Death Comes for the Archbishop

While I was growing up in my parents’ house, it took such little effort to feel at ease. The feelings of comfort and belonging in one’s own home happen so easily, I’ve learned, that it often goes unnoticed just what a home is and how it is made. It is simply there, all the time and unchanging… I say unchanging because only upon leaving does it seem to have changed. I returned home at times feeling disappointed that it was not the same as I remembered, but really it was me who had changed, away from the place that had always been a partner and friend.

Many people refer to home as the most beautiful place in the world, but certainly it is an invisible beauty that is felt more than seen. While growing up in Colorado I rarely noticed the clean, cool air falling from the towering Rocky Mountains. I didn’t consider the friendly, hardworking people as anything special, and I certainly wasn’t conscious of the simple, delicious foods like beets and potatoes as part of every meal because they grew there. I became aware of all of these things after I didn’t have them anymore.

So while establishing my new home in Manhattan I found even the smallest of tasks a challenge, and my first years were spent learning, practicing and then mastering each aspect of daily city life. I struggled with everything, but eventually I grew to love everything, building a very different concept of comfort and sense of self. And soon what was initially my new home became known as simply ‘home.’

“In the old world he found himself hungry for the new.”

Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop is a novel based on the lives of two French missionaries who travel through New Mexico and establish one of the first Catholic dioceses in the west. In the mid-19th century the travel was long and difficult, and their struggles are often life-threatening as they seek to befriend the Native Americans and convert the Mexicans to true Catholicism from a devout yet superstitious Christianity.

Father Jean Marie Latour, who would become the first Archbishop of New Mexico, along with his vicar Father Joseph Vaillant, are patient, devoted priests who handle each challenge with grace and understanding. Far from their beautiful native land, they spend their lives learning to love this new desert home, growing and changing with its every hill and village. During his last years, Father Latour spends his only resources building a modest cathedral. He dies at an old age, not among his family in France, but there in New Mexico with the “beautiful desert and its yellow people who were dearest to him.” Cather eloquently explains Father Latour’s longing for his ‘new world’ during one of his last visits to the old:

“It was a feeling he could not explain; a feeling that old age did not weigh so heavily upon a man in New Mexico as in the Puy-de-Dom…in New Mexico he always awoke a young man.

“Beautiful surroundings, the society of learned men, the charm of noble women, the graces of art, could not make up to him for the loss of those light-hearted mornings of the desert…it was where he had come as a young man, and where he had done his work.”

As Father Latour often noted, a child merely lives but an adult works, and it is through this work one learns about his surroundings and becomes a part of them. Although at the time it seemed an eternity to me, it was really not long until I too had created a wonderful new life exactly catered to myself—the new self I had hoped to become. In opening myself to a new world full of challenges and rewards, I soon found the city to be a friend as we joined together to learn and grow. By overcoming challenges, I became my true self “where I had come as a young woman.”

“Gold under Pike’s Peak”

Reckoning one’s new self with the old is, however, a lifelong process. It’s an eternal debate that places every experience in a competition between what was previously known, and what remains to be learned. In other words, what parts of the old world are left behind, and which parts are brought to the new, in order to build this new life?

Father Vaillant experiences this in the strongest of ways toward the end of the novel. After many years establishing himself in New Mexico, he is sent away to Colorado and Camp Denver to begin new missionary work among the miners. He is again forced to leave home and adopt another, in a “terrifying and cold new landscape”:

“The congested heaping up of the Rocky Mountain chain about Pike’s Peak was a blank space on the continent at this time. Even fur trappers coming down from Wyoming avoided that humped granite backbone…people were living in tents and shacks, Cherry Creek was full of saloons and gambling-rooms. [The people] lived adrift in a lawless society without spiritual guidance.”

I, perhaps more than most readers, was shocked at these paragraphs describing my beautiful homeland as a rough and terrible place. I had grown up with the heroic stories of the miners and trappers, the bravest of all people, coming to settle the welcoming landscape of the Rockies, and it was the barren and foreign desert of New Mexico that was to be feared. But this only further proves that the sense of home is relative, and it is an individual struggle (or grace) to understand, accept and love each aspect of it.

Father Vaillant proved an example for all of us by gracefully and willingly accepting the mission of settling in the Rocky Mountain region. “I seemed to be doing the most important work of my life [in New Mexico],” he said to Father Latour before leaving, “but Heaven knew what was happening in Colorado, and moved us like chessmen on a board.” Father Vaillant embraced the uncertain, and at times unfriendly, turn of events that would lead him to become one of the most influential advisors in the settling of Colorado and the Front Range.

Uncertainty is the most fearful part of leaving home, and is the emotion that makes us cling to the old world in either nostalgia or desperation, depending on the moment. For those of us who choose to adventure away, we are willing to accept every challenge. Yet the uncertainly of its result is a constant weight upon the mind: What will come of this new life I am building? Who will I become? And most importantly, what of the old can I carry with me that will build on a solid foundation for the new?

It is a constant mystery each person must handle in his own way. I attempt to unravel it every day in my own habits of observing and learning. Even in just simply living as best I am able. Sometimes I feel I will always be ‘the new girl,’ because every new day is filled with new challenges. But with the inspiration of Father Vaillant’s grace, and remembering the patience in Father Latour’s devotion, I can close each rewarding day having found the answers I seek.

It is the lifelong mystery I am blessed to discover.