To be a pilgrim, I have had to let go of a lot of preconceptions. It has been easy to do so superficially, but difficult to do so substantially.
One of the more superficial accommodations a person from the United States of America must make is how to introduce themselves in Mexico.
“What country are you from?”
“I’m American.”
“Well so am I.”
“”No… I’m from the United States.”
“Well so am I.”
“Huh?”
The point I learned the hard way is that Mexico’s official name is “The United States of Mexico.” Therefore to say you are from the “United States” does not precisely distinguish between the USA and Mexico. It also has also given rise to an expression that has taken some time for me to get used to, “Ah… you are from the North.”
The North?
The North?
My country doesn’t even get the respect of a name. It is simply “The North?”
The frame of reference sheds light on Mexican immigration to the United States of America. Culturally, there is a lack of acknowledgment that the United States has a sovereign claim on land that has been part of the migration of indigenous people for centuries. Sure. There is a government who wants to put up a fence and carries you back to an imaginary line in the sand if they catch you, but otherwise, that area up there is just “the North.”
“The flag is waving in your mind.” I’ve thought of that statement so many times since it was spoken in the homily of the Indian Order of the Mass that I attended in Bangalore (see blog entitled Your Mind is Forming the Contradiction, March 21, 2007) . The proverb is a recognition of Indian wisdom that concepts don’t exist in reality, they exist in the mind. The United States, Mexico, Iraq, Rome, etc. These are just concepts. They don’t really exist. They didn’t five hundred years ago, and five hundred years from now… how can we possibly say that they still will?
A constant frustration for me this year has been encountering pejorative attitudes toward differences in the Church. The Jesuits, the Dominicans, the Schoenstatt movement, Opus Dei, Protestants, Evangelicals, Orthodox, Benedictines, Melkites, Lutherans, on and on the differences extend… in our minds, in our conceptual understanding of the world. It seems that every group has an opinion about the other, and it usually isn’t a very positive opinion.
I have often wondered whether all of these groups have ever read the First Letter to the Corinthians by St. Paul. He says in 1 Corinth 3:3-9
While there is jealousy and rivalry among you, are you not of the flesh, and behaving in an ordinary human way? Whenever someone says, "I belong to Paul," and another, "I belong to Apollos," are you not merely human? What is Apollos, after all, and what is Paul? Ministers through whom you became believers, just as the Lord assigned each one.
His words make me feel pretty small for being annoyed that the United States of America is commonly referred to by Mexicans in the South of Mexico simply as “The North.” What unifies us is far more important than what divides us.
Today, by letting go of my preconceptions, I was able to have an experience that epitomizes why this pilgrimage has been important. I left Mapachapa, and the state of Vera Cruz, and drove through Oaxaca to visit the community of Poblado Once. The drive was one of the most beautiful I could have imagined. Lush green rolling hills that I have only heard about in places like Ireland, but unannounced, and pristine, in the South of Mexico.
Poblado Once is one of several poblados constructed by the Mexican government to relocate the inhabitants of an area flooded by an artificial lake, the result of damning a nearby river. The poblados are named in order one, two, three, etc. Poblado Once is the eleventh township created.
In Poblado Once there is a chapel to Our Lady of Guadalupe. If you have downloaded Google Earth onto your computer, you can view my pictorial of the chapel by clicking here.
Like many of the places that I have been this year, Poblado Once is not on any tourist map. Outside the villagers of the neighboring poblados, there are very few people who ever come here. It is more or less forgotten.
The priest who serves the chapel is Fr. Mike, who is a Marist priest. He arranged for the community to gather before the Mass so they could talk with me about my experience of pilgrimage. In our conversation, I spoke with them about the other Christians that I had visited in other parts of the world. At the end of the session, right before Mass began, an elderly woman stood up and spoke.
She said, “I would like to thank you for coming here. I have always known that there were Christians throughout the world, but it was more of a concept than anything. To have you share with us their stories makes me very happy, because now I truly know, I have brothers and sisters all over the world.”
This was a woman who knows about, but will probably never use at a constructive level, the internet. She will probably never board an airplane. She will probably never leave Mexico, but because of my presence in Pablado Once, she felt less isolated. Conversely, by her words to me, I felt less isolated, less trapped by the concepts that are used to divide us from one another.
When are courageous enough to confess that we are sinners, there is a tendency for us to focus on the deeds that we have done that were wrong, for actions. It is a good thing that we express sorrow for our actions, but that isn’t the whole story.
At the beginning of Mass, Catholics pray the Confetior which states that “I have sinned through my own fault, in my thoughts and in my words, in what I have done and what I have failed to do.” I have noticed that even when we name “thoughts” that we consider to be “sins,” we are usually naming actions. For example, “I thought of killing my enemy.” To think of killing someone is an action, not a thought. It is something that I did. The thought that is “sinful,” is the concept that the other human being is an enemy.
The point I am trying to make is that our very approach to the world, our thoughts, our concepts are plagued by sin. They divide us from one another and justify evil. They are used to determine the dignity of a human being based on which United States s/he is from rather than his/her kinship to God.
We can confess our sinful actions all we want, but such confessions are superficial. What is causing the problem is more substantial.
To be sure of what I am saying, there is nothing wrong with concepts. The concept of the United States of America is a rather good concept. The belief that we are all brothers and sisters in Christ is a rather good concept as well.
What is evil is when these concepts explicitly negate the implicit dignity of God’s creation, when our respect for another person is predicated by them being Opus Dei or Scheonstatt, from “the North” or from “the South,” being Catholic or Lutheran, or being black or white.
When this happens, we should be thankful that the Confetior calls us to a more substantial confession of sin, and conversion of self. We have truly sinned in our thoughts and in our words… in our very concepts.