Holy Dirt
I keep a container of it, myself. I’ve given away a fair share of it to others. It’s holy dirt from the Santuario de Chimayo in northern New Mexico. Pale, pink dust dug out of a hole in the back room of the old adobe chapel.
You drive north of Santa Fe, through hills studded with cholla cacti, pinons, and junipers. You wind down the side road into the little town tucked in its narrow valley. You park by the old gift shop and walk through the gate in the adobe walls into a courtyard paved with native stone around the cottonwood trees. Inside the old sanctuary with its tin roof are pews facing a typical New Mexican Spanish altar with painted wood images. To the left of the altar is a doorway, and through it is a room lined with pictures and crutches and “milagros” – little metal images of body parts representing the miraculous healings attributed to the dirt in the earthen hole in the back room on the other side of a doorway so small that a six-footer like myself must stoop to enter.
It is said that after you rub this dirt on the part of your body that is afflicted by injury or illness, a cure will follow. Claims to this effect cover the walls in the vestibule outside the room with the hole.
But one who doesn’t make this attestation is the Catholic priest who has tended the Santuario for the last 50 years. Father Casimiro Roca says that it is God alone who does the miraculous healings. For him, there is not any mystery or romance in the dirt itself. After all, he has the prosaic duty of seeing to it that there is a steady supply of it delivered to a storehouse near the chapel. Perhaps it is his disdain for this presumed causal relationship between the dirt and healing that caused him to place a children’s red plastic sandbox shovel in the dirt, for the convenience of visitors who want to take away a supply. I found the shovel to have a certain folksy charm, an unpretentious simplicity, when I used it on the most recent of my many visits to the Santuario. A simplicity that reflects the very faith in the effectiveness of the dirt that Fr. Roca strives to dispute. (See the website for the NY Times story about him, below.)
My intellect resonates with Fr. Roca’s denial of the dirt’s direct healing efficacy. I'd go further, and say that since God and Nature are one, all healing processes are natural, not supernatural, miracles. But all that said, my soul has experienced great power in that hole in the ground in Chimayo.
In my first visit to the Santuario, about twenty years ago, I walked into the chapel and instinctively knelt down by the back pew and made the sign of the cross, despite the fact that I’m not Catholic. I sat in the pew and gazed at the altar and began to weep. My body and soul knew that I was in a holy place. After regaining my composure, I got up and went to the back rooms. Seeing the crutches, I wept some more. And just looking at the little room with the hole in the ground was enough to make me sob some more. I went in and scooped up some of the dirt and folded into a piece of paper, and took it home. A treasure.
In the Santuario, I strongly sensed the prayerful intentions of the thousands of people who had come there, in hope of cures for their illnesses or the infirmities of others. When I open up the box where I keep my supply, and run that dirt through my fingers, I sense the suffering and the faith of the countless souls who have sought it. The dirt is holy, indeed. Made sacred by the heartfelt yearnings of so many people, ever since 1810 when pilgrimages to Chimayo began.
The devotion this dirt inspires in me is dampened not at all by knowing that a backhoe digs it up somewhere else in New Mexico and dumps it in a truck that hauls it to the church, no differently than it would haul a load of fill to a construction site. As far as I’m concerned, all the dirt in New Mexico is holy. They don’t call it the Land of Enchantment for nothing.
Some devotees of Chimayo dirt make tea out of it and drink it for healing. I am willing to bet that the dirt has no medicinal quality to it, or if it does, that quality is hardly different than what could be found in a tea made from the dirt of the least enchanted vacant lot in urban America.
But I’m sure of this: the tears I shed every time I visit the Santuario de Chimayo have a healing effect on me. The peace people feel when they worship in that little chapel can only help them recover from insults and injuries to their hearts. The hope that fills people when they enter into that dirty holy of holies can only help to bring their bodies and souls together. It is hard for me to imagine that a visit to such a simple, quiet, beautiful place could harm anyone in any way. It is easy for me to imagine that, on the contrary, just being there could have a subtle but real healing effect on a suffering person.
I feel better, just writing about it! So to Father Casimiro Roca, I say, thank you for keeping that dirt coming in the dump trucks. Thank you for the little plastic shovel, too; it really helps when I come for a refill. Thank you for your wise, cautionary words questioning any direct effect of the dirt: you make an important distinction. But most of all, thank you for keeping this holy, healing place so beautiful and accessible.
New York Times article about Fr. Roca:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/20/us/20dirt.
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