A letter from Elisabeth Cook in Costa Rica
July 8, 2007
Dear Friends:
“Where were you born?” the students in Guatemala asked me. “Across the street,” I answered, to their surprise. One of the exciting things about my recent trip to teach a course at the Central American Evangelical Center for Pastoral Studies (CEDEPCA) in Guatemala, one of the institutions associated with the Latin American Bible University (UBL), was returning to the country where I was born. To top it off, CEDEPCA's offices are located right across the street from what was the Presbyterian hospital where I was born.
Eli Cook's class on the sociology of the Old Testament at CEDEPCA, in Guatemala City.
I hadn't expected to feel a special conection to Guatemala. After all, I left the country when I was 2 years old and had been back only once, as a teenager. But from the minute I landed I thought, “for once, I can say I was born here.” As a child, I used to insist I must have indigneous blood because, after all, I was born in a country whose population is over 60 percent indigenous. It was hard for me to give up the idea once I realized how genetics worked. There was something enticing about having the blood of a civilizaton that goes back thousands of years and whose traditions are rooted to the very earth they depend on to survive.
Unfortunately, “enticing” is probably not how most of the indigenous populaton of Guatemala would describe their experience as a majority culture treated as a discriminated minority. The mass assasinations of whole communities during the twentieth century have left indelible footprints in the life, culture, and dignity of the people. How frustrating, above all, to realize how the Church has participated in negating the very escence of this autocthonous culture.
Sociology of the Old Testament
The course I had gone to Guatemala to teach was “Sociology of the Old Testament.” I guess it doesn't sound very exciting. But it is. It has to do with life, the life of human beings, their families, their institutions, their culture and religion. And necessarily, when we talk about the life of human beings and societies in the Old Testament, we make connections with our own realities today. A light goes on when we realize that the very deep needs, desires, and conflicts that we find in the Old Testament are very present in our societies today. We see ourselves reflected, revealed, and challenged.
The students immediately found points of contact between life and cultures in the Old Testament and indigenous culture in Guatemala: in the conflict between centralized structures and local communities in the Old Testament and the persistent conflict between power structures and indigenous communities in Guatemala; in the call for the erradication of local religious and cultural practices in the Old Testament and the literal erasure of cultural practices among the indigenous peoples. We had evidence of this in our very classroom.
One of the students, a Maya Quiché Pentecostal pastor, was repeatedly asked to provide examples of local cultural practices, to which he was unable or unwilling to respond. He later recognized that he had been taught by his church that his culture was full of pagan practices and beliefs. He had been asked to give up who he was, to become a Christian.
UBL has many students from indigenous cultures throughout Latin America. Many theses have been written and much reserach done on how to be a Christian and a Mayan or Aymara or Mayanga. The question is: Does God only reveal Godself in Western (European, Northamerican) “clothing.” The implications are thought-provoking and challenging in a world that is growing ever smaller and in which contact with people of other cultures is more and more frequent.
Dina Ludeña, a student from Peru, explored some of these issues in her thesis at UBL. She studied the shared meal of the multiplication of bread and fish in Mark 6:30-46 as a sign of solidarity in a world where individualism is rampant. She finds these same signs of solidarity in the shared meal of her Quichua culture and explores the challenges this table of solidarity—in the gospel and in her culture—pose for the church in her context today. Dina graduated and is ministering with the Methodist church in Cusco, Peru, along with her husband Marco (also a UBL graduate). They recently hosted a workshop led by UBL's indigneous program facilitator, Antonio Otzoy. Their concluding expression of thanksgiving was: “Thank you, Lord, for making us a country of different colors, smells, and melodies.”
As I look forward to several months in the United States for my interpretaton assignment, and my participation in Mission Challenge ’07 during October, I take these many different colors, smells, and melodies in my heart. Each an expression of life, and yes, of God, in an exciting variety of cultures, traditions and experiences.
Sincerely,
Elisabeth Cook
The 2007 Mission Yearbook for Prayer & Study, p. 56
