March 2005 | Vol 41 No 3 | Index
 

From the Director…

Chiapas Missionary Experience
By Br. Jeremiah Loverich, O.P

he two-track road, along which we had been lurching in Fr. Henry’s jeep, died in a pool of mud, so we continued on foot.  A well-worn footpath wound through a cow pasture, along a barbed wire fence, crested a low hill, and skirted a ridge before plunging into the jungle.  After about a mile we were met by a cluster of wooden, thatched-roofed huts – Comunidad Guadalupe.  The community greeted us around the cooking fire, where an iron kettle of chicken soup, covered with banana leaves to keep out the ashes, boiled.    The women, several  holding  children,  were dressed in their traditional long skirts and white blouses with vibrant splashes of embroidered floral patterns along the neckline, the men wore loose collared shirts and soiled pants, and a group of children in bare feet, smiled and quickly returned to playing marbles on a hard-packed patch of dirt.  Drying laundry hung on lines strung beneath the eaves, dogs scurried out of our paths and continued their search for scraps, a bevy of chickens scratched among clumps of grass, and a pig lounged in a shady puddle of mud.

The chapel was a three-walled hut (about the size of a large closet) with a low roof topped by a wooden cross.  The floor was covered with freshly cut pine needles that silently offered their distinctive fragrance.  We gathered, spilling out of chapel, and Deacon Feliciano led morning prayer in Spanish and Tzeltal: the Our Father, several Hail Marys, and spontaneous petitions.  A simple breakfast followed: rice, chicken soup and hand-made tortillas.  We ate standing at a rough table near the fire, sharing plastic bowls.

his was the parish’s annual visit to Comunidad Guadalupe, one of over 300 communities scattered throughout the jungle, which the Dominican parish of San Jacinto in Ocosingo serves.   The parish contains over 150,000 souls in an area of 400 square miles.  Although the catechists of the community hold Liturgy of the Word services several times a month, the priests can only come once a year. 

The theme for today’s catechetical lesson was ecology – how all that God created was good and how we must care for the gifts he has entrusted to us. The traditional Mayan culture is intimately intertwined with the earth, and I found that the community needs little reminding of how dependent it is on the earth for sustenance – water, soil, crops, animals – and of how vulnerable they are to drought and flooding.  But the reading from Genesis served as a reminder of our call to be good stewards of these gifts. Although the 1996 cease-fire between the government and the Zapatista rebels ended the violence  that  had  riddled this region for almost ten years, it has brought another danger to Chiapas – attempts by the government and corporations to exploit its rich natural resources at the expense of those who live there.  The indigenous people are feeling pressure to use pesticides on their crops, allow their rivers to be dammed to provide electricity to Mexico City and other countries, and to cut down their forests. There is telling evidence all over the parish of this new danger – deforested hills and eroding hillsides stunted with charred stumps.  Ecology is one of the areas in which the parish strives to preserve and promote aspects of the traditional culture that are resonant with Catholicism. Our neediness and our utter dependency on God calls us to cherish and protect the gifts he has given us and to seek salvation in a God who loved us so much that He condescended to become one of the poor.

After a long break after the class, during which I learned to play marbles, we re-assembled for the community meeting, which lasted several hours.  I tried my best to keep up with the Tzeltal proceedings through Mateo’s whispered Spanish translation.  We talked at length about how the community was

doing spiritually and how well their needs were being met.  Several of the families in the community were evangelicals and some were Jehovah’s Witnesses, and this had caused some hard feelings.  Division in a  community this small,  which shares several corn patches and  two shallow wells at the foot of the hill, can be especially devastating.  For this reason, unity within the community has more than just spiritual ramifications.  Reconciliation is so culturally important that sometimes communities will ask to postpone the Mass to another date if healing has not taken place.  After everyone who had something to share, expressed his or her feelings,  the community felt ready and Mass began with a lengthy communal penitential rite.

Fr. Henry’s homily profoundly united their culture with the faith.  He spoke about the cross, how even their Mayan ancestors saw it as the intersection of the human and the divine – the passage of the sun from east to west crossing the path of mortals, which stretches from the warm, fecund south of birth to the cold, bone-white north of death. 

As Catholics we venerate the cross as the instrument by which God deigned to become a man and bear our sins so to shatter the gates   of    hell.     The   ancient Mayans believed that a sacred, cruciform Sable tree held the sky above the earth to give humans a space to dwell.  Does not also the Christian cross prevent our lives from being crushed by sin?  Does it not also give us a ladder by which we may ascend to heaven?

T

he offerings at Mass were eggs, bowls of corn and beans, and two, small live chickens with their feet bound.  One of  the chickens squirmed free during the homily and began scurrying back and forth under the altar until it discovered the bowl of corn and started to feed.  A soft nudge by the deacon’s foot sent it bolting crazily through the chapel, outside, and into the nearest house. A group of kids pursued it, and, several minutes later, a little girl brought the chicken back, re-tied and chirping more discontentedly than ever.  She placed it again on the ground before the altar, and it lent its shrill voice to the Tzeltal hymns rising with the cedar incense through the thatched roof.

