Travelogues

This Article Is Track 03 Of Travel Soundtrack

In my third week in Guatemala, I began to learn more about the powerful religious currents that flow through Latin America. Religion is a contentious theme and I was therefore glad that I was not left to explore it alone. Trish, Gina, Beth and Grace - all fellow students at my Spanish School - became companion guides that helped me to new insight and understanding about the contemporary and historic impact of faith in Guatemala.

The unlikely setting for the first of these insights was Nim Pot - Centro De Textiles Traditionales. Nim Pot is a warehouse-sized arts and crafts store on Antigua's Calle Del Arco - the street that is spanned by the city's famous arch. Catering principally to the passing tourist trade, Nim Pot sells everything from hand woven huipils (traditional Maya dress) to brightly coloured monederos (wallets) and allegedly unique playeras (t-shirts).

Towards the back of the incense-enveloped shop is the wood-carving section. It was to here that Trish had brought me and where I now stood, transfixed by the awfulness of the store's most expensive chair. Noting my reaction Trish, beamed proudly in triumph. "Wow," I eventually mustered, "that really is quite something."

Retailing at 5,300Q (about 530 Euro or just under $700), this chair's price probably reflected its pretensions to divinity. In revering Christ the Carpenter, the chair is Christ as Carpentry - constructed as a Jesus you could sit on. The chair's front two legs end in pink naked feet, arms and hands provide the arm rests, a brown torso acts as back support and the chair is crowned with a familiar bearded face.

It is impossible to know what the artist responsible for this piece was thinking when he began carving this chair. Perhaps the original plan was to evoke the gentle embrace of sitting in the lap of Our Lord. Yet the effect of the finished product is anything but comforting - the severe, unsmiling face has a joyless, terrifying quality. In this regard, the chair is in keeping with Christian iconography in general, which often seems designed with the express purpose of scaring young children. Why anyone would want this in their living room is a riddle as impenetrable as the deepest mysteries of religion itself.

By showing me this unsettling chair Trish had, although she did not know it, discovered a perfect motif for my travels in Latin America. Arriving on this continent as a 33 year old male, I have often thought of this journey as my Age of Christ Tour. For men brought up in the Christian tradition, 33 is often a potent life marker. The symbolic power of this age is not confined to the religiously observant. Reaching the age of Christ may in fact mean more for men, like myself, who have long since loosed their moorings to the faith of their childhood.

Thinking of Jesus as a mere man rather than a God invites cripplingly deflating comparisons for men my age. By 33 Jesus had completed his life's work, was worshiped by women and men and had proven himself as the inspiring founder and leader of a movement that would change the world. He then died a hero in a courageous act of self-sacrifice. All in all, this is a tough gig to follow.

There is also no escaping the fact that 33 years is the outer-limit of time for a man to live up to the role model society has chosen for him. At 33 a man's adolescence is definitively over (though many women can cite extensive evidence to the contrary). The connections in our brain are now hardwired - the time for trading on our promise or potential has ended. So this is a time to take stock of who we've become and what we've done, rather than who we'd like to be and what we plan to do. Am I a leader? Am I courageous? Is the world different because I am here? Do I inspire people? Will I be remembered?

The answers to these questions can be discouraging. Grappling with one's own failings and traumas, increasingly evident mortality and loss of faith all at once can be a kind of crucifixion. Whether one has a resurrection to look forward to afterwards depends on the success and honesty with which one engages with these issues.

So Nim Pot's Jesus Chair - unsettling and overpowering - captured many of my private thoughts. However, its existence is also a social commentary on the highly visibile and enduring potency of religion in Guatemala.

The vitality of religion and religious organisations in Guatemala - best expressed in exuberant festivals such as Semana Santa and Day of the Dead - is in part the legacy of successful evangelical work by mostly US based Protestant churches. A number of my fellow students were foreign missionaries and thanks to meeting two of them - Beth and Gina, I gained a little more understanding of what they did.

Both women are about 30, intelligent and engaging and from the United States. Beth and Gina came to Guatemala to work in volunteer projects that aim to tackle some of the consequences of the poverty that is prevalent throughout this country. Additionally they sometimes engage in direct ministry - talking to strangers on the street about faith issues. Like many Antigua-based missionaries they also attend services and prayer meetings in the Higher Grounds Cafe. The Higher Grounds is a cafe where you can order coffee that comes with a free shot of salvation ("paid for by Jesus" as the cafe's slogan says).

