Children from the San Juan Apostol parish, Chichicastenango, Guatemala. Photo by Emilie Smith.

I love Guatemala. I have loved Guatemala for 25 years and now I am living here, come from our mountains in Vancouver, to these great, majestic mountains in the Department of El Quiché. Here I am, an Anglican Volunteer in Mission.

My view on mission is that we shouldn't engage in it at all unless we are clear that we are God's servants, and servants of God's people, and that we know almost nothing, and are not the carriers of faith to those who haven't yet received it. I consider myself a pilgrim and servant, and am grateful for the hospitality and the kindness with which I have been received in Guatemala.

Let me share a few words about how my heart is being undone, and re-done, in the shadow of the crucifixion. For Guatemala is a land of great suffering, of terrible poverty, of obscene violence. It is also a holy land.

A holy, broken land
The reason Guatemala is holy is because Ajaw, the creator of heaven and earth, made this land, alive with its forests and mountains, its endless fields of corn, its holy and sacred people, who have kept the days and the stories of their ancestors. The Maya have lived on this land for 10,000 years, and they have kept the count of days, tended the land, and fed their families sacred corn of the four colours from the four corners of the earth.

Five hundred years ago strangers arrived in this holy land, strangers bearing firearms and Bibles, riding horses, and—worst of all—carrying dread disease. Human geographers estimate that 90 per cent of Central and South America’s Indigenous population was decimated in the 100 years of epidemics that followed the 1521 Spanish invasion.

More recently, during the Central American civil wars of the 1970s and early 1980s, Guatemala suffered the worst genocide our hemisphere has known in recent history. Over 200,000 people—men, women, children and the elderly—were murdered. Another quarter million fled the country, and a full million, one in every nine Guatemalans, were internally uprooted and displaced.

In 1996 a peace treaty was signed, but little true healing, and no justice has occurred since then. In fact, levels of violence and poverty remain virtually unchanged. In some rural areas of the country, 80 per cent of Maya children suffer from chronic malnutrition.

The church, both Catholic and Protestant, has been both a faithful witness to this crucifixion, and a blind participant in it. The church has been both witness to the resurrection, and perpetrators of the ongoing violence. Current levels of violence in Guatemala are shocking and terrifying, and levels of poverty are heart-breaking and obscene.

Where my heart is supposed to be
With this history in its heart, the Guatemalan Episcopal Church (a small but strong faith community) has begun a new ministry—the creation of a new diocese in the Western Highlands of Guatemala, to attend to those areas most devastated by the history of violence and poverty. I have been invited by the church and its bishops, Guerra and Lainfiesta, to participate in this holy ministry, and I am delighted to say “yes!” to the church in Guatemala, and to God. So that is how I have ended up here, priest-in-charge of San Juan el Apostol, in Chichicastenango, assistant to Bishop Lainfiesta. I have also been invited to begin a mission in Santa Cruz del Quiché, 15 kilometres up the road, where I will live.

After a month’s travel from Canada—by bus, train, and pickup truck—I arrived, at last in this holy land. As I write this, I’m resting, while Bishop Lainfiesta goes back to the city for a week. I am left here, it is raining endlessly, and all I do is pray and think.

Yesterday a man appeared in the yard, and I went out to greet him. He is Miguel, Akiel in K’iche’. His Spanish is rough, but my K’iche’ is practically nothing, and I find out that he is the husband of Reverenda Pascuala—my ministry partner at San Juan. Joy! We talk for a while, as best we can, and he corrects my pronunciation, and I think that I will learn K’iche’, if I throw myself in the deep end. K’iche’ words sound different in his mouth, but I’m not a bad parrot, and I have a good ear. After a few tries it sounds okay. My heart swells in happiness, and he tells me that later la Reverenda will come by and say evening prayer. She’s busy right now, he says. She has two ladies about to give birth. La Reverenda Pascuala is a midwife, and a healer, and a priest. I am deeply grateful that we are working together.

Later, Akiel comes back and brings me three pears, little sweet fat pears that taste like candy. For my welcoming he says, and I grin, like a fool. Matyox! Thank you! And then la Reverenda comes by, and three, then four, then five children, neighbours they are, and we file into the church. Glory be! Church is church, and prayer book is prayer book and evening prayer is there, and the Magnificat, Mary’s song and God’s promise that the hungry will be filled with good things, and I pray, and try not to cry (again) but I cry mostly because I’m so happy, and I can’t explain it, but in this dusty, drippy, plain, yellow church, here with these people, my heart is where it is supposed to be!

And after the book service we kneel and La Reverenda Pascuala prays in K’iche’ and I know that it doesn’t matter what language you use, because fierce Ajaw, mother hen, mother bear, mother earth, has laid a great banquet before us, to share.

I cry, as I kneel in the yellow church, because I read before Akiel came that Guatemala has reached the level of the fourth country in the world with the highest rate of chronic malnutrition. The highest in Latin America. That goes too with the useless number that Guatemala has the most unequal land distribution in the Americas. Does that have anything to do with the legacy of the unacknowledged genocide, the quarter million dead and buried in these cornfields that surround me? My tears are falling on the wooden kneeler, that Oscar the young boy who read out the gospel (Jesus not loved in Nazareth) put down for us to share.

So friends, the rain comes down and no one can stop it. God is the lord of heaven and earth, no one else is, and he is a God of Justice. I don’t know exactly what my life here will be like for the next two years. Challenging. An unfolding blessing. I think it was Akiel’s pears of welcome that assured me, a hot-headed pilgrim, that here too, is my home.