December 13, 2004
Mary Hamilton’s book, The People Could Fly,
tells the wonderful story about a great people who had magical
powers. They could fly. They didn’t need flying machines
or airborne contraptions. But with their songs, their inner
strength, and their mental capacities, their spirits would soar,
and often their bodies would join their spirits in sailing above
the terrain. The people thought nothing of this ability. They
thought everybody was like them. They lived with difficulties,
they fought nature to survive, and they had enemies both within
and without; but something so strong inside them gave them the
power to rise above situations and circumstances. With the powerful
gift of memory they remembered that once upon a time, they had
the ability to fly.
Jesus and Those Bodacious Women, Linda H. Hollies,
p. 24
Marta
We’ve shared sacred spaces with people across Guatemala
who’ve lived moments where “something so strong inside
them gave them the power to rise…as he looked up, Jesus
saw the rich putting their gifts into the temple treasury. He
also saw a poor widow put in two very small copper coins. ‘I
tell you the truth,’ he said, ‘this widow has put
in more than all the others. All these people gave their gifts
out of their wealth; but she out of her poverty put in all she
had to live on’” (Lk. 21:1-4). We accepted the invitation
to enter a home. Boxes of possessions were re-positioned around
the supporting pole as seven gringas huddled under the
leaking lamina roof. Chickens scurried outside under the walls,
chorusing our arrival as neighborhood dogs dug nose-and-paw holes
under the same to take a peek at these strange ones with mushroom
drape. Putting our umbrellas aside, we exchanged greetings. The
owner of the five-by-six-meter home sat on her bed, composed of
five or six raised five-inch slats. She was spent and weary. Firewood
was piled in the cooking area with coals protected for the next
firing. A young man entered. A wee shadow began to move. A dance
began with Marta wrestling with herself, calling on earth’s
energy to give her strength to rise from her straw mat. Many of
us knelt in the presence of this holy one. Marta was cradled in
the arms of one of the women. We listened to silence of this wee
saint.
“My mother is tired. I’m her oldest son and I have
a family. Our hermana (sister in Christ) is giving my
mother a piece of her home to place her bed because we have no
room. When we finish the new house we will all live together.
Can you help her? She is getting smaller because she won’t
eat.” As the nurse lovingly strokes Marta’s face a
harsh reality becomes evident in the son’s words, “she
told me it’s an offering to the family.” A widow with
children who have families of their own, and she, Marta is old,
almost blind, having only a straw mat, the clothes on her back;
she’s giving the family “all she had to live on.”
Marta smiled and said she wanted her grandchildren to live. All
the while rain was cascading through worn spots in the roof and
we remembered our baptism—in life and in death we belong
to God.
We sang a song…the only song we all knew in Quiché:
C’o quicotem, quicotem pa ri wanima’,
Pa ri wanima’, pa ri wanima’,
Maltiox che ri Dios.
(I have joy, joy, joy down in my heart, down in my heart. Thanks
be to God.)
Marta turned her head and smiled at these seven gringas singing
for her in her language, I have joy down in my heart. Thanks be
to God.
Echos of her maltiox, maltiox cling to my memory. Marta
remembered how to fly, to rise out of her poverty to provide food
for her grandchildren. And we were helpless in our riches.
Donaldo
“Yes, I speak English,” Donaldo said. “I studied
hard when I was in el Norte, but they sent me back to Honduras.
Conditions are really bad so I came to Guatemala. I can’t
go north again. Your country needs me because I could help you
understand why we go north. We don’t go with much and what
we have is used along the way. Did you know we risk our lives
for you in the north so you can have nice landscaping, fresh vegetables
and fruits, meat, chicken? We work in the slaughterhouses. Some
of us build the furniture you use. I sent money to my mother.
She’s a widow you know. Yes, we risk our lives for you and
then you send us back to suffer.”
I asked him what he is doing, besides selling newspapers. “Oh,
I’m a ‘coyote,’ and I’m a good one. I
learned how to go north. Now I help others and all my
people are OK.” I asked him if he had a hunch why he was
discovered. “Let me tell you one thing. I knew I needed
more education. I started asking people to teach me this and that.
I asked one too many people. Now here I am dreaming about what
it is like to be….” We were interrupted by customers,
only to be lost in a sea of people. His parting phrase, “dreaming
about what it is like to be,” was “all she had to
live on.”
Señora V
Señora V, I called her, because try as I might I couldn’t
say her name. Señora V liked her name because V means verdad,
truth. She said “Selena” was easy because there was
a singer named Selena, but she died. We chatted while we made
mountains of tortillas; hers were round, mine were geographic.
We laughed and sang, she in K’anjo’bal and Spanish.
Ms. V wanted me to sing only in English. We sang real songs and
made up tri-lingual songs which drifted out the open window across
the mountain valley to where a new congregation was starting,
an hour and a half’s walk from there, to the tops of the
Cuchumatanes. Ms. V shared stories of her family. Then she took
my arm and said, “My husband is in the north, his second
trip. He sends me money. The first thing I do is give a tithe
and an offering to the church. The rest I use until he can send
me more. After we build our house he won’t go north anymore”
We went back to our work preparing almuerzo (lunch)
for the delegation, and I listened once more to her words, “give
a tithe and an offering to the church.” I looked around
at the church kitchen with boiling pots on the wood-burning stove,
piles of cut wood ready for feeding, pots hanging by nails on
the wall, a cupboard with assorted kitchen tools, a small table,
stumps for chairs and they, she “out of her poverty put
in all she had to live on.” Ms. V’s spirits soared
with “something so strong inside her giving her power to
rise above situations and circumstances.”
A powerful gift of memory. One who risked His life that we might
have life and to have it more abundantly. Veni Emmanuel! Oh
ven, Sabidurá de Dios. O Come, God with us.
…caminando en la gracia de Dios….walking in
the Grace of God,
Selena, Joe Keesecker
The 2005 Mission Yearbook for Prayer & Study, p.
62
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