Reading Isaiah In Chiapas

Chiapas, Mexico, 2001

 THE VIRGIN CRESTED THE HILL, and a man emerged from his doorway and gave a shout. Others rushed from their huts. Perched on a dais borne on the shoulders of four men dressed in leather sandals and white tunics, she descended the narrow dirt trail toward the Mexican village. Behind her a long procession unfurled over and down the hill. Musicians marched in front, playing wooden harps and guitars and child-sized violins that looked like they had been carved with a hatchet, which they had. A lone trumpeter announced the Virgin’s arrival, his notes bearing no particular relation to the melody.

The village of Nuevo Yibeljoj (Yee-bell-ho) was a half-hour’s walk from the nearest highway, perched on the side of a steep ravine in an airy, rugged land of mountain mists and waterfalls. The villagers were all members of Las Abejas, a nonviolent Christian society of Maya that had become targets of government persecution. Almost all of them had been displaced from their homes three years earlier by paramilitary forces sponsored by the Mexican government. The Abejas had shouldered the few belongings they could carry and walked several hours to the village of X’oyep (Sho-yep), where nearly a thousand of them had built shanties, exiles in their own homeland. Then, just a few months before I’d arrived in Chiapas, they had decided it was time to return. Despite the continuing paramilitary threats, the residents of Yibeljoj had come back to their village and found their houses destroyed, their land taken by others. So they’d built a new village down the hill in a ravine, a “new” Yibeljoj. The Virgin was being carried toward the little wooden chapel constructed since their return. Her arrival signaled the start of Holy Week, commemorating the events leading up to Jesus’s crucifixion and resurrection.

Seeing my villager friend José sitting on a hillside above the chapel, I hiked up to join him, and we watched the slow procession in silence. I was nearing the end of my tour in Chiapas as a reservist in the Christian Alliance for Nonviolence (can), and I had no idea what I would do next: Continue my career as an international peace activist? Return to the States and apply for a PhD in theology? Lately I’d been dreaming of starting a fair-trade coffee business. The idea had come to me after I’d heard José describe the difficulty the Abejas had in getting a fair price for their main cash crop. In recent years the market price of coffee had fallen below the cost of production, making their crop worthless. But what if someone bought their beans for a fair price, I thought, regardless of what the market paid? And what if that someone was me?

The Virgin drew near. A hush descended, and the villagers parted to let her pass through. Her graven face appeared long and dolorous: the gaze of one who has seen much suffering.

They said the statue of Mary had taken a bullet at Acteal. “La Virgen de la Masacre,” they called her: On December 22, 1997, more than a hundred paramilitaries descended upon the Abejas village of Acteal. Fearing such an attack, the villagers had been praying for peace for three days. The chapel where they were huddled was the first building fired on by the paramilitaries. Unarmed and nonviolent, the Abejas fled into the surrounding woods. For the next six hours the killers hunted them down: men, women, children. The Virgin Mary had watched her own son be put to death. That day in Acteal forty-five more of her children were slaughtered.

As a Protestant, I had always wondered why Catholics venerated Mary — adoring her, lighting candles to her, even praying to her, which seemed borderline idolatrous. In the Evangelical Free Church of my youth we hadn’t even had Holy Week: why dwell on the cross when Christ had already risen? But I was learning in Chiapas how Holy Week acknowledges that suffering and humiliation can’t be bypassed on the road to glory. Pain must be confronted and endured. And Mary, too, embodies that story. She bore a child destined for calamity, as had many of the Abejas. She was human, like them, but had the most intimate contact with God, having carried his son in her body. Of course they would adore her. The Virgin’s sad, maternal gaze as she rode by seemed an assurance that God doesn’t abandon his people; he suffers with them. The Mother of God was among us, and Holy Week had begun.

José told me of his plans to work in his field of cafetales — coffee trees — later that week. The field was near the homes of several known paramilitaries. Would I accompany him? We decided to go in three days, on Maundy Thursday, the day of Jesus’s Last Supper with his disciples. José would come to collect me at 6 am.

“Hora de Fox?” I asked. I knew the answer, but I still liked to hear his reply.

José smiled. “No. Hora de Dios.”

The Abejas had named daylight saving time after Mexico’s president, Vicente Fox. Hora de Fox was a human invention that changed according to the whims of a capitalist economy, but the villagers operated on God’s time: a small act of resistance.

THE can MEMBERS weren’t the only activists in the village. There were also the “campamentistas” — “those who camp or visit.” They’d come to act as human shields: Soon after the left-wing Zapatista rebels had declared war on the Mexican government in 1994, the government had responded by training paramilitary groups to attack Mayan villages. The campamentistas’ strategy was that, although paramilitaries might slaughter Mayan farmers by the dozens, they would be unlikely to kill a ruddy-cheeked gringo from Minnesota or Manhattan for fear of an international outcry. And it worked. The attacks grew sparse. But as the violence decreased, the number of Western activists grew. Tourist guidebooks even recommended that travelers spend a week as “human-rights observers” in a rural village during their trip through Mayan country.

