Rooted music

What she told me--and what I have never forgotten--was how what she was taught affected what she was. Her parents were pure Zuni, in thought and culture and religious practice. Therefore, her going to a "Christian" school meant she had to forcibly unlearn what her Christian teachers taught her.

And that was difficult; it was traumatic, not because she had to shift priorities and allegiances (that too!), but because she simply loved her parents, who were widely acknowledged as leaders in the pueblo because they were just plain good people. They worshiped in traditional ways, danced the traditional dances, ran the races of her people; her parents were neither impure nor immoral. They were good, good people, and every one said so, said exactly that. She was blessed to have such good parents. But the Christian school in her life made it clear--chapter and verse--that her parents, despite their goodness, were flat wrong. 

And that criticism had an even greater eternal dimension because, or so she was taught, some day her parents would be forever cast out from the glory which is to come to those who believe in the white man's God. There's a Hell after all. Stakes were high. Stakes were forever.

She was Zuni and she was Christian when I spoke to her, but that doesn't mean that she'd forgotten what her education, a half century before, had taught her. That's why she told me the story. She wanted me to understand.

Last night I listened to a fine high school, 70+ piece symphonic band from Rehoboth Christian High, Gallup, NM, the school where she'd attended 70 years earlier. I've got a history there too. I wrote a book for them, stories about families who'd been part of that school's mission for more than a generation, stories like hers. 

But even before that, my Grandpa Schaap was a member of the denomination's "Heathen Mission Board" a century ago; in fact, a great uncle of mine, Grandpa Schaap's first cousin, was one of the place's earliest missionaries, Rev. Andrew Vander Wagon. 

The unintended shaming explained to me one night in her front room was something my people--my family, in fact--spread abroad in New Mexico to Navajo and Zuni alike. Last night, that fine group of young musicians shaped a presentation that included an open confession of sin, when an administrator from RHS made clear that the mission, close to 150 years old, had at times failed the people it had come to serve--and failed miserably.

But what the kids spread abroad in the concert was beauty, and what was spectacularly clear, at least to this concert-goer, was that the denomination of which I've always been a part could not be more proud of any blessed accomplishment it has done in its own 150-year old ministry than what has blossomed so dearly in the high desert of New Mexico, where Rehoboth, today, is a blessing to the people, both colonizers and Native, who live there. It took a long time to understand that the most effective ministry may be little more than a ministry of presence.

It was all in the music, the whole story, and it was beautiful.