYAV stickers, health clinic t-shirts (8), New Mexico snacks, flowers, and of course, a box full of veggies and grapes hand-picked from Luke’s garden. All of this is to say that between the two of them, I felt that my presence was very welcomed and desired, especially as Luke had noted my love of tea and Emma’s love of coffee and picked up local samples of both for us. This is the intention, kindness, and embrace I have come to cherish about the people of Albuquerque. Even strangers have just this sense of knowing you and an openness to meet you wherever you are.
Then, as if to only further exemplify this welcome, Carolyn, a member the ABQ YAV Board (9) and Head of Administration at First Presbyterian Church, walks up to the house and knocks on our door, ready to journey with us to lunch. As we walk to a local burger joint, Carolyn asks us where we’re from and what organization we’ll be working with and then starts telling us about a flood that occurred the week before in the basement of First Presbyterian. She orders sweet potato fries for the table and we chat about her childhood in Albuquerque, her pride in her state and what her children are up to. It was an extraordinarily normal conversation. Yet, in it, nothing was hidden nor put on a pedestal. Alongside Carolyn’s appreciation for her city, we talked about the ways in which it is also failing its highly visible and vulnerable population of unhoused neighbors, most notably a crackdown on a local park where these people had historically found refuge. We discussed the beauty of the countryside and also the ugliness of the past that has unfolded within it - Spanish conquistadors murdering and mutilating indigenous populations with later American expansions crushing the then Hispanic New Mexican natives (as they see themselves) much the same way. Here, you are Anglo, Hispanic, Indigenous, or Other, and these identities are not dismissible. Unlike in the East, where many are able to put on blinders to racism (10), in New Mexico our differences are acknowledged. Historical plaques around the city proclaim events in both Spanish and English. When we drive up to Santa Fe, we pass five different signs naming the Pueblos whose land we cross and so much take for granted. There is no re-writing history here, because it is etched into the very fabric of the land.
The name of the Sandias, the large mountains that hover over Albuquerque to the East, which my dad and I drove down through as we were coming in, is Spanish for “watermelons.” Some local tales say the Spaniards named them that because when the sun sets, it paints their massive sides pink and green. Other stories claim the local indigenous people, most likely of the Sandia Pueblo, grew fields of watermelons in the spaces of the mountain’s fingers. Both interpretations are likely to have some truth to them. And just as the Sandias themselves are impossible to ignore from their perch over the city, New Mexico’s layered history rests within the chests of its inhabitants.
This truth comes to light for me more clearly in the evening we spent on the crest overlooking Albuquerque from those very mountains. Emma, Luke, and I were joined by two more ABQYAV Board members, Laura and Ben, for a picnic on the crest. After a winding, hour-long drive, we parked near the top, slung our bags over our shoulders and headed towards the edge of the mountain. Ben and Laura took turns pointing out different landmarks and highlighting various anchors in New Mexico’s history. Laura told us of the Indian Residential Schools, one of which was started by the Presbyterian Church, the same denomination that I am here now volunteering for, and how these Christians justified the stealing and torture of children in order to kill the difference in them (11). The effects of this injustice, which has happened in many places other than New Mexico, has left trench-deep scars in the native populations of our country. In a further insult to our land’s rightful stewards, Ben shared the story of Tularosa with us, or as history may know, the first testing site of the atomic bomb (12). The site, close to another large New Mexican mountain range called the Sangre de Cristos (or The Blood of Christ) was picked for its supposed emptiness and safe distance from civilization. However, if you have not learned this before, learn it now - there is no such thing as “empty land,” only people whom the powerful do not find worth counting. (13)
As such, when the bomb went off and all
the scientists in Los Alamos celebrated in their idyllic small-town sanctuary, a nightmare for the people of Tularosa and other local communities began. One day their lives were normal, and the next there was a plume of radioactive smoke in the sky, and their crops were killed and their water was poisoned and their children are still developing cancer. And the nation that did it, the “greatest nation in the world” as we are known for proclaiming, refuses to see them. It makes me wonder what it says about us as Americans that we would rather revel in the triumph of destruction than possibly face the uncomfortable horror of our own guilt by sitting and existing in a space with those we have harmed.
Yet when we take that leap, accept the offered hand or offer one of our own, there is no place more equal than the table on which all the hard and difficult truth is laid bare. And in our discomfort, we allow space for genuine welcome.
-----
Footnotes:
1. Shout out to my fellow YAV, Emma, and her work placement! If you’re interested in checking out her definitely more consistent blog, click here: https://emmaabqyavjourney.wordpress.com/.
2. Like I discussed in my previous blog post, when I talk about the Church with a capital “C,” I am talking about the institutional church specifically in America. In a similar way, I have quoted the word “mission” to contrast its intended meaning with its historical execution.
3. I didn’t have space to put this in the main body, but I want to thank and acknowledge the work behind my words done by Rev. Dr. Alonzo Johnson (who is the Coordinator for Self Development of People Compassion, Peace & Justice) and Rev. Shanea Leonard (who is the Associate for Gender & Racial Justice), the changemakers and worldshakers that lead our national YAV Orientation from the PC(USA) head office in Louisville, KY. We are really lucky to have such lovely and wonderful teachers in our denomination.
4. The Bible I use is The HarperCollins Study Bible which is a New Revised Standardized Version (NRSV). Like many holy texts, the English version of the Bible comes in several translations which each being slightly different from the others. I like to use the NRSV best, and the HarperCollins copy especially for its detailed introductions and footnotes. For future posts, if I am quoting from the Bible, I am quoting from this one.
