Holy Week Trek Takes Path to Peace

CHIMAYO, N. M. -- Alicia Avila knelt stiffly in the tiny, dark room of the adobe church Friday, scooped dirt from a hole in the stone floor, patted some on her bad knee and rubbed it slowly over her arthritic hands.

“The holy dirt is supposed to help you,” she said.

Each year Avila joins thousands of pilgrims on the Good Friday walk to the Santuario de Chimayo, a shrine built about 1815 that the faithful believe is a healing place.

She makes the trek for her family, her friends and the Alzheimer’s patients she cares for at work. On Friday, though, there was something else on her mind as she set out at 3 a.m. for the 13-mile walk.

“This year, it was for the war -- to bring all the men and women home,” Avila said.

War -- and peace -- was uppermost in the minds of countless pilgrims who made the Holy Week journey to the little northern New Mexico village.

Avila has a son in the National Guard and hopes he won’t be sent to Iraq.

“It’s still scary,” she said of the conflict. “It seems like it’s been too easy.”

American flags flapped from walkers’ backpacks and from fences along the narrow, winding country roads that lead to the shrine. Still miles short of her destination, Tina Napier stopped to stretch, laying aside the 5-foot-tall wooden cross she carried. It bore the names of family members, friends and the carved inscription “Armed Forces.”

“I have a few friends in the military that are in Kuwait right now, in Iraq,” said Napier, a correctional officer at a juvenile detention center who had left Santa Fe 14 hours earlier and walked through the night.

Albert Munoz, warding off the early morning chill with a cup of coffee, said he worries about the aftermath of the war.

His son is a 1991 Persian Gulf War veteran who came home with Gulf War syndrome, and it was a battle to get him disability benefits, Munoz said.

“I know a lot of these kids are going to come back with something, and it’s going to take a while for the government to figure out what happened to them,” the Los Lunas man said.

Munoz said the Iraq war took him back a dozen years.

“I went through what these parents are going through now,” recalled the retired post office worker. “We were hooked on that TV day and night. We couldn’t concentrate on our jobs.”

A Vietnam veteran, Munoz made the pilgrimage by car, because his war injuries left him with leg problems. He arrived at the church about 7 a.m., just as the line to enter the church began to lengthen.

“I went in there first thing and prayed -- for the war to end, to bring the kids home safe,” the ex-Marine said.

“No more wars,” he added. “Stop it.”