ALUMNI VOICE
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I feel very fulfilled by what we accomplished last week,” Andy tells me, a sentiment I’m sure all of us share. “Having a team that instinctively understands how to work together, looks out for each other, and leaves ego at the proverbial door is a very rare and treasured experience.” Eager to repeat it, he’s already planning the next trip.
Andy Smith with Shelton Horsley ‘81, Brewster Rawls ‘08 and Dean King ’81
St. Christopher’s Mission in Utah SAINTS, LED BY ANDY SMITH, LEND HELPING HANDS By Dean King ’81 On the second full day at St. Christopher’s Mission in Bluff, Utah, I was reminded of one of Andy Smith’s great gifts. Shelt Horsley and I (both Class of 1981) had joined him and four others, including Brewster Rawls Jr. ’08, for a week in Navajoland, among the windswept sandstone buttes of Four Corners, where Colorado, Utah, New Mexico and Arizona meet. The day before had been mostly chaos. We’d had only a vague idea of what needed to be done, what tools and supplies were available, and who would do what. But Andy, a veteran organizer of service projects both in Richmond and far-flung places (this one under the auspices of St. James’s Episcopal Church), calmly grappled with the variables and personalities, applied his signature wry wit and tamed the forces of anarchy. Brewster, a professional arborist, now removed dead cottonwood trees around the 80-year-old Mission House,
a sprawling vernacular building of sandstone and log cabin sections, and the adjacent chapel. Shelt and the father-son professional builders in our group, Kyle and Johnny Martin, installed windows. Brewster Rawls Sr. and I followed behind, staining window frames. Meanwhile Andy was everywhere at once, picking up supplies, discussing logistics with the Mission’s vicar, and making sure his team was happy and productive. All of this came as little surprise to Shelt and me, who as players on Coach Smith’s varsity lacrosse teams back in the day, had experienced his remarkable juggling act and game-time decision-making. Andy, who first came to the Mission with a group of students in 2018, had no problems motivating our team. Once we were on this austere and timeless property, where Anglo and Native American traditions mix and mingle, we could feel the spirituality and positive energy.
That’s in part because the new vicar, Joe Hubbard, has big plans to revive the place, following in the footsteps of Father Liebler, who founded the Mission in 1943. When Liebler bought the trading post, now part of the building we were working on, he thought he bought the land around it, too, but by tribal law, that wasn’t the case. To buy the land, he had to negotiate with Navajo leader Tom Mustache. As Hubbard tells it, “Mustache said, ‘You can use the land, but only if you serve the people.’” If the Mission stopped serving the people, the land would revert to the Navajo. Hubbard recognizes the Mission has flagged in recent decades. In fact, the place was used as a dumping ground when Andy first visited five years ago. So one of the first things Hubbard did was to assure Tom Mustache’s grandson that he meant to keep Liebler’s promise. “That is what you are helping me do,” he told us.
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