Long Night's Journey Into DayDespite the complexities of history, religion and language, the Word of God is bringing spiritual light to the Maya of Guatemala.by Marilyn Henne | Photographs by Ken FastBefore Abraham left Ur of the Chaldeans and travelled to Canaan, the ancient Maya had appeared on the American continent. By the time of Christ, they had settled mainly in Guatemala and southern Mexico. Rising to prominence around 250 A.D., the Maya built temples and cities that were architectural marvels, developed a complex hieroglyphic writing system and discovered the concept of zero.
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His back bent under a heavy load of
wood, this K'iche' labourer in
Chichicastenango, Guatemala,
emerges from the shadows into the
light of a new day. |
His back bent under a heavy load of wood, this K'iche' labourer in Chichicastenango, Guatemala, emerges from the shadows into the light of a new day.
The Maya were animists. They believed that everything, animate and inanimate, possessed a spirit. And they had to appease the spirits, if life was to be good. Maya religious rites to satisfy these spirits, as well as the ancestors, often seemed dark and foreboding for the average person. Who could understand the mysteries of the spirit world?
After 1,000 A.D., the Maya civilization fell apart, but its animistic rites still persisted. When the Spanish conquistadors and Roman Catholic friars arrived in the 17th century, they Christianized the population, or so they thought. Shrewdly judging the new religion to be yet another avenue of favour with the supernatural, the Maya adopted the outward trappings of Catholic ritual while retaining their own animistic core. In many rural communities, the daykeepers (guardians of the Maya calendar's favourable days for life's important events) and other shamans continued their ritual prayers and sacrifices at remote sites high in the mountains. Later, in the whitewashed church whose long shadow dominated each town plaza, they implored favours from the conquerors' painted wooden saints.
But uncertainty dogged the steps of the daykeepers. Entreating the capricious spirits and the ancestors, the shaman sought to penetrate the world beyond time. Even with all the prescribed sacrifices of chickens, incense, flower petals and liquor, who could know that the spirits would be content? The journey to the imposing town church held no assurance either.
Protestant missionaries entered Guatemala more than 100 years ago. They found this most populous of the Central American countries to be a mountainous and rugged land. It was also home to 22 indigenous Maya groups, the descendants of the famous, ancient civilization. Each group spoke a separate language and together far out-numbered the ruling Latino class, a mixture of Spanish and Maya blood.
So, after beginning a few churches, schools and hospitals in the capital, Guatemala City, many of the early Protestant pioneers spread the Gospel to the rural Maya communities—in Spanish, of course. No one they knew had yet unlocked the intricacies of Maya grammar and syntax, or understood its many guttural and popping sounds, so unlike English or Spanish.
As the Protestant missionaries encountered the Maya, they found a people ready to embrace this new form of Christianity as yet another experience of the supernatural. They did so more readily than the Enlightenment-influenced Westerners had expected. But the weaving of Maya deities and Catholic saints proved difficult to disentangle, whether by reformed priests or enthusiastic evangelists.
Moving toward the day
For the Maya it was like a long night's journey, always moving toward the day, the sunrise, and the light. The depressing theme of the famous North American playwright, Eugene O'Neil, had been "A Long Day's Journey into Night"—difficult, dark, downhill. The dream for the Maya was different. In fact, it was the opposite—a long night's journey into day.
Beyond the religious issues on the journey, another factor complicated the sunrise: all those Mayan languages! They were so different from Spanish. What choice was there but to introduce the Gospel first in a foreign language? With their emphasis on the written Word of God and the priesthood of the believer, the Protestants, of course, had brought Spanish Bibles. Surely the Maya could learn to read and write in this language, even if it was the conquerors' tongue!
Yes, those with more formal schooling could, like teachers and some leaders. But any authentic discipleship that stressed radical life change through the truth and love of Jesus Christ, demanded communication in the Mayan languages themselves. Thus the long, arduous task began, learning the new sounds and expressions of daily life, then translating the eternal words into the Maya framework. Early Presbyterian, Primitive Methodist, Nazarene and Central America Mission missionaries eventually broke through the language barriers and produced some of the first Bible translations. Among the missionary pioneers was Wycliffe founder, William Cameron Townsend.
The Word of God slowly began to penetrate the world of the highland Maya. But even with the proclamation of the Gospel in the Mayan tongues through dedicated missionaries, their converts and the early Bible translations, were the Maya just adding another religious layer to their syncretism? Or had the light penetrated the darkness? Had the night's journey led to day?
Forests and thickets
It was indeed a journey—first through the dense forest of cadences and clauses in the Spanish preaching and Bible, then through the thicket of translation into the tongues of the Maya.
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Rural churches commission pastors
and leaders to offer specialized courses,
where students learn to analyze biblical
passages and prepare message notes
in K'iche'. |
On the journey's rising trail came the challenge of deciphering a new alphabet of familiar symbols mixed with the ones to represent the Maya sounds. This trail never seemed to stop curving upward. Reading and writing were like huge boulders on the road.