The social impact of the volunteer army of missionaries over the last few decades has been significant. Due to the success of US based Protestant churches in gaining adherents, Guatemala is now Latin America's least Catholic country (the continent's premiere religion accounting for just 63% of the Guatemalan population according to my Rough Guide). Non-Catholic religions have had been successful in part because they established locally based health, social and education programmes to serve families who changed their faith. Having visited a fabulous Mormon outdoor centre near Antigua, I can understand why people might pick their faith not on the basis of promises of life after death, but on practical temporal benefits in the here and now.

The activity of the US Protestant churches is a relatively recent phenomenon that follows the precedent established almost 500 years ago by the invading Spanish forces. The Spanish brought Catholicism with them, a religion that either replaced or was incorporated into the traditional Maya belief systems of this land. I explored some of the Catholic heritage of Guatemala with Grace, a New Yorker and fellow student at my school, who I had met earlier that week.

As part of a walking tour organised by our Spanish School, Grace and I climbed the short distance to Cerra De La Cruz, a clearing on a nearby hill that has the most beautiful views of Antigua. Cerra De La Cruz (Hill Of The Cross) is named after the large cross that has been erected here and which is visible from most parts of the city. The cross is said to form the northern point of a triangle of crosses that provides divine protection for the city - much needed in light of Antigua's history of violent destruction.

After the trip to Cerra De La Cruz, we visited the Las Capucines - the beautiful ruins of a convent once populated by a particularly ascetic group of nuns. Apparently living all of their convent lives without any visual contact with the outside world, these nuns must have had a grim existence. This impression of austerity of their lives only deepened when we walked past the ruins of the tiny cells that the nuns formerly inhabited. Two of these cells have been reconstructed, complete with mannequins in nun's habits. Downstairs another mannequin was also dressed in a nun's habit, but for the rather ghoulish purposes of recreating a death scene.

A striking impression of visiting Las Capucines is just how remarkable it has been for Catholicism to establish and maintain a position of dominance in popular adherence whilst promoting such self-denial and self-abegnation. Evidence of the continued potency of religion in the popular imagination is everywhere to see in Antigua.

Las Capucines is one of just 49 notable religious structures contained within Antigua's compact confines. Just a few yards from its famous Jesus Chair, the Nim Pot exhibits paintings representing prayers of thanks from people who have endured great pain - including an especially graphic representation of a rape that gives thanks for the victim not getting pregnant or contracting AIDS. And throughout Antigua's cobbled streets trundle Chicken Buses and other vehicles bedecked with slogans such as Dios es mi luz (God is my light), Guiame Senor (guide me Lord) and Siempre in mi mente (always in my mind).

However, on my own path to meaning I have found the most spiritually resonant slogan I have encountered to come not from a church but from an adventure tour company. Outdoor Excursions' creed "The mountains are my church" avows allegiance not to a God created in our own image but to the natural world we inhabit.

Journeying through the natural wonders of Latin America, I often feel a spiritual, or at the very least existential, resonance to my travels. A private search for meaning is common amongst travelers - it is almost a cliche that people leave their regular lives to either find themselves or lose themselves. Strategies these travelers employ vary from drug consumption or meditation (popular options around Lago De Atitlan, which I visited in my first week in Guatemala) to promiscuity or religion (relatively easy options in Antigua, a city of gringo-parties and colonial churches).

The contours of my own spiritual quest is being shaped by volcanoes, lakes and waterfalls. I feel at my most alive when confronting the natural energies that have carved the arteries of our world and which transport our planet's red and white blood cells of fire and water. My instinctive reaction when experience nature at its most powerful and beautiful is to feel a kind of transcendence. At these times, I feel that the faith of my childhood may have gotten something profoundly wrong in conceiving of God as a conscious being. The pulse of creation seems to me to be all the more spiritually powerful for it being unthinking energy. For me, despite the splendor evident in many of Antigua's 49 religious structures, it is nature not man that has created this region's most potent places to worship.

Play Music:
Neon Bible (Arcade Fire)

This Weeks Dates:
1-7 Oct 2007

This Weeks Places:
Antigua, & Guatemala City in Guatemala

This Weeks Doings:
Learning Spanish

This Weeks Sleeps:
Renting An Apartment

This Weeks Eats: