This
article first appeared in the Winter 2019-2020 issue of COMBONI MISSIONS
Petén: Guatemala’s hidden “Amazon”
 |
On top of Temple IV at Tikal in 2009 |
On Easter Monday 2016, I concluded my visit to my earlier
mission post in San Luis Petén, Guatemala, with a “pilgrimage” to Tikal, the
ruins of one of the main cities of the ancient Maya empire.
TIKAL! The Temple of the Jaguar! Not too long before my
visit, Morgan Freeman had his picture taken in front of this pyramid while seeking
inspiration for his National Geographic series on God. The reason? He was about
to debunk a Hollywood theory. According to Hollywood malarkey and the movie
“2012,” a Maya prophecy foretold that the world would end on December 21, 2012.
It didn’t and my former parishioners are still laughing about it.
Tikal and Petén are very ancient, remote and challenging.
In 2005, a season of “Survivor” was filmed in Petén. Two of our young parishioners,
who worked with the tourist bureau, were hired by the team. The place was so
remote, they told me, that Survivor people “really” got lost, “really” had sun
strokes, “really” faced an unexpected croc in the pond. Yet, the place is still
alive and life giving.

So, while tourists braved 90+ degree temperatures to
climb the 200 steps of the tallest temple, I sat in the shade of a massive centuries-old
ceiba. From there, I followed the members
of an extended Maya family as they prayed to God and honored Mother Earth,
turning to the four corners of the earth with raised hands and offering a
burning sacrifice of corn, cacao, beans, candles and incense.
The scene brought back a flood of feelings about my own
interaction with Petén and its people. The descendants of the Maya of old, the
Queq’chi and Mopan in particular, are still remote, alive and well and I, as a
Comboni Missionary, was privileged to share their life from 2007 to the end of
2010.
Amazon echo-system
As I look back on my experience in the light of the
recently completed Synod for the Amazon, I
realize that Petén is one of the
many unknown, smaller, hidden - yet not less important for this – “Amazons” of
the world.
The department of Petén covers one third of Guatemala’s
territory, yet it is home to less than 15% of its population. History books and
tourist guides seem to ignore what happened in Petén between the Spanish
conquest over 500 years ago and the 1950s, when settlers from the south started
moving in searching for a new life and a piece of land. Settlers have learned
to live side by side with the indigenous people, who took to the hills and the
forest centuries ago, to avoid contact with the Spanish armies. The rocky soil,
the torrid and humid climate and, above all, the impenetrable rain forest helped
the Maya’s quest for isolation and faithfulness to God and tradition.
A unique Earth Day
Locals still treasure these traits. I had only been in
Petén a month in 2007 when I was personally drawn into them. We were going to
celebrate Earth Day by having our parish agriculture committee hold a series of
demonstrations and lectures, accompanied by prayers. The venue was typically Maya
and was not the average parish hall.

The Comboni pastoral team of San Luis, a Maya holy man,
local catechists and about 50 other men, women and children, entire families in
fact, met at an outstation in early morning. We took the path behind the
two-room school building and plunged into the jungle behind it. We walked for
two hours through ever thicker vegetation and got lost twice. We finally reached
a clearing at the foot of a steep incline, where we found a centuries-old well.
Nearby stood an even older
ceiba, the
Maya sacred tree that holds the universe together by joining the netherworld
and the heavens with its pillar-like trunk. Later on, we would share a
typically Maya community meal by its massive roots.

Soon the men started cutting openings in vegetation as
thick as a wall, to allow us to climb the incline
and in about a half hour we
reached a small flat area, our goal. We were standing on sacred grounds. We
were standing atop a pyramid built many centuries ago and totally covered by
the thick mantle of the rain forest. That’s where I celebrated Earth Day in
2007. No, I will not tell you where it is… our parishioners prefer it that way.
It’s the Petén way – our little Amazon.
Common hopes and woes
It took the Spanish armies 150 years to conquer Petén. By
then, the mid 1,600s, Dominican Friars had gained the trust of the Maya,
revealed the Gospel to them and had encouraged the indigenous people to write
down, rather than erase, their own mythology, to treasure it and to build on it
– the Popol
Vuh.
What the Amazon basin people have been facing up to now
is exactly what the Maya of Petén faced then. The Maya took their new faith in
Jesus, and their traditions into the rain forests of Petén. Centuries later,
their faith and their culture resurfaced into the middle of the 20th
century to face new challenges, new dangers but also to offer new ways of
keeping both, faith and culture, alive. Can we learn anything from Petén’s
survivors?

How did the Maya of Petén keep the faith for decades
without having a priest among them? Faith in the Gospel of Jesus was embedded
in the traditions of the
Popol Vuh: a
great respect for Mother Earth, for life, for the forest, for the lives of the ancestors,
as signs of God’s goodness.


The Synod on the Amazon is proposing a liturgical rite
that will be Catholic without necessarily being Roman. Is that something new? Not really. I grew up in a non-Roman rite in Italy and eagerly adapted to Maya customs at age 70 in Petén. I delighted in sharing the gift of the Eucharist with our Maya parishioners because, after years of deprivation, they hungered for it and rejoiced in it in their own way: pillars of
pom (local incense) rising to the sky, colored candles dotting the floor, a chicken meal brought to the altar at the offertory, a shared cup of chocolate from ground
cacao beans
before the final blessing on solemn Masses, blessing the grounds where the new
church would rise by burying holy gifts, praying to the four corners of the
earth, praying in caves such as
La Cueva
de los Padres to ask God for the gift of abundant water, the sound of the
marimba through it all.
What if a Mass lasted two hours and a prayer
service lasted all night? God was present in a tangible way.
Our communities in the forest begged for the privilege to
preserve the Eucharist in their chapels and share the Lord at Sunday prayers.
Allowances had to be made. In that torrid and humid climate, oil lamps do
better than bee wax. In a “sacred vessel” the hosts would spoil within a week,
but colorful plastic containers do the job. What counts in Petén is the hunger
for Jesus. And we fed it. Personally, I felt
enveloped by it all: fully Catholic and fully “smelling like the sheep.”

Who kept faith alive when priests were not there? Lay
people like the Elder Flavio, whom people
El Pastor and revered as such. Thanks to a far away, wise and
pastoral bishop, years ago Flavio was allowed to catechize communities: he
baptized their children, prayed at their weddings, solemnized their passing.
When a priest came back in the 1960s, Flavio walked him for months through the
hills and the forest until he got to know his flock. This is what Pope Francis
wants the Church to be: “A Church going out…,” with people of equal dignity
serving in ministries.
Celebrating the installment of the new bishop in Flores,
Petén a few years back, Card. Rodolfo Quezada Toruño of Guatemala City
remarked: “Poor Petén, for so long abandoned by the government and by the
Church!” The Church, very local and very much part of the culture, is now a reality in Petén.
But government corruption, land grabbing, climate change,
people trafficking, gangs, deforestation, mineral and oil exploitation, added
to economic and genocidal situations we helped create in the 19th
and 20
th century, are now threatening the very existence of these wonderful survivors.
May the resilience that helped the Maya of Petén survive
the Spanish invasion and the way they chose to cling to the coupling of their
culture and their faith keep them alive today. May they lead all those people
of good will who want to save the Amazon. Petén did it, and so can you.
No comments:
Post a Comment