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Six am on June 17th feels like a lifetime ago now, but was the start time of the RYG work trip to Navajo Land in Utah. We gathered at the church parking lot in Bryn Mawr, saying our goodbyes, checking our boarding passes, and loading up a caravan to the Philadelphia Airport. The trip out was pretty seamless with most of us together towards the back of the plane. The excitement and anticipation was palpable and the number of unknowns were…unknown. We were starting out an adventure together, a new family, a defined community, with energy in our bodies and hope in our hearts.
There were twelve youth and five leaders on this trip. Each person was assigned a “prayer partner” who would become their responsibility as we counted off for van rides and as we processed the trip. Each person was given this prayer partner a week before the trip and was encouraged to begin a conversation and to pray for one another to have patience, understanding, humility and love as we faced each chapter of this trip together. Our prayer partners became our mini unit within the larger unit of RYG and helped each individual feel they were cared for in the midst of a strange land and many new experiences.
We landed in Phoenix hoping to have a 5-6 hour trip ahead of us to Bluff, Utah, located in the four corners region of the southwest known for its spectacular national parks and for the Navajo Reservation. It was not 5 hours, but closer to 8, with a stop in Flagstaff to collect a week's worth of groceries for 17 people. Somehow this relentless travel day did not exhaust RYG. The landscape around us was mind blowing: from the hot dry Phoenix region, to the open road with cacti and red rock outcroppings, to the pine forests around Flagstaff, to the breathtaking glory of Bluff as we arrived at dusk. The rocks above our mission were otherworldly as we all remarked countless times throughout the week. The landscape of the southwest reoriented us and reminded us not only how small we all are, but how little we truly have seen of the glory of God.
This trip would prove to do many of the expected things a short-term mission trip does. It helped our teens to be inclusive, compassionate, empathetic, creative, flexible, and to do all of this without their ever-present phones. What we could not have predicted however, was the influence of the Native people and their land on all of us. The founder of St. Christopher's Mission identified something sacred in the land that called him to stop there and to develop a relationship with the people. Father Liebler left Connecticut and a developed and established life in the early 1940’s. He felt called to the desert to serve people who did not speak his language or know his religion. He brought his understanding of the Gospel and the Episcopal Church to the Diné people and he vowed to serve them.
Father Liebler’s origin story framed our week working with the native people. The Episcopal Church here recognizes that “Navajo” is a white word given to the native people. It is not their word and is a catch all for many tribes, or many people. The people we worked with were the Diné. And it was clear that in the 1940’s, to them, Father Liebler was a different kind of white man, and a different kind of priest. He established a completely unorthodox dynamic with the Diné in those two decades he spent building the mission. The Elders speak of him as though he were some kind of Father Christmas character, bringing joy, food, education and hope to the people. He managed to represent them without diluting who they were. He served the people with emptying love, and without hope for anything in return. This is not a new theme in our faith tradition, but rather is at the core; and is as countercultural today as it was in the first century after Christ’s life and death. In the context of the often tragic treatment of natives in this country, this was something the kids could see as hopeful: a story of a white priest giving his life for the rejected and the forgotten. The impact and influence of this story we could not have predicted, and it changed our sense of relationship with the Diné.
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