Learning and Serving

Elizabeth Griswold – Guatemala

I came to Guatemala as an UCC/Global Ministries Overseas Associate, through Brethren Volunteer Service/Global Mission Partnerships, to teach. However, as it turns out, I think I have been the one to learn so much more than I have offered.

Elizabeth Griswold – Guatemala

I came to Guatemala as an UCC/Global Ministries Overseas Associate, through Brethren Volunteer Service/Global Mission Partnerships, to teach. However, as it turns out, I think I have been the one to learn so much more than I have offered.

For example, I have been expertly schooled in the practical arts of traditional weaving, making tortillas, and picking coffee.  Yet I have also learned a tremendous amount about some of the most important intangibles in life—love, culture, community, and especially faith.

As far as my own faith background, I was raised within a liberal UCC congregation, and I hope to someday be able to use my faith lessons in UCC-ordained ministry, since I plan to enter seminary once I go home.  I have also been heavily influenced by my experiences within the activist Catholic Worker movement. Through these modes, I developed a faith of action in serving others, but not necessarily a personal spiritual faith based on my own needs.  I know that all of my faith-based work for peace and social justice has come from a place of privilege, and that a lack of a personal spiritual faith is a form of luxury that, alternately, all of the instability and uncertainty of life here just does not afford most people.

Faith becomes a way to keep one’s sanity in a struggle for survival in a world where, for example, if there is no rain, there is no corn, which is the staff of life.  In a world where if there is too much rain, the flimsy cane houses by the river get swept away in the storm, as they did after Hurricane Stan recently.  Faith becomes a means of making sense of things in a world where the whole community gathers to pray the rosary on their knees before a dead compañero, taking comfort in the enduring rote prayers, as there is no way to explain his death besides “God called him.”

And I have found myself also praying more during my time here than ever before in my life.  Every night I am on my knees meditating on people and situations in rippling concentric geographic circles.  Beginning with my indigenous Mayan host family, spreading to the community school where I work, to the neighborhood well project and the families needing that water, to the political climate of Guatemala and its tense and fragile peace.  The circle widens to my own family and friends in the US, my church, the LA Catholic Worker, my friends with cancer, my friends in jail.  It broadens globally to encompass all those in Iraq, Afghanistan, Israel and Palestine, Sudan, and the US powers-that-be.  Finally, the circle radiates back, and I pray for “A Closer Walk with Thee,” my own following of the Way.

I always end crossing myself over the Immaculate Conception medallion I wear on a chain around my neck.  I won it in a raffle from my sixth-grade students, and I like wearing it almost because, while from my less orthodox faith perspective, I do not believe in the concept, yet I can still take comfort in the ecumenical syncretism of keeping close my amiga María, who is revered by everyone else around me as the literal conceived-without-sin Virgencita.  And as “Father, Son, Holy Ghost” becomes “Melt me, mold me, fill me, use me,” I pray to be used for God’s purposes, knowing that marking myself as a Christian necessarily entails taking up the cross to follow Jesus, in action. 

And I have learned from so many great examples of that following.  I have US compañeros who have followed to solidarity in war-torn Iraq, to stark voluntary poverty serving the homeless, to jail, to hospitals, to developing nations.  And I have Guatemalan compañeros who have followed to the bank to mortgage their home and give all they have to save a public natural spring from private developers, to city hall to donate from their own meager possessions so their flooded neighbors can persevere and rebuild, to the streets to speak out for justice and indigenous rights.

And they continue to teach me so much.  Though, on the one hand, I am increasingly grateful for my education and comparatively vast knowledge of the outside world, on the other, I am repeatedly amazed by the faithful worldview of those who have not been “overeducated.” So many of the poor of the Third World, out of necessity, acknowledge God before all and intimately know our own lack of control over most affairs.  While my own scientifically-trained mind at times becomes alarmed by practical dangers, the people continue in their faith.  Fervent prayers and crosses swinging from the rear-view mirror supersede seat belts on car rides.  A red bead necklace and painting of Michael the Archangel intervene for good health.  Traditional Catholic and Mayan belief systems synthesize as religion takes on its original goal—as an explanation for the unknown and a way to makes sense of events’ causes and effects with God and spirits. 

In this vein, I have been able to gain an understanding of the longing for an afterlife in a way that I have never gotten it before.  My own life has been filled with so many blessings that, in the words of the Haggadah of the Passover Seder, “It would have been enough.”  Yet here, people like the mother of my host family are confronted with death threats for actions such as building a school for the indigenous poor.  And her response, from her deep personal faith, was basically, “Go ahead.  My compañeros will finish the work. Though our lack of money means the teachers will have to work for just corn and beans, the school will be built.  I know I am doing nothing wrong in working for our children’s future.  And I’m tired and ready to go home to God and rest if it’s my turn.”  Faith in the promise of an afterlife is a necessary and deserved sustainer, especially after such a life of true struggle. 

The strength of family and community ties also sustains the people in their faithful lives.  I have come to really enjoy the ritual in which, after every meal, everyone at the table thanks every other person there for their companionship, for creating and enjoying the meal together, for being a part of the acknowledged community of God, where sharing food means a lot.  And of course, song, which crosses cultures, binds the people together in communal worship and personal faith.  In reverie I close my eyes and join the choir in the familiar “alleluias” of the mass.  In delight I sing songs of sister- and brotherhood my little host sisters learned in First Communion class as we walk holding hands up in the mountains.  Song soars above all to the source of our faith, linking the people here in communion with creation and with each other.

Yet that is not to say there is complete religious harmony in Guatemala, by any means.  Just as there is much ladin@ vs. indigenous animosity, it also exists between Catholics and Evangelicals.  As an open-minded mainline Protestant, I have tried in small ways to bridge that gap and offer a tolerant accepting example.  As we have been told, “Whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it” (Luke 18:17).  I witnessed a beautiful example of that reception as I sat in silence alone in church one weekday afternoon a couple months ago.  A little boy entered with his mother, who immediately reverently kneeled to cross herself, then quietly sat down in one of the pews.  But he went right on walking to the front of the big church, happily skipped up the steps, and began to stroke the altar.  All the while whistling and obviously enjoying himself, he danced a circle around the podium and finally sat down in one of the special reserved seats gaily swinging his little legs that didn’t reach the floor.  As his embarrassed mother tried desperately to shush him and summon him to more pious behavior, as would happen most anywhere, I giggled and gave her what I hoped was a reassuring smile.  I doubt he knew whether it was a Catholic or Evangelical church, or a synagogue, mosque, or temple, for that matter.  Yet he seemed to know, and to enjoy, that he was in a special place; and that is a place where people gather and try to faithfully reflect their highest values, to seek hope and strength together as sustaining community.

I believe it was Catholic Worker co-founder Dorothy Day who said that we should work like it’s all up to us, but pray like it’s all up to God.  My time here in Guatemala is teaching me to follow this practical advice about faith.  I hope that after I leave, some of the kids at our school may remember a few of the English words I taught them, but I know for sure that I will never forget the life lessons in personal faith that I have learned from the people here.  I plan to bring them home with me to share with others since, after all, even in the First World; we can all use a little sustenance.

Elizabeth Griswold
Elizabeth Griswold serves as an Overseas Associate in Guatemala through Brethren Volunteer Service.  She works with an indigenous Mayan community in the Chimaltenango province of Guatemala as an elementary school English teacher.  She also teaches other subjects, helping with the community’s reforestation, greenhouse plants and other agricultural projects.