Dear Saints in Santa Fe and other far-off places, Greetings in the name of Jesus Christ. A blessing of the animals. Renowned Celtic teacher and writer John Philip Newell, who helped us in the formation of our Wednesday Celtic Evensong service, often tells the story of a woman he met during an Iona pilgrimage week.  She was around seventy years of age and over dinner she told John Philip about what happened to her some fifty-five years earlier when she was in church with her family.  A dog wandered into the sanctuary and moseyed up the center aisle and as it got closer to the front of the church it sniffed the air around the altar, then turned around and walked out.

Dear Saints in Santa Fe and other far-off places, Greetings in the name of Jesus Christ. “I’m gonna git those injuns!” I regret to say that I spoke those words as a 2 ½ year-old back in 1961 when my family took our first trip west from Ohio to spend a week at Ghost Ranch.  I wore my white cowboy hat, my black cowboy boots, and was ever on the lookout to “git those Injuns.”  I was a product, as most kids were in that era, of a culture of playing cowboys and Indians, shooting toy guns at “bad guys,” and learning about life through the lens of TV Westerns and movies.