from The Toe Bone and Tooth

lengthy selection from Martin Prechtel's The Toe Bone and Tooth, this one about the public tribunal of a prospective seminary student, Gaspar Culan, and the prosecution and defense of indigenous beliefs in Guatemala before the Civil War.

from The Toe Bone and the Tooth

Like a big city man on a date with a girl he thought he'd never get, Stan started off the first morning by boring the entire board of examining priests, the Bishop and one hundred and thirty monks and students by talking very slowly for an entire hour about himself and his mission.  As with anything that had poor Stan in it, there was a lot of sleeping going on, but he finally brought it all to a close, raising my blood pressure by introducing me with several derogatory remarks about my mixed heritage, calling my wife my "tortilla-making woman" because we weren't married in the church, while expressing his worries about my poor unbaptized older son, who ironically enough actually was baptized, and commenting on the "secret study" he thought I must be making of what he'd hoped was the dying practice of Mayan shamanism.
I let all his unkindness slide, for my goal was not to be right, but to get Gaspar and I back into the arms of the things he mocked, by which he'd never be held and myself away from this terrifying collective lack of vision.  So I thanked him as a brother and let Gaspar begin his charlanda, his discourse.
After standing like a rector, putting on his horn-rimmed eyeglasses, Padre pulled out a snap-ring binder from his backpack, unlocked a couple of laminated leaves and began speaking in a deep, aggressive, open-jawed, non-mayan voice, not unlike orphan Indians do when raised by Norwegiens or American missionaries; a voice that didn't match his face, a voice I'd never heard before.  Like a pushy socialist church historian, he cited the data of certain anthropologists and the conjectured opinions of some scholars about Mayan ritual, blaring on about the grandness of Mayan spirituality before they had become acquainted with the advantages of the modern Catholic church, which took the better part of an hour.  For the next hour, he expounded unimaginatively but with great detail on why he was disappointed with the Catholicism of the Spanish conquest and how all of what the Oklahoma Catholics were doing to rid the highlands of these vestiges of damaging spiritual superstitions and the people's persistent veneration of idols through their mistaken understanding of the statues of the Spanish catholic saints left over from the sixteenth century was very laudable and slowly having a positive effect, as far as he could see, and of which he was an avid supporter and so on, and so on and so on.
With his coffee cup held on his thigh, the Bishop tried to look as serious as his position demanded, but every hungry monk could tell he was pleased with this clear, positive delivery of his party policy by this prized Indian candidate.
I think there was a great longing for what they knew as God among most of the monks, seminarians and a couple of the priests, but for them God was not in the ground, in the whiskers of jaguars, or in the utterances of mad street women; God was only in the caring that humans had for one another and was therefore a deified institution.
The remainder of old boy curates from the American middle corridor, who were the hierarchy and core of judges here, feared what the others desired; God for them was a stack of rules and rightness, a place for their conquering football instincts to gain territory for the church.
Almost all the seminary students here were young Mayan men from various villages and linguistic tribes, some of the Quiche, Ixil, Mam, Cakchiquel, Kekchi, Pocomchi, Pokoman and Tzutujil and everyone of them spoke their mother tongue.
Made to stand as a crowd behind the seated bishop, Pachito and the old boys embedded in the couches, the only seminarians not present at this welcome flamboyant interruption to their predictable daily routine were the youths assigned that day to bake the bread and cook the meals, who every chance they could get joined the ranks of the wide-eyed, loyal audience, bronze-faced would-be priests with their delantales still tied on, everyone dispersing to eat their lunch when Pachito finally rang his little bell.
But in the afternoon the wrestling began and the first words that were aimed at Swordfighter's grandson came from a known enemy of the Bishop's, who, in tolerable Spanish with a bad Okie twng, matter-of-factly blurted out, "What about this image of San Simon you were out there worshiping?  He's anything but God; isn't he an image of the Devil?"
"I wasn't worshiping this idol," Padre retorted with his strange non-Indian voice still in place, "I was kneeling at its feet, praying to Jesus to help my people to see the way and come away from such things into our holy church.  What better place to do this, as Padre Francisco says," pointing to a very worried-looking Stan, "but in the very places where the people have laid their mistaken faith?"