Of course, we can reservists felt morally superior to the campamentistas — disaster tourists who came to gawk at others’ suffering between stops at ruins and souvenir shops. For starters, we stayed for three months instead of one week. After a while, however, I had begun to wonder just how different we were. What, besides my little red cap with a can logo, distinguished me from the other gringos and Euros having activist adventures? Sure, I’d visited several Abejas villages and played basketball with the teens on the dirt court near the chapel. And I was learning Tzotzil, the local Mayan tongue. But mostly I just sat around and tried to look vigilant. The inescapable truth came hard: I was of little use to the Abejas.

Which is why I’d been thinking more and more about my fair-trade coffee scheme. I met with Pablo, the president of the Abejas coffee collective. When in town, I spent time at the Jesuit compound, talking with Arturo, an oblate who knew a lot about the coffee business. He helped me formulate a plan to launch a fair-trade Abejas coffee store back home. I didn’t know where I would get the money, and I didn’t know how to roast coffee, much less market it. But those were minor obstacles that could be dealt with later. The important thing was to learn as much as I could about coffee while I was here.

So when José asked me to help him in his field, I thought of it as research. Plus, I would be useful to him, offering not only my white skin as protection from paramilitaries, but the work of my hands.

WHEN I WASN’T VISITING the village, I stayed in the nearby city of San Cristóbal de las Casas, and each morning I would rise at six and climb to the rooftop of our office to pray. There was a water tank, a basin where we washed our clothes, a small writing desk that I had carried up the stairs, and not much else. I could hear the city below but couldn’t see it over the waist-high walls. Above were cloudless skies and the thin blue light of dawn. It was just a rooftop, but to me it was a cathedral in the sky, and, like any well-built cathedral, it directed my thoughts heavenward.

When my mind wandered from my prayers, I would pick up the Bible or one of a small selection of other books I’d brought: the collected poems and essays of Wendell Berry; Tolstoy’s The Kingdom of God Is within You; and two books of Christian philosophy by Søren Kierkegaard. Maybe it was my Danish ancestry, but no one articulated my distrust of establishment Christianity better than this gloomy Dane. This passage had particular resonance: 

True individuality is measured by this: how long or how far one can endure being alone without the understanding of others. The person who can endure being alone is poles apart from the social mixer. He is miles apart from the man-pleaser, the one who manages successfully with everyone — he who possesses no sharp edges. God never uses such people. The true individual, anyone who is going to be directly involved with God, will not and cannot avoid the human bite. He will be thoroughly misunderstood. God is no friend of cozy human gathering.

The last three sentences were underlined. I had felt the “human bite.” My fellow can reservists wanted me to be more involved in planning protests, to spend more time with visiting delegations, to take a more active role in their “cozy human gatherings.” All I wanted was to be with my Mayan friends, who were teaching me so much. I made up reasons why I needed to spend time in the villages, and why I needed to be there without my colleagues. It’s not that they were bad people. In fact, they were just like me: twenty-something, middle-class, Christian kids who rebelled against anything that might repress their freedom. But I couldn’t see this then.

Kierkegaard also warns of the dangers of academia, which I was still considering as a possible vocation. “What is needed is not professors but witnesses,” he writes. “No, if Christ did not need scholars but was satisfied with fishermen, what is needed now is more fishermen. . . . To become a full professor [of theology] is to make a living off the fact that Christ was crucified.”

I didn’t want to profit from Christ’s death. I also worried I would be too confined in the academy. I yearned to do my theologizing out in the world, on a mountain hillside or a rooftop.

Kierkegaard’s polemical barbs showed me what I should be against, but they didn’t articulate what I should be for, which is why increasingly I found myself reading Isaiah, particularly the poetry. I savored the lyrical language, the ripe images of agrarian life. Sitting on a hill above Nuevo Yibeljoj at dawn, I would watch the villagers arise with the birds and read: “Ah, land of whirring wings / beyond the rivers of Ethiopia.” Or during Mass at Acteal, I would remember Isaiah’s haunting, exuberant image of resurrection: 

Oh dwellers in the dust, awake and sing for joy! For your dew is a radiant dew, and the earth will give birth to those long dead.

 Isaiah is a beautiful book. Even now I love to read it in the early morning while I’m still waking up. It was an important book for the Abejas, too, and they read it often during their gatherings, where I came to see their lives as somehow part of Isaiah’s story. In the displacement camp at X’oyep, I’d attended a service where the priest had read the second half of Isaiah 65. It took me a moment to realize that he had substituted “X’oyep” for “Jerusalem”: 

For I am about to create new heavens
and a new earth. . . .
for I am about to create X’oyep as a joy,
and its people as a delight.
I will rejoice in X’oyep
and delight in my people;
no more shall the sound of
weeping be heard in it,
or the cry of distress.

 Another time I heard a reading from Isaiah was when the Abejas burned their coffee crop. One day in late March they held a prayer service in Acteal, where they would protest the market forces that had made their coffee worthless. A swarm of local media came. As the cameras rolled, a man wearing tattered pants and a shirt with no buttons read Isaiah 58 in Tzotzil.

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