5. Communion is an important tradition in Christianity in which Christians are reminded of God’s eternal love through Jesus’ sacrifice. Depending on the denomination, it can be a charge to turn away from sin (bad deeds) and towards God’s forgiveness (through repentance) or it can serve as a symbol of acceptance and invitation. I like to view it as the latter. Communion involves a blessing of the sacraments (usually a form of bread and grape juice) which represent Jesus’ body and blood and his own final act of invitation the night before he was arrested. This final meal with his disciples is called “The Last Supper,” and one of the most important stories in the Christian faith.
6. Listen to all of “Crowded Table” by The Highwomen here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZPfI8zBWub4.
7. Savannah was one of the ABQYAVs from the year before. Luke and our board decided to ask her to stay on in the house with Emma and I to help form an intentional Christian community, which is part of the program goals. Savannah is working a full time job and paying rent, while also participating in some of our community events and happenings. She’s also a joy of a person to be around and has helped us plug in to our local community very well.
8. Savannah works at Truman Health Clinic, which is an HIV/AIDS non-profit doing good work in the ABQ community.
9. In addition to Luke, our site coordinator who runs the majority of our Albuquerque programming, there is also an ABQYAV Board made of seven members from the community. They come from all walks of life, backgrounds, and ages, but have each committed two years of their time to helping Luke run and decide the direction of the ABQYAV program. They’ve also been extremely welcoming and invested in Emma’s and I’s experiences here. So grateful to have them!
10. A common phrase I hear often from well-meaning white people (and I have even said, and been corrected on, myself) is that “I don’t see color.” This is something that many people of color find offensive, because it is often used as a one-way-free-“I’m not a racist”-ticket out of facing the realities of institutional racism. It does not denote that you’re not a racist, but rather that you do not care to recognize the systems in place in our country that have historically and continually harmed anyone who isn’t white. As I discussed in this post, hiding from our uncomfortable truths only divides us further rather than bringing us together. I encourage you to explore why you might have said “I don’t see color” in the past and how that places you at a distance from true and vulnerable discussion with others.
11. One thing I want to be extremely clear on is that I am not in New Mexico to minister to nor convert indigenous populations. They are neither lesser nor in need of “saving.” The Church has historically only offered extreme suffering to our native brothers and sisters, and I work to be very aware of how I, as a white Christian, show up in their spaces. I have been very lucky to have been invited to some such personal spaces, and it is important to me that I remain respectful of my friends who have shown me much kindness and welcome. Everyone has a right to their own religion (or non-religion) and no one is inferior for it. Too much of the Christian narrative has been “we are better than…” I am striving to live into “you are my equal and I am grateful to learn from you.” I have much much more to learn from the Puebloan people than they from me.
12. If you’re interested in reading more about the community of Tularosa and the atomic bomb testing in New Mexico, please follow this link: https://www.kunm.org/public-health-new-mexico/2014-07-24/inhabited-desert-the-untold-story-of-the-trinity-test
13. It has been pointed out to me that I got some of my geographical information wrong and would like to correct it down here. The Tularosa Basin is located south of Albuquerque along with the White Sands Missile Range, the northern part of which was the Trinity testing ground for the atomic bomb. The bomb was developed in the 'secret city' of Los Alamos north of Albuquerque near the Sangre de Cristos mountains. In addition, Ben was talking about neither of these facts (which both had drastic ramifications on local and native populations) but instead about the uranium ore mining that occurred in Grants which is west of Albuquerque. This too has had lasting effects on the environment and the people in the area. Needless to say, NM has had a long and difficult history with the production of the atomic bomb. If you want to read more about uranium ore mining, look here: https://nmindepth.com/2022/the-toxic-legacy-of-uranium-mining-in-new-mexico/. Edited Nov. 1, 2022.
-----
Hello! Thank you for reading another doozy of a post. Sorry I did not end up getting it online in September, but I’ve been trying to think of ways to discuss this experience while staying true to the values I hold and sharing the lessons I am constantly learning from my time here in New Mexico. I’ve decided that the best way for me to do that is to focus less on the chronological order of the things I’ve done and focus more on grouping my experiences by themes. This post is obviously about welcome. I’m hoping to go over more of my orientation and work experiences in some of my later posts, so stay tuned. (If I stay on it, October’s post should be about nature and exploration. Fingers crossed I stay on it.)
I would also like to thank the various other ABQYAV Board members and just general community members that have extended variations of this embracing welcome to me over my (nearly!) two months here. It is the care, intention, and kindness of those both named and not named that have made my transition here easier, and it is in deepening those relationships that I find excitement for my upcoming months.
Again, if you like to follow a more chronological and frequent post of what’s been going on in the YAV life generally, you can find Emma’s blog here: https://emmaabqyavjourney.wordpress.com/.
Also, as you go into this week, I encourage you to ask yourself these questions alongside me: What truths am I avoiding? Whose story have I not heard? How do the stories we tell of ourselves impact those left out of them?
Thank you for reading, I hope you have a blessed and love-filled week, and peace out!
- Allison
P.S. A HUGE congrats goes out to my cousins Sarah and Jeb on their wedding this past Saturday and also to Lydia and Trey on their upcoming wedding this Saturday!! I’m sorry I couldn’t be there for either, but I am sending you all so much love and well-wishes. <3