Though I couldn't endorse either side of such an argument, as far as Christian spiritual wrestling went it seemed that Padre had the edge, but the big guy from Oklahoma who was sitting on the edge of the couch now wasn't about to give in.  "Even if we are to believe that you could keep your eye on Christ surrounded by such a presence of the Devil, isn't it true that the idol at whose feet you knelt is considered by your people to be a God and that anyone who worships him has more than one God, and don't they call this idol the 'horned one'?"
Finally, I found a loose brick in the wall of their mediocre dogma and in an attempt to earn and be a worthy keeper of the story of The Toe Bone and the Tooth, I spoke up not only in defense of Gaspar Culan, the Grandson of Swordfighter, but in defense of Holy Boy.
"This deity you speak about is indeed an ancient God," I finally spoke, my voice also not sounding entirely like my own, "But was never called 'horned one' by anybody until your religion showed up to show the people what to call him.  Before the coming of the Spaniards and the arrival of Catholic Christians he was called the Lord of White or the Clear Unblemished Boy or Holy Boy, all names still used today.  It was before this God of both human frailty and possibility that people had always gone for alleviation of their hard lives, as they still do today, and more importantly for you to recognize, they went to this Clear Youth to be given the blessing of forgiveness, the forgiveness that people are not so good at bestowing."
This large priest who I stopped short of calling Buba was getting fairly excited and, widening and bracing his seat, he severely crowded little Pachito, who sank back involuntarily into the hollow wake of cushions created by Buba's forward lurching.
"You're just trying to whitewash the Devil," he yelled out in his Oklahoma-accented Spanish, the Indian men wide-eyed and open-mouthed, taking it all in.
"Isn't it true," Buba continued, "That the Tzutujil and every other kind of sinner, go before this devil with pagan shamans, zajorines, to which they give all their hard-earned pay and sell their sins to this demon with tobacco and liquor, finery, money and licentious words for which he adopts their sins for them and which they continue making, so they can live in this world, unaccountable, having traded, like Mephistopheles, for an eternity in hell where this devil rules when they die.  Isn't this true?"
In a policy I learned from Chiviliu when he'd been confronted for his habits and understandings, I took up where I'd left off instead of biting on the barb and baited hook of his interruption.
"Before your people came here, I mean white folk from abroad, this God you call the 'horned one' was the Mayan equivalent of Jesus; an unmarried, magical boy whose annual sacrifice caused the world to flower and the earth to provide again; whose disappearance every year, like Jesus' crucifixion, caused the people to grieve and weep; whose tears fertilized the earth, his mother, whose womb brought fourth a new 'clear child,' like Maria does every winter..."
I hadn't wanted to explain the intricacies of how this deity transformed annually thirteen times, and how because there was no verb "to be" in Mayan language there was no issue of one-ness and because of that sometimes he was a woman, and that he was built of lighting thoughts and ropes of two hundred and sixty Gods of deified Time from the Tzututjil versions of the more generally known Mayan calendar, whose knots created a supernatural net of fire who were the stars, which in turn were the spark souls of a million types of life and life to come, but pushed by this angry, not very subtle Oklahoman enemy of the Bishop I proceeded, against my better judgement, to do exactly that.
The hundred nodding heads of young Indian novice priests, who recognized in what I'd said their own spiritual dilemmas, of wanting as Indians to love some part of their people's traditional ritual and faith, but having had it demonized or trivialized by the church who called their beliefs childish, upon hearing the Tzutujil version of the same, explained in terms of its splendor and spiritual depth, allowed little hairs of Indian pride and doubt about the Christians to be planted in their hearts, all of which now terrified the priests.
Buba, though seeming by then to be more of an embarrassing liability than an ally to the other curate's cause, was so wound up by the hatred he felt toward me personally and the ground he'd lost on my account that he now jumped to his feet and forgetting to speak in Spanish so everyone could understand, blurted out accusatorily in English while shaking his mutton-fisted arms my direction, "Then tell us, smart buy, if this manifestation of Satan, that you call 'the clear white child' is so glorious a thing, why is he known far and wide as 'Big Jew'?  Wasn't it the Jews that killed our Jesus?  Huh?"
