Dancing with Sister Water and all our sisters and brothers

My children were hungry, and I took them to be with the families who have been getting food. There, the man with a kind smile was teaching people how to put the seeds in the ground. The seeds grow and there is more food. Even when no water falls from the skies and we cannot find enough acorns, nuts, berries and grasses, the people there share and have food.

Our area is semiarid, on the far edge of the Chihuahua Desert. I imagine those words as what a Coahuiltecan mother might have said in the 1700s when she brought her clan to the place where the Mission Concepción community was growing. By 1755, the community had built Mission Concepción, my parish church and the oldest unrestored stone church in the U.S. Our church is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, one of the five Spanish colonial missions founded by Spanish Franciscans.

Read the full article here.