the migrant workers' church

[If dreams would write more stories for me, I could become very...happy.  Well.  Something to hope for.  One of these days when I remember how to sleep consistently again.
As well as to the dreamtime, my thanks also go to my friends in the Catholic Worker movement, for 80 years of reinventing and revitalizing the word "church".  Not a positive connotation there for many, I'm well aware.  But through CWs' dedication to solidarity-through-poverty, radical personalist community, tireless labor for peace and justice, and joyfully anarchistic creativity, many of us have experienced something authentic and vibrant in this word (as well as many others in its realm of meaning), much more of life-affirming essence than a system or an institution.  Or a piece of architecture.]


*******
Passing by Chiara's desk on the way to the kitchen, I catch sight of a familiar image on her monitor.  There's no way I'd forget that solid shape, though I haven't seen it in a while.  It's the Migrant Workers' Church.  Why's my roommate looking at this?  Religion's not her field.  Maybe an art history project.  It is an artistic edifice, though it's more than that...

I lean in for a closer look.  A complex quadrilateral of rough, honey-colored sandstone fills the view, filigreed with rainbows of delicate stained-glass.  The building is a living metaphor of light-suffused shelter.  I always admired the balance of fragility and strength in its features. Something is making it hard to see the contours, however:  squinting at the miniature image, I observe that most of its facade is covered by a scaffold.  Tiny men move along the wooden frame, engaged in careful preservative restorations of the ancient stone surface.  It's a live view, I realize with a little shock.  I've heard about these new virtual systems, but this is the first time I've seen one in operation.  They're supposed to have made some serious advances in the technology, in the last few years.  Just like being there, they say.  I angle my face closer to the flatscreen --hesitantly, as it almost feels like I'm going where I don't belong -- then, suddenly, I'm there.  Gliding around the church's walls, diagonalling across one sturdy buttress, rising toward a view of the horizon on the other side.  At first I don't want to look up:  a sense midway between dread and anticipation fills me.  Always been a bit wary of this technological mind-trip.  But I can't resist.  Knowing that the system's navigational controls are inside me now ("inside" "me", whatever both of those words mean in a virtual field), I simply think "left", and the scene swivels round, and a deep, sheltered valley opens below me.  Boundaries and reservations melt away.  Fearless and free, birdlike, I bank and dive over coral-rosy cliffs of volcanic tuff, into what appears to be an ancient caldera. 

The church had perched right on this cliff-verge, looking as if it had been there for a century or two.  But the settlement in this circular earth-hollow is obviously much older.  Modest wooden houses, in various stages of quiet dilapidation, dot the slopes.  Horses and cattle wander, grazing.  A man plows his milpa with a donkey.  Stunted trees of a brilliant green contrast with the cliffs, which curve round and shade from orange to dove-grey to lavender.  Swallows wheel across the vertical faces in soft slanting light.

Clarity of vision I was expecting.  But this is something a little beyond virtual.  If this is only technology at work, its designers seem to have progressed far beyond the old days of GoogleEarth.  I can feel a warm afternoon breeze on my skin.  Breathe the scent of woodsmoke from the small houses below.  The clarity of light and color is too intense for a virtual app, and too lovely.  Is this really a program? 

And the subtle prescience of this place's story is an altogether unexpected addition.  As easily as turning to gaze from east to west across this peaceful scene, an interior shifting reveals knowledge I couldn't have possessed on my own.  Peace didn't always rest on this valley.  In a past not too distant, guerilla wars threatened the homes and lives of these families who quietly labored for no more than subsistence.  Men wresting power by corruption and violence gave no heed to the wishes of those not living by the sword.  Governments neither recognized nor cared.  In their moment of greatest threat, perhaps on some plane as subtle as that of my present knowing, the people reached out for relief.  And the church came.  Not the "organized" institution, not a hierarchical system of authority.  Not even a group of people.  But a living, sentient benevolence, for purely practical reasons expressing itself in a visible structure solid enough to offer sanctuary.   Perhaps an expression recognizable to those with whom it would temporarily share that space.  Probably different in other instances of manifestation.  Solidarity and shelter in tangible form, surrounding peace and light and refuge for those who struggle.  No more, and no less.


Chiara walks into the study, and abruptly, without warning, I'm back in the room with her.  Trying to slow my breath, shake off the vertigo, let eyes readjust to present limitations.  "Hey, where's the Migrant Workers' Church located?" I ask her in what I hope is an offhand tone.  "Oh", she replies, distracted by the contents of a file drawer.  "L.A." 

But it's not.  Not this time, anyway.