Churchgoers have fond memories

If you visit the Utah portion of the Navajo reservation, you can meet a number of people who grew up attending school and church at St. Christopher's. In Lillie Henderson's earliest memory, she is being taken on horseback by her parents to stay at St. Christopher's for what she assumes was a summerlong Bible school.

She was not afraid, she says. Everyone was nice, and her older sister was with her. She can remember playing at taking communion, gradually absorbing English words and Episcopal rites at the same time.

Today, she's a deacon in the church. She translates Father Ian Corbett's sermons into Navajo and teaches Christian education in an after-school program.

Former San Juan County Commissioner Mark Maryboy says Christianity has become even more important as traditional ways erode and drug and alcohol abuse and domestic violence plague his people.

Maryboy grew up thinking Father Harold Baxter Liebler was as kind and wise as Jesus himself. He had to go away to college to learn that Christianity had a bloody history. With his own children, Maryboy says he taught them the Navajo culture first, "the beauty way of living," and then taught them all the good things from the Bible.

Catherine Plummer, whose late husband, Steven, was the first Navajo Episcopal bishop, still lives on the grounds of St. Christopher's. Her father and uncles helped build the chapel and the school where she studied.

Plummer quotes her late husband, saying that even before the Anglos came, the Navajos had the Bible — except that it was not in the form of a book. She says, "God has always been among us."

Plummer worries because children no longer know the Navajo language when they are tiny, even though they do eventually learn it in school. She thinks it gives them an important moral foundation if they understand their ceremonies and values in the way their great-grandparents taught their grandparents.

Today's Navajo children may not have the same cultural foundation she had when she first began to learn about Christianity. Still, she believes in the importance of blending the two ways of worship. Plummer says, "God is intending us to reach out and hold hands."

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