A circle of stories

An old essay from the time I put together a book for Rehoboth, a century-old Christian mission and school in Gallup, New Mexico. I don't have a picture of the picture--wish I did!--but the story is worth telling again.

An old mission institution like Rehoboth Christian School eventually accumulates a museum of cast-offs. Upstairs in the old Mission House, in a four-by-six library, itself likely a gift, a whole shelf of books are marked "Grand Rapids Christian High." Cast-offs.

For close to a century, supporting churches and families—even schools—have given away old books, old knick-knacks, unused furniture, and what not else, to the mission, designated for years to “our Indian cousins,” the description the denominational magazine used to keep white folks like my parents and me, “back east,” in touch with the enterprise.

Not long ago, I stayed in the Mission House, where I noticed a print in my room, a painting, the only ornament on the wide wall south, across from the bed. It’s a slightly impressionistic rendition of what appeared to be a country road in England or Holland, some exotic European country villa nowhere near the gorgeous Southwest backdrop that takes your breath away when you step out any door at Rehoboth.

An odd print for this place, I thought—a strange way to decorate. A room in the old Mission House really ought to feature some breathtaking desert landscape.

When I looked up close, I realized it was not a print. Run your finger over the canvas, and you’ll notice that someone painted it.

So, for a night or two, I simply assumed the painting was some Easterner's spare bedroom wall-hanging, something someone like me couldn’t gather the wherewithal to chuck, even though it was of little value to anyone. “Send it to Rehoboth,” he told himself, years ago. “Maybe someone there can use it. It's a real painting, after all."

That’s why it’s here, on this old wall, so out of place I told myself—it’s somebody’s cast-off gift.

There's a name in the lower left-hand corner. “M. Vander Weide - 51,” it says, the number, I’m guessing, a reference to the year it was painted.
Okay, someone sent a painting to his Indian cousins, a painting his grandma had done maybe ten years before she died. Couldn’t throw it out, I told myself, so he sent it to Rehoboth. Sure—that makes sense.

*

The next morning, in Window Rock, I prayed aloud over a breakfast I shared with three others—Mr. Herbert F. White and his wife Sarah, as well as their son, Fred. And as I did, Sarah White whispered grace like a soft alto line, as if my own words, my prayer, were the melody. It was beautiful. Then we ate breakfast—and talked, about life, about Rehoboth, about the saving grace of the Lord.

Mr. White’s own father was a Navajo medicine man, a good man, a loving father, his son says, remembering, even while he was apologizing for what he considers to be his fractured English. As a little kid, he says, he didn’t know a word of English until he came to Rehoboth Mission School.

Rev. Jacob Kamps visited his hogan one day in the mid-1930s. He says he didn’t remember any white man ever having come into his place before—not one; and even though he knew no English, this Rev. Kamps, in fractured Navajo, told his father—the boy picked up a bit of it anyway—that his son, his only son, should be going to school at Rehoboth.

Six or seven years old, this boy was, soon after, trucked—well, wagon-ed—off to the mission school—and once there, was left behind. “This was something totally new,” he told me, remembering that day. “I didn’t even have an idea what a school was going to be.” He was going to get an education, an education his father wanted for him.

“I went right away to the dormitory, and Miss Van was there—she was the matron,” he told me over blue cornmeal pancakes. “And the late Miss Van—she treated me just like a mom,” the mom he’d never had. “Her welcome was so great,” he said, it was as if she was saying “come to my house. I don’t care what color your skin is, you’re my child. And from there on,” he said— “I didn’t feel any harm. I felt welcomed.”

But there’s more. Miss Van, he said, used to spread her arms out and act like a train—he made a whistling sound just as she had so many years ago, mimicking her. “And all of the students would follow her,” he told me, as if they were boxcars following the engine all around the dormitory room where the boys slept. She was putting them to sleep.

And now, if you’re still with me, you’re likely already putting the stories together.

*

That afternoon I met an elderly white man who knows almost as much about this mission as anyone still alive. I was telling him parts of this great story, when I asked him who this Miss Van was.

“Why that was Marie Vander Weide,” he told me.

“M Vander Weide,” I thought, lights going on in the dimness, the woman who painted that odd little impressionist image of some quaint European village, the one that hangs on the wall in the old Mission house, the very place where Herbert F. White remembers, with joy, his very first taste of fresh cow’s milk.

All of that history sits beside me now, right here at Rehoboth, as I attempt to tell the story, the precious history of believers, in obedience, trying their human best to love as the Lord commands, to bring his saving love to kids who were, often as not, scared to death, far from home in an incredibly strange, whole new world, bringing the gospel in outstretched arms and silly train whistle.

Marie Vander Weide’s oil painting hangs across the room, where it shines a good deal brighter today, as if it were aglow in the radiant bronze patina of a perfect New Mexico dawn. That painting is nobody’s cast-off. It’s priceless.

And I feel blessed to have been the recipient of an entire circle of stories.