This past week our theme was religious expressions in Guatemala. Last Sunday we attended a Catholic mass in Chichicastenango and this Sunday we attended a Mega-church, one of several neo-Pentecostal churches so called because of their huge membership and attendance. At the service we attended, the five-thousand seat auditorium filled up and this was one of four services on Sunday with another on Saturday night.
The mass in Chichi included many elements from Mayan spirituality which were interspersed with traditional Christian religious expressions. As an example, along with the offering baskets taken to the alter to be blessed, ushers carried poles with symbols of fruits, vegetables and other things from nature that were blessed as an offering along with money.
Between these two Sundays, we had our own worship service with communion and were invited to a Baha’i community gathering for an evening meal where prayers for peace and unity from various religions were read.
A more diverse sampling of religious expression would be difficult to reproduce in any of my more normal weeks of the year. There were many questions among students about appropriateness of forms of worship, authenticity of religious expression, and of course, whether there is truth in any of the non-Christian forms of spirituality.
These are all good questions and I in no way want to make light of them, but the thing that I carry with me from this past week is to once again marvel at how each of us has a deep-seated longing for God within us—a longing that seems to be stamped into our DNA. Perhaps that longing is part of our “God-likeness,” stamped on us at birth and to which we long to return. There is a ground swell of mystery, of unexplainable phenomena which blind-sides us; a tingling sense of transcendence which makes us experience the holy.
Unfortunately, Western civilization has tried to downplay our holy longing, or to explain it in psycho-social terms. Yet it keeps bubbling up and breaking out everywhere, often in strange forms. We seldom speak of the transcendent dream we had, or the feeling of “presence” we’ve had while walking in nature, or being overcome with sweeping emotion while experiencing a particular work of art. Yet these are nudges to remind us that the veil in the temple between us and the Holy has been “torn in two.”
In Guatemalan culture, as I have experienced it, the expressions of holy longing, whether simple or spectacular, are overtly displayed. There is no apology for experiencing God, for speaking of God, for attributing one’s all to God. Even if I may question the extravagance of the Mega-churches, or the simplicity of the Mayan woman kneeling in reverence at Catholic mass with a traditional brightly embroidered Mayan veil on her head, I cannot deny the deep sense of holy longing breathing through this volcano-dotted land.