The Desert Pilgrim

The Desert Pilgrim: En Route to Mysticism and Miracles
by Mary Swander

In this exquisite memoir, critically acclaimed writer Mary Swander recounts her extraordinary trek from suffering to emotional, physical, and spiritual recovery. After a car accident left her almost completely paralyzed and in chronic pain with no medical cure in sight, Swander-a lapsed Catholic, without any family to speak of-headed for New Mexico in search of the alternative medicine that the region is known for. Amid the stark beauty of the desert, she meets two unusual healers: Father Sergei, a Russian Orthodox monk who helps restore her faith, and Lu, a curandera, whose herbal remedies help restore her body. Using her own transcendent experiences, Swander weaves an investigation into the history of healing and such mystics as Teresa of Avila, St. Francis of Assisi, and Hildegard of Bingen. Beautifully written, The Desert Pilgrim shows readers how to restore their faith in the modern world-and how to believe in miracles again.

I stand near the back of the nave of Father Sergei's church, my eyes fixed on the two nuns bowing and chanting at a lectern near the wall, their black veils drawn down to their eyebrows, the room dark and hazy from the incense rising up in the air. 'Kyri-e e-le-ison,' the three Russian Orthodox monks in the next room sing. 'Kyri-e e-le-ison,' the tiny congregation of about a dozen parishioners answers. In unison, they bow and cross themselves according to the Eastern rite from right shoulder to left. I follow suit, standing there barefoot, our shoes all piled in a clump near the door of this converted garage in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

'Christ-e e-le-ison,' the monks chant. Father Sergei or Papa, as he is called by his followers passes by the sanctuary door, his bright gold-and-white vestments rustling and glittering, the flames from the candelabra stationed near the altar flickering in the dimness. A large votive candle encased in red glass hangs down from the ceiling in our room, casting eerie shadows on the walls, every square inch filled with brightly painted icons, statues of saints, skulls of animals, photographs of dead monks in their caskets. Even the ceiling is covered with icons: long-haired men staring down at me from slightly crazed-looking eyes. My feet dig into the old oriental carpet, its threads worn and dusty. I am a white, middle-aged, middle-class university professor from Iowa. What am I doing here? I ask myself.

'Christ-e e-le-ison,' I chant back with the congregants and cross myself again. Even though I can't understand the sprinkling of Russian prayers that enter into the worship, I remember enough Latin from my old Catholic school days to get the drift of the service. The format is following that of an old pre Vatican II Mass. The congregants bow, and I bow with them. A single wooden pew graces the back wall, but we all stay on our feet and sway to and fro, gracefully, rhythmically, hypnotically, knees bent, heads bobbing from side to side. An old Hispanic woman in a long, lacy black veil. A suburban-looking couple in their late fifties with their grown Down's syndrome son who sings out the responses in a strong, hearty voice. A younger couple with three small children, one crawling across the floor, weaving in and out around our feet. Over my left shoulder, mounted on a waist-high platform, is a shrine of the Blessed Mother, her eyes open, serene, less psychotic-appearing than the male icons. The odor of roses wafts toward me. 'Kyri-e e-le-ison,' the monks continue. The suburban woman cracks the door, the incense so thick now that we can barely see across the room. A streak of warm, bright desert light beams into the church. Outside, Sunday morning traffic passes by, first one car, then a full five minutes later, another. Once, this had been a busy thoroughfare in Albuquerque, part of Route 66, a street that ran through the heart of the city, through the flesh and blood of an old working-class section of town that sprang up around the railroad. Once, the street had been teeming with shops, cafès, tortilla factories, the Jewish and Hispanic owners sweeping the dust off the sidewalk together in the early morning hours. Then freeways outclassed two-lane roads, and urban renewal severed the area from the flow of traffic. Slowly, over the course of several decades, businesses began to die, and by the mid-1990s, the neighborhood had given way to crack houses and drive-by shootings.

