In the morning we went to the town of Santa Rita, just a few kilometers up the road, where we joined the congregation of Espiritu Santo (Holy Spirit) for a rousing celebration of the Eucharist. Concepcion, the deacon in charge, invited me to celebrate; but since I have no Spanish, we traded paragraphs: I'd read in English, and he'd repeat in Spanish, and together we prayed the prayer. I did try a few phrases in Spanish--like "Oremos" for "Let us pray"--and while I'm sure my pronunciation was atrocious to the ears of native speakers, they were gracious to me and made the responses. I love liturgy.
And it was a great experience of what liturgy can do. Although the Anglos in the room could not understand the Hondurenas (even our Spanish-speakers have a hard time keeping up when they're at full speed), and the Hondurenas could not understand the Anglos, we still came together in prayer and worship and communion, because the liturgy is bigger than any of us, and the liturgy has its own rhythms and movements and shape, and the liturgy carried us all along together into the epiphany of Christ's love in our midst. As I put the wafers into people's hands at communion, saying "El Cuerpo de Cristo" as well as I could, knowing that word and gesture and bread were all coming together to communicate more than was humanly possible, I was deeply touched by the awareness of God at work among us, and the gift of sharing in the making of the peace that surpasses understanding. The whole church, which our mission trips had helped to build, was bathed in the radiance of sacred space.
After church we headed back into town, where different parties banded together for different afternoon activities. Five us us--Lee and me, John and Bizzy Lane, and Ralph Ruedy--went to the ruins, where a very thorough and splendidly informed tour guide led us on a journey through the ancient city and the deep mythology of the Mayan Copanecas. I visited the ruins last year, and I've done some reading as well; but today I felt as though some things really came alive in my understanding in a way they hadn't before. Just one example: the king whose name I've always seen rendered "18 Rabbit" actually had a much more interesting name: the glyph looks like a rabbit (well, like an agouti, really), but it means "image of the god," so the king's name was really "He Who is Eighteen Times an Image of the Dynastic God." How's that for a royal name! We spent nearly three and a half hours walking slowly from building to building and stela to stela, hearing stories of the kings of Copan, myths of the Creation Hero Twins, fine points of the artistic development of Copan culture. It was truly wonderful.
It was part of Maya mythology that the king served a priestly function to communicate with the gods of the heavens and the ancestor-spirits of the underworld on behalf of the people. Mountains reached toward the heavens, and caves communicated with the underworld; so the place of effective ritual was a mountain with a cave at the top; and that is what they built their temples to symbolize. The acropolis at Copan is ringed with such artificial mountains, marking the whole enclosure as sacred space. It has even been suggested that one of the plazas could be flooded at will, so that it became a representation of the watery underworld upon which the solid land floats; when the king emerged from the temple-top chamber and looked out over that artificial lake, it was like looking out over the whole creation.
I find encounters with ancient myths, and the religious spaces that embody them, to be fascinating. The way the human spiritual imagination works to map its cosmic visions onto physical spaces runs very deep in us, across many cultures, through all the centuries. Trinity Church, sitting in its churchyard full of ancestors, with its tower reaching toward the heavens, with its nave to gather the people for the journey of life, with its sightlines focused on an altar that stands below a representation of Christ ascending, bearing the human reality up into the very being of God--Trinity Church is its own kind of map of the cosmos, a representation of the spiritual imagination worked out in the physical world. I come home to my church with my imagination enlivened and my spirit deepened by these encounters with other people's forms of sacred space.
One Sunday, two very different sacred sites, both bearing their own special gifts of insight and wisdom and love from God. And both reminding me to keep my eyes open for the sacredness of every space where God can be revealed
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