Unaware that Pachito understood and spoke English as beautifully as he spoke his native Spanish, along with Latin, Greek, Italian and Cakchiquel, and I now listened as he very carefully translated what the American Buba priest had inquired into Spanish for the crowd, his eyes bugged out, eyebrows wrinkled up to his sweating, bald head, staring in horror at the Bishop, whose rising blood pressure was already in heaven and whose fist thumped his jittering thighs.
Padre froze with the rest, his arms folded looking straight down at the plastic desk, while I on the other hand responded before anyone could stop the session or interrupt, starting before the last words of Pachito's translation had dropped from the air.
"When the Spaniards came they were divided between clergy and civil colonial bureaucracy.  While different religious orders were assigned to different districts, here int he southern highlands the Franciscans won the appointment.
"After fifty years of force bullying, proselytizing, saying mass and instigating their cults of saints and cofradias, this more human-sounding Mayan Jesus, 'Clear White Youth,' was still just as difficult for the Franciscians to eradicate as he has been for all of you.
"When the Tzutujil people were increasingly punished and further harried for their veneration of this more visible of their many deties, they started calling him Saint Simon Judas Tadeos, considering him to be Jesus' older brother, which was further confused over time by the Spanish priests with Judas Iscariot, the one who sold your God's son to his persecutors.
"By the time of the Catholic Holy See, the Dominican Inquisition feared by all people far and wide, sent their anemic, sadistic officers to what is now known as Guatemala, they had as their prime directive to rid the Earth of all heretics, Protestants and heathens, all of which were known collectively as Jews.
"The Inquisition could not legally try Indians in their courts for heresy for the greater faith they showed for the 'Clear White Youth,' or San Simon, as his newer manifestation was called.
"This was because in the human ranking system of Europe, the Indians were ranked as a subhuman caste with a status equal to the beasts, which Christians, Protestants and Catholics alike saw as not having a soul and therefore exploitable as dead matter.
"Of course, everybody knew they were people, but they weren't legally people.  To make them into people legally, so the Inquisition could have domain over them all, the Holy See set about proving that Mayans were actually one of the lost tribes of ancient Jews, from the time of Gog and Magog,  before the Jews had a temple, much before they'd lost their temple and adopted Rabbinical Judaism.  If they could convincingly show that Mayans were genetic Jews, then the Inquisition could have them.
"So, like the council and Pilate that judged and sentenced Jesus, the Inquisition, just like you seem to be doing here, tried and sentenced the Mayan Jesus, proclaiming the 'Clean White Youth' to be the 'Gran Judio,' so they could eradicate their God for being a Jew and crucify the Mayans for being Jewish, forgetting of course that the Romans who later became the Roman Catholics crucified their Jesus who died not a Christian but an Aramaic-speaking Jewish Rabbi."
Then finishing up like I thought a lawyer might, I added in conclusion:
"If this council has been called to determine the purity of faith of the prospective priest Gaspar Culan by trying and passing judgement yet once again on another people's God, then I say that even if he had been worshiping what is holy at the foot of the Grand Jew, or the 'Clear White Youth,' or conversely if he was only accompanying his relatives who were, no matter how you cut it, you have all ended up looking a whole lot like a tribunal of jealous, unforgiving people trying Jesus all over again, instead of practicing trying to be like him.  In that light I submit that Gaspar Culan has as good a faith as anyone else in this carpeted room."
Though i was hungry and could have eaten, the dinner was late, for every single cook, monk, novice priest, student, delivery boy and visiting Indian parent had forgotten what they were doing and had converged into the crowd mesmerized by the argument, which at this point was immediately and emphatically halted by the Bishop, whose hierarchical cronies called for a huddle which all the priests jumped up to join, whispering like a football team after their last down who was going to have to punt, throughout which Gaspar and I uninvited, patiently waited.
When the knot of priests unfurled, Pachito loudly announced with his little bell and clipboard in his hand that Padre was exonerated and back in the graces of the Church and that two more days spent discussing what was obvious to everyone would be a waste of precious time away from their parishes and all our work.  Which meant to be, best of all, that tomorrow we could all go back home to our families in Atitlan.
In the months that followed more than sixty percent of the Mayan seminary students would have renounced their ambitions to pursue a catholic priesthood.  What had happened to them all, only they themselves could tell, but not a few of those young men ended up as left-wing guerrillas.