Dear Westwood Family,
Just before we arrived at our Sierra Service Project (SSP) site in Teec Nos Pos, Arizona, on the Navajo Nation, our team of 24 stopped by the Four Corners Monument. It was hot, and the particular place where these four states’ corners connect isn’t an especially captivating landscape. (There are a multitude of captivating landscapes nearby, I would like to note.) Still, we paid our admission fee and took photos standing in this unique spot where you can inhabit four US states at once.
Around the monument that designates the exact spot of the intersection, Navajo vendors were selling handicrafts, jewelry, and t-shirts; bottled water and fry bread with honey. It was the middle of a hot, sunny day, though, which made it a more agonizing visit than it might have otherwise been. It was, however, delightful to drive around in the area, cheering every time the highway took us through a hew state, sometimes only for 3 minutes.
For me, the whole experience underscored the absurdity of our political borders. In particular, these boundaries drawn by cartographers using straight lines of latitude to mark political edges remind me that such designations have nothing to do with the lived experience of the people, creatures, water, and plants that call these places home.
At the Four Corners Monument, I was remembering my time on our church pilgrimage to the US/Mexico border in January–how different the tall, foreboding wall is that marks the boundary between our two nations. And how similarly the straight line is drawn from east-to-west, irrespective of people and ecosystems. Navajo Nation stretches through all four of the US states we stood in at that monument; now a political boundary that maps the edges of an area “granted” back to the descendents of Diné people who long inhabited that place. Unlike the Kumeyaay people whose ancestral lands were divided in two by the boundary of the US and Mexico, these state borders do not prevent the movement of people or land animals.
I was also thinking about the boundaries of identity that we draw to designate belonging, responsibility, and allegiance. How similarly absurd it is to imagine that there’s a place where our interconnection ends, or our responsibility to one another begins.
It was a joy to experience the gifts of human community during our week on SSP, as 70-ish folks from four different church groups joined the young adult staff leading at the Navajo Nation site, plus the local Navajo folks who joined us for meals, for programs, and in welcoming us to the work sites where our volunteer labor could be useful. Yes, there were some boundaries in our group — appropriate and separate responsibilities for the middle- and high-school age youth, the young adult volunteers and staff, the adult counselors, and the local folks. But even more, I experienced a deep sense of interconnection and belonging. I love how consistently people at SSP are willing to pitch in together; everyone has chores (re-branded at SSP as “Opportunities to Serve”), everyone eats together, most of us sleep in a big multi-purpose room together, on the floor. Though each participant brings their own life experiences, struggles, and gifts, there’s a powerful sense of being “in it” together.
Again this year, being a part of a community of people who choose to spend warm summer days offering volunteer service for others has been a beautiful antidote to the temptations of individualism that are rampant in our culture. Freely choosing to give of myself in service to others and to community helps me overcome feelings of isolation, helps ground my identity in community, and liberates me for deeper belonging. Time spent in a landscape and culture that differ from those I see in my everyday life has been a beautiful reminder that life is bigger than what I see right in front of me. I am grateful to belong in this beautiful, diverse, wondrous world, and reminded of my calling to recommit to seeing beyond boundaries toward the fullness of what God sees and loves in this world.
grace and peace,
Pastor Molly