Looking at the devout faces of the people and the faithful way they approached the Eucharist, I could not but recall that Christ was born in a place like this: on a dirt floor with a board for a bed, without running water, with a candle for light and a wood fire for heat, sharing His first room with animals.  Did Mary carry Him snugly against her back wrapped in a blanket knotted at her shoulder?  Did she nurse Him in the vestibule of the synagogue in Nazareth when He cried, hungrily, as these women nurse their children here on a wooden bench in a hut made now into His dwelling place?

After Mass, we ate more of the same soup we had for breakfast and bid goodbye.  It was one day and one community.  Many more would follow, some a half hour from Ocosingo, others an entire day’s journey by car and horseback, some speaking Tzeltal, others Ch’ol.  Later, we visited the communities that are part of the Dominican parishes in San Cristóbal de las Casas, the other Dominican mission in Chiapas.  San Cristóbal is a colonial city nestled in the highlands of Chiapas two hours above the lowlands of Ocosingo.   Each of the friars who live at the 16th century Church of Santo Domingo pastors a parish, each of which includes dozens of chapels.   It is Tzotzil country, a land of scrub and pine, much colder and drier than the humid palm and banana groves of the Ocosingo area.

We accompanied Fr. Alfonso on a visit to one of the communities that his parish of San Sebastian serves.  We followed a serpentine road hugging the cliffs above San Cristóbal.  It wound between villages, wrinkled by the terrain – clusters of concrete buildings with corrugated metal roofs clinging to slopes – and steep fields filled with the jaundiced skeletons of corn stalks, three months after harvest. 

We passed women washing clothes in basins near trickling cascades, others carrying loads of firewood suspended against their backs by straps running across their foreheads, and roadside markets filled with fruit and flower venders. The road dropped sharply into the village of Zinacantán, skirted hand-sown fields of flowers,  then rose again.  At the outskirts of the town, we stopped to let a young shepherdess and a herd of sheep pass.  Then the church of St. Nicholas appeared, white with blue trim, set against the green hills and heavy, gray sky.  Hundreds of colorful streamers, hanging from diagonal lines running from the top of the facade and to the far end of the courtyard, flapped in the breeze.

Our arrival was greeted by the clanging of the iron bell and a series of fireworks, lit by two young men holding cigarettes.  

The main source of income for the people of Zinacantán is the cultivation of flowers, and they brought their crop to decorate the chapel.  The high altar and sanctuary were filled with them, and their smell permeated the small building.  Their blossoms brushed the feet of the statues of saints – Sebastian, Dominic, Nicholas, and Our Lady – freshly vested and wearing their distinctive mirrored scapulars so that we could see ourselves reflected in them.  Although it was three days past, we came to celebrate the patronal Feast of San Sebastian.

 After greeting the catechists and elders in the cramped sanctuary, Fr. Alfonso put a vibrantly patterned stole over his shoulders and then a traditional tasseled hood – the former, as a symbol of authority in the universal Church, the latter, what the elders wear, as a symbol of authority and wisdom in the Tzotzil culture.  The Mass began.  The chapel’s tile floor was filled with worshippers, and the thick incense spewing from the clay bowl of embers soon filled the room with a holy haze.  At the penitential rite, the entire congregation knelt toward the altar and spontaneously began to confess their faults to the Lord.  A dissident, but unison, murmuring filled the Church, each person, alone but together, expressing sorrow for sins.  The murmur gradually subsided, and when the last person had finished praying, Father led them in the Confiteor.

verything was in Tzotzil, but I could tell that Fr. Alfonso used the homily as an opportunity to teach the people about who St. Sebastian was and about veneration of the saints.  After the consecration the elders of the community formed a semicircle in front of the altar and began a traditional dance before the Blessed Sacrament.  It was an earthy dance, a slow swaying from foot-to-foot, which conveyed both a connectedness with creation and the presence of something sacred and much greater than we.  During Communion, there were too many people for lines, so Fr. Alfonso slowly circled through the crowd, ministering as he went.  A bewildered dog in the crowd used this opportunity to yelp its way toward an exit.

Mass was followed by more fireworks and six baptisms.  Watching the godparents hold  the children while Fr. Alfonso poured water three times over their heads and watching the parents carry the lighted baptismal candles to the altar, I was moved by the profound universality of the symbols of light, incense, water, and salt.  On our way back to San Cristóbal, Fr. Alfonso mentioned that Our Lady of Guadalupe is the ultimate exemplar of the enculturation of

the Catholic faith.  She is the  model of evangelization – appearing as an Aztec woman, wearing native clothing, replete with Aztec symbolism, speaking to Juan Diego in his language.  She is the compassionate mother of all humanity who gave birth to the Savior of the world by transcending time, geography, culture, and politics.

Each community we visited, speaking foreign tongues in unfamiliar contexts, was so unique and distant from each other and from where I was raised.  Yet all were mysteriously united in the One Body of Christ.  Here among the poor of Chiapas, as in Catholic communities all over the world, the redeemed children of the Virgin are working with brothers and sisters that they may never meet to build the Kingdom of God, a kingdom that will not crumble and collapse like the colossal Mayan ruins I visited in places such as Palenque and Yaxchilán, but one of everlasting peace and justice under the headship of the Son of the humble Virgin of Guadalupe.