Yet some businesses withstood the changes in the barrio. Across the street, the drugstore and oldest pharmacy in New Mexico, established by a man who had ridden with Pancho Villa, is still open for business. Its walls are lined with herbs boxes, crates, and gallon jugs of dried leaves, bark, and flowers. Luisa, part-owner and manager, stations herself at a card table near the front counter. 'Lu,' as her people call her, keeps track of her clients on little white index cards, filing them by their first names in a small recipe box. There, she records your symptoms and her recommendations: yerba del manzo, echinacea, red clover. One after another, people find their way to her store, her door decorated with an icon painted by Father Sergei, an icon of St. Francis of Assisi, the light from the saint's stigmata shooting out from his hands. The ill approach Lu with stomach problems, Bell's palsy, migraine headaches. One by one the people find themselves cured of their suffering, cured by the herbs Lu gathers along the Rio Grande.

The Rio Grande flows south through Albuquerque, winding past the Isleta Pueblo and casino. The stark white walls of St. Augustine's, the mission church built around 1629, stand in contrast to the flashing neon casino signs advertising blackjack and slot machines. The river pushes beyond Albuquerque's sprawl into the open countryside, where the sky and desert slice the horizon into two equal halves. The Manzano Mountains provide a backdrop for Tome, where just beyond the small town three crosses sit on top of a sacred hill to commemorate the death of Christ. Farther south, the fertile farming valley near Belen with its green irrigated fields gives way to a drier, crustier topography near Socorro. The marshlands of the Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge, with its great blue herons and migrating flocks of snow geese and sandhill cranes, provide a cool oasis in the midst of blowing sand and tumbleweed.

The Rio Grande proceeds north out of Albuquerque on an ear-popping ascent into the high desert country. Rolling hills punctuated with pion and juniper trees fold into the feet of mountains jutting their peaks up into the clear, bright blue sky. The vistas of the high desert narrow, the focal point shifting from an outward to an upward perspective. The Rocky Mountains humble humans, their presence large, looming, and encompassing. Past Santa Fe, the river carves out another fertile valley, a valley filled with red chili pepper plants, with grazing sheep, and with shops containing woolen rugs handwoven by fifth-generation weavers using Old World Spanish techniques and natural dyes. The region is also rich with healing sites. The best known is the Santuario de Chimayo, a Roman Catholic shrine built on the site of an old Tewa Indian hot spring.

The desert is at once inviting and threatening. Its landscape is varied with geological formations from plainslike terrain to rock cairns to ancient cliff cave dwellings. Its people are as multidimensional as the landscape, with a dominant blend of Native American and Spanish cultures. Its vast open ranges produce a leveling effect, its mountain passes a passage through adversity. Here, I am awed by the sweep of the desert's panorama, the absolute envelopment of its reach. Here, I can feel secure in a land that takes such command of its space. Here, I can also sense the danger of the hard, rocky mountain outcroppings and cliffs, and of the beds of volcanic rock and ash. I can grasp my own insignificance in the grand scheme of the earth and the universe. In that realization, in that sheer expanse of emptiness, I am forced to confront my deepest fears, my aloneness and individuality, and my relationship to the Divine. I am forced to intone my own chants of penitence, forgiveness, and gratitude.

'Kyri-e e-le-ison,' Father Sergei intones, and the monks fade from view again into the privacy of the sanctuary. The nave is ours now, the babe at our feet finding our shoes and scattering them across the carpet, the Down's syndrome man wiping his nose with his sleeve, the old woman in the lacy veil lowering her head and kissing the crucifix on her rosary, crossing herself again and again. The mid-May sun shines through the bars of the one window on the door. The bright desert sun forces you to squint even here in this dim room. Light spreads out from the window. Light spreads toward me like St. Francis's hands. The smell of roses encircles me: roses in bloom along the boulevard in front of this church, rosewater mixed into the Virgin's tears, rose hips sealed in a gallon Mason jar in the drugstore across the street. My hands warm. My feet warm. My whole body feels transported to another time and place, a place suspended in time. What is unsealing inside me? From where have I journeyed?

© 2004 by Mary Swander

About the Author

Mary Swander is an award-winning poet and essayist and the author of eight works of nonfiction. Her work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, New Republic, and USA Today. A regular commentator on Iowa Public Radio, Swander teaches at Iowa State University.