Sabado en Copan

The Spanish name for Saturday is Sabado, which comes from Sabbath, which is a day of rest--and that's what we did today: rest. Instead of going to the work site, we had time to stroll around town, visit the shops, try a new place for lunch (well, new to me and Lee), and just generally play. Lee and I lunched at a place called "Casa de Todo," which means "House of Everything," and they mean it: it's a restaurant, a gift shop, a wireless hotspot, a laundry, and a paperback book exchange. Lee had a chicken and guacamole sandwich, which she promptly proclaimed "the best sandwich I've had in my life"; and I tried the baleadas, which is sort of the Honduran version of a burrito, with beans and cheese and crema wrapped in flour tortillas. I got the extra special version with eggs. All familiar tastes, but blended in a way, and made with such fresh ingredients, that the overall flavor was truly wonderful. I love it when simple things reveal depths of goodness we don't typically expect, or we're too busy to notice, from them.

Lee and I spent a good part of the morning in the archeological museum just off the town plaza. Copan is of course a major Mayan site; the actual ruins are just a little way outside the modern village; but many original stonework pieces from the ruins were brought into the village and housed in a museum early on in the site restoration, as much for their own protection from further erosion by the elements as for people's ease in viewing them. When I was here last year I spent as much time as I could in the ruins and in the major museum at the ruin site; but until today I'd never been in the smaller museum in town. There are some wonderful carvings from buildings, stelae of rulers, and very delicately flaked flint ceremonial objects in that museum. Some of the information on the pieces was translated into English, but much of it was only in Spanish, so I'm not at all sure if I understand much more now than I did before visiting the museum this morning (especially concerning the bloodletting rites of the rulers--ugh), but it was still an amazing feeling to get a close look at things that had been part of a people's vibrant cultural and spiritual life so long ago and in a mental world so different from our own. We are going to the ruins and the big museum tomorrow, and I can't wait to visit them again. I think I want to read up on Smoke Jaguar and 18 Rabbit (interesting names these Mayan rulers had...), the two rulers who really consolidated Copan's power at its zenith, before seeing their monuments tomorrow.

There is something very special about having a day of rest, a day to be curious, a day to try new things, a day that is not parceled out into work blocks and obligations, in the midst of a heavy work schedule. And I think that's true whether one's work is heavy manual labor or intense emotional labor or focused intellectual labor. I think that is the wisdom of the sabbath, a wisdom we would all do well to cultivate, and a wisdom that presented itself for the sharing on this Sabado in Copan.

May the Peace of Christ be with you,
Paul+