About Wind Spirit Teaching
Arizona City resident Lench Archuleta was selected to represent the American Indian people at World Mission Conference 2000 in Rome in October.
While there, he was one of four people chosen to address the crowd of 1,500 delegates from 126 nations.
"My heart was beating so hard I could hear it through my chest," Archuleta said.
He had been selected as a delegate by Miriam Heverline, education coordinator for the Pontifical Mission Societies office in the Catholic Diocese of Scranton, Pa.
Heverline had been asked to find delegates by the societies' national organization, the Society for the Propagation of the Faith in New York.
As she was compiling a list of names, Heverline received a call from New York asking her to make sure that at least one delegate was an American Indian who would talk at the conference about traditional spirituality.
Heverline said she was "wracking her brain."
"All of a sudden it hit me," she said. "Who would be more perfect?"
Heverline had met Archuleta last summer when she could find no place in Arizona to take high school students on a mission experience among American Indians.
Recommended by a mission brother, Lench invited the group - 10 teen-agers, five chaperones and a priest who acted as spiritual director - to spend a week in his family's three-bedroom house in Arizona City.
During the days, the teen-agers volunteered at the Blackwater Community Center, at a nursing home, a day-care center and a soup kitchen. In the late afternoons, Archuleta took them into the desert.
"Our group just loved it," Heverline said. "They came to understand the importance of silence.
"There was no wind, but we could feel a breeze come across our faces, almost like the breath of God. You come very close to the presence of God when you go into the desert."
Everyone meditated. Lench chanted and drummed. A visiting Lenape family taught a circle dance. The teen-agers walked barefoot in the desert. The priest led evening prayers in the desert and drummed with Lench.
"It was truly an amazing, a wonderful, wonderful week," Heverline said, adding that it is ironic that she had almost called off the trip to Arizona.
"There were so many problems and no place to stay. But I had a feeling I had to find a way.
"Now, looking back, it was all for a reason. That's how I knew who to contact to take as a delegate. He gave a wonderful talk."
On World Missions Sunday, more than 100,000 people filled St. Peter's Square to see the pope.
Each national group of delegates had to pick one person to carry their nation's flag and another to carry a basket of soil. The pope was to plant an olive tree of peace in the soil of all nations in the Vatican garden.
"So we put all the names in a hat," Heverline said.
A man from Puerto Rico was drawn to carry the U.S. flag. Archuleta carried the soil.
"So we had a Native American carry the soil and someone from Puerto Rico - which is trying to become a state - to carry the U.S. flag," Heverline said.
"When I talk about the Holy Spirit working, that's what I mean. We never could have planned that. Just like we never could have planned Lench. Everything just worked out."
<©Casa Grande Valley Newspaper 2001