Desert Pilgrim

This book is autobiographical, the story of a woman with serious physical handicaps which made normal movements of arms and legs difficult; it meant a wheelchair or struggling to walk with use of a cane. But Mary Swander, through leaving her home in snowy Iowa to take a temporary teaching assignment in Albuquerque New Mexico, encounters a spiritual tradition which helps her find healing where the medical doctors failed.

The Monk and the Curandera

She meets a Russian Orthodox monk whose monastery in the Hispanic barrio features a vegetable garden and colorful icons, and a woman who runs an unusual drug store across from the monastery; the store is stocked with hand-selected plants and herbs. Lu, the curandera who operates it, gives medicinal remedies along with compassion to the community. Through these people, Mary is able to reinterpret her life experiences: her years as a Catholic schoolgirl, the time she spent as a young woman taking care of her mother who struggled with cancer and finally died in a bleak nursing home. These experiences were followed by the disastrous accidents that left her in pain, with limited mobility. All the while, she has been shedding the Catholic faith of her childhood, but still hanging on to the memory of the mother who was never without her rosary. She embarks on a search for the meaning of these things, as she wonders, as do all of us when we suffer physical pain, why me? Will I ever be better?

This book appeared at the right time for me, when I felt my own need to be a pilgrim in search of better spiritual and physical health. It also gave me new insights into the meaning of recent events in my life. For the author, insight came in slow spurts as she absorbed the wisdom of her newfound desert friends. Father Sergei, the strange monk with his little church full of hand-painted icons in a converted garage, speaks in riddles that only slowly begin to make sense. Lu, dispensing hand-made rosaries along with her remedies, has faith in her ability to help herself and others through her own compassion and ability to mix together the right medicinals. Mary connects with these people while she teaches a writing class at the University.

Beyond a Medical Diagnosis

Mary has seen lots of doctors who have given her various diagnoses, mostly of little help. The doctors can put a label to her problems or scrawl a prescription for a drug already tried without success, but they cannot give her the inner resources to fight for herself, to find the path to better health. Without much faith in medical science anymore, Mary turns to other sources and reconsiders her mother's reliance on her spiritual convictions. Like many of us, Mary cannot go back to a childish or superstitious belief in teachings that make no sense, nor can she relinquish control over her life to an institution like the Catholic Church. But she sees that neither Father Sergei nor Lu have done that. Father Sergei seems to follow his own muse, perhaps because he is a "converso," a Spanish Jew whose family converted to Catholicism during the Inquisition. He embraces his Jewishness as well as his belief in Jesus and sees no conflct between them. He has a kind of Zen peace that doesn't pick things apart.Lu relies on her own inner confidence in what she knows about healing, and both of these spiritual teachers use their own mystical approach to prayer.

Seeking the Inner Life

The author returns to an earlier interest of hers in mysticism and researches the lives of Francis of Assisi, John of the Cross, Hildegard, and Teresa of Avila. The two women especially inspire the author, as she sees them as part of a tradition of female spirituality. This is the same tradition often suppressed, forbidden or persecuted by the Church. Women healers are reviled as "witches" and only men are granted the right to heal by a patriarchal society. But when you are fighting against pain and a perception that "nothing can be done," you need to find the solution inside yourself. The story ends with the completion of Mary's time in New Mexico and her triumph at participating in a community festival, without the cane she had used for walking. She is still not dancing in the street, but she is feeling whole, having found new paths to healing that she can take back to Iowa.

Sometimes, feeling whole and healthy means seeing the value of painful events and finding meaningtul metaphors in daily activities. Here's an example in my life. When I lost my contract job at Ford Motor Company at the end of 2005, after a period of unemployment I got a temporary job at a bank processing center with an IT group where I replaced someone who was unable to do the task. I had to work on a website that stored information about the bank's network equipment, but my predecessor had created a site so confusing that no one understood how it worked or would ever be able to maintain it. After much painful reflection on why I had taken this gig, I decided that I had to discard the current design and start from scratch.

On the day I began this job, on a nice spring day, in a large nest of twigs by the side of the building, three goose eggs hatched and little fuzzy yellow birds emerged. Every day, as I struggled with my task inside the building, I would take breaks to go outside and think while I walked around the pond next to the building and I would check on the progress of the baby geese, who were always there, pecking at the grass with the mother and father geese looking on protectively. I discovered other ponds nearby in this suburban area and more geese families and watched as the babies learned to swim in these small ponds and got bigger each day. Somehow, this temporary job for me became about these geese and checking on them became the highlight of each day. By the time I had put together a redesigned and usable website, the baby geese who had hatched on my first day of work had gotten their adult colors and were ready to fly away. And my time there was also over. The geese never wrote a line of code, but somehow my bond with them helped me put together that website.

Mystics feel the connection between all things and see that the outer world reflects the inner world. To be healed, we must reform our inner world. We must find our own spiritual strength and listen for the inner wisdom. Sometimes there are teachers like Father Sergei and Lu who enter our lives and help us. Sometimes the wisdom is inherent in what we see around us if we can only see it with new eyes.

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