I am very grateful for my Christian faith and for my daily sense and experience of God's presence in my life through his son and the second person of the Trinity, Jesus Christ. This can be very difficult to communicate to others nowadays given how much the Christian religion has fallen into disrepute, and largely through the culpability of its own adherents. I know that to many of you, my Gentle Reader, the words I just wrote probably don't make a lot of sense or evoke not a little rolling of the eyes and this is why I am often reluctant to use this kind of language, though for me it expresses what for me is a very true and authentic experience. For this reason, I prefer to be silent about my faith but to live as though Christ is alive in me, which is to live in a state of innocent joy and love and to be kind and generous towards others. Are Christians the only people in the world who have this sort of experience? And how would I know? I only can say that for my sense and understanding of God in my life this has become my common, everyday experience. I'm not about to speak for others because, honestly, I have no such right.
I was listening today to a radio broadcast about native spirituality and how important it is to a lot of First Nations people that they recover their original native beliefs and spiritual practices; of how those were taken away from them by the brutality of colonization and of how nasty old Christianity is the preferred whipping boy for everything that is wrong for our indigenous people's. Or is it?
That is another question I am not able to answer. I do recall hearing a bit of a controversy a couple of years ago about a group of Christian indigenous people objecting to the presence of a native sweat lodge on their property because they believed that native spirituality invokes evil spirits.
Full disclosure: I have absolutely no problem or issue with indigenous spiritual practices or beliefs. I remember attending last year a smudging ceremony and what a powerful, beautiful and moving experience this was and how full of the presence of the Holy Spirit. Does this make me want to abandon my Christian beliefs and experience and go, well, completely native? Hell no!
This experience did persuade me of the folly of judging the spiritual life and experience of people I know nothing about.
Listening to this radio program I heard about how the European colonizers, especially the Spanish and the Catholic Church, at first didn't even believe that the native peoples of the Americas were legitimate human beings with souls. It took them six years of deliberation in the Vatican before they could recognize the humanity of indigenous peoples, and only then because they wanted them as slaves and indentured labour to make it all the easier for them to plunder their land of its wealth and resources.
What I found particularly appalling was that it was Pope Alexander VI (yes, THAT Pope Alexander VI!) whose illegitimate children, the siblings Borgia became famous for incest, murder and extortion and to this day their fame shines through our pop culture with its uniquely lurid intensity. He was the pope who had to be convinced that the New World "savages" were indeed human beings and had the absolute nerve to tell them that if they held onto their native beliefs that they would be condemned to eternal hellfire.
Such was the brand of Christianity that was brought to the New World, perpetrated cultural and actual genocide and murdered and enslaved millions of innocent people to work in their fields and manor houses. All this, while professing to convert them to the same Jesus who for all of us became very poor and offered his life as a sacrifice for those same ecclesiastical bastards whom would have re-crucified our Saviour at the blink of an eye.
This is a theme that I want to further explore in this project I am embarking on about collective trauma in Latin American cultures: the role of the Roman Catholic Church, which has long been a particularly dominant force in those countries. Indeed, Mexico is particularly a best friend forever to the Vatican.
In many countries, particularly in the Chiapas state of Mexico, Guatemala, Bolivia, Peru and in others, there have been particularly strong influences and fusions between aboriginal and Catholic spirituality. We have also liberation theology, a unique Christian-Marxist fusion that has strongly influenced some of the leftist social and political movements throughout Latin America. There are, of course, also the diehard conservative traditional Catholic Latinos, very devout and very resistant to change or reform. Abortion is still illegal in many Latin American countries and scarcely a handful recognize gay marriage. I have also seen, at least in Mexico City, Bogota Colombia and in Costa Rica a particular indifference about religion, especially among youth and the well-educated.
The influence of Protestant Christianity is also noteworthy. When I was in San Cristobal de las Casas in Chiapas State I was intrigued by the many Pentecostal, evangelical and fundamentalist Christian churches on the outskirts of the city. In Costa Rica I was listening to a fundamentalist evangelical radio station that appeared to have a lot of followers. In Chiapas proper the devotion of some of the local indigenous Tzotzil was also intriguing to me. I can still feel the resonance in my soul of a woman kneeling, weeping and lamenting in her native language before an image of the Virgin.
I think that in order to really understand the role of religion and spirituality in the development of the Latin American cultures and nations I will always be referring back to that Tzotzil woman in a small chapel in San Cristobal de las Casas, and feel again her tears run over my soul and her cries of desperation pierce into my heart. This I believe will be my route to understanding and this is what will teach me more than all the scholarly articles I click onto on Google.
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