The Maya were also carrying a heavy load of shame on their backs. Shame that they didn't speak Spanish well. Shame that Latino schoolteachers had compared their language to the sound of pigs grunting. Shame that there were so few books, magazines or newspapers written in any Mayan language. Shame that God Himself had seemed to speak Spanish before any Mayan language.
It was this burden of shame that my husband David and I discovered when we first began to learn K'iche' (key-CHAY) in 1964. A large group of Maya, the K'iche' numbered 500,000 speakers then and grew to two million. They lived in 50 town centres with hundreds of outlying rural townships and many dialectal variations of their language.
We remember well how people enjoyed our enthusiasm for learning their language, but they were of two minds. On the one hand, our neighbour don (a Spanish title of respect) Mateo encouraged us with words like, "You are surely right, my friends. We need to understand the Bible in our own language. How good of you to come and help us translate."
The opposite view erupted from a 14-year old boy, impatient with his family's polite tolerance of our earnestness for Bible translation. I can still hear José's words as he brashly suggested, "We aren't really interested in having more Scripture in our own language, because after all, we already have Spanish Bibles. We're bilingual."
Not only that, but José and others told us that the K'iche' wanted to progress and not be held back, bound to their mother tongue. They rightly saw that Spanish was essential for business, education and government.
"K'iche' is for the women and kids, and old people—like my mother," argued José. His words still ring in my head.
Subtle pressures, old practices
In those early days, we didn't understand the subtle pressures of society, economics and the old animistic religious practices. We naively imagined it was an obvious choice to speak K'iche' or Spanish, to preach in one language or another, to value your culture, to teach your children to retain their mother tongue even when the school overwhelmed them with Spanish.
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Pastor Julian Tzunun has preached from the K'iche'
Scriptures since he was 18. Today, 40 years later,
he and his family run a small Christian bookstore in
Chichicastenango that sells the K'iche' New Testament
and a Spanish-K'iche' dictionary. |
The K'iche' are famous for their weaving and tie-dyed garments. This is a hand method of producing patterns in textiles by tying portions of the thread together so that they will not absorb the dye. Weavers pass down the patterns from generation to generation. But each generation also develops changes according to the style of the times and the artistic ability of the weaver. You can see the changes and mixing of patterns in the textiles for sale in the market place.
People also develop patterns in the way they use language. The patterns sometimes change or get mixed, according to the speakers and their environment. Speech patterns are not always clear. In the 1960s and '70s, it seemed to us that everyone talked K'iche' at home. Well, yes and no. It depended on who was there and what they were talking about. What if Grandma and Mom were discussing the need to keep vulnerable youth away from the cantinas (bars)? They spoke in K'iche', of course. Or if the pastor from town was talking about a denominational meeting with Dad, and quoting a Bible text regarding those vulnerable youth? It would be Spanish for them, definitely. Just a small change of people, topic or location often signalled a change in language.
Shame was a big factor. Two women wouldn't be ashamed to speak K'iche' to each other, but a man would expect to speak Spanish to his pastor who came from the town. Spanish was the prestige language, and if you wanted to get ahead, you had to speak it, or at least try to.
At peace with the tension
This tension of language choice in various situations weighed down our conversations like the freshly washed clothes on the line outside our house. Eventually we made our peace with this tension and persevered in spite of it. Why? We saw that many rural K'iche' did not really understand enough Spanish to grow as disciples of Christ. We thought that once people had Scriptures that flowed in a natural style, and with some accurate explaining and interpreting of the biblical text, they would embrace the translated Word. Wrong again.
People expressed gratitude for the Word in their mother tongue, but most had little patience to learn the new alphabetic symbols and actually spend time reading (see "The Smile"). Besides, most books were written in Spanish. Over the years we began to understand that the long night's journey into day might not come via the written word. To sensitively exploit the oral communication of the translated Scriptures—this would help the day to dawn for thousands of people who might never learn to read or write (see "Doing What Comes Naturally").
Reflecting on the Maya religious tradition, we also came to understand that personally reading a sacred book of God was not required of the average person. For the Maya, there was no such book. The closest thing to it is the Popol Vuh, the sacred book of the K'iche'. This recorded the old beliefs about how the world was made and the frightening but thrilling adventures of the first people, created out of maize. No daykeeper, however, read this book in order to choose the favourable days for planting or marrying. Rather, he learned the prayers and rituals orally from the previous generation of shamans.
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The view from atop the volcano, Santa María, near
Quetzaltenango, Guatemala's second-largest city. Visitors
who climb it begin the five-hour hike at midnight so they can
be greeted by a spectacular sunrise. |
So many delays in the nighttime journey. So many still hoping for the dawn.
Recently I returned to Guatemala and talked with many Maya Christians. They assured me that the new day is rising. They are full of hope, because God has changed their lives. The translated Scriptures are penetrating the darkness. Some Maya are learning through the written word, others through the spoken word on the radio; some through listening to cassettes and watching videos, others through the joy of music.
I thought of the five-hour hike up the Santa María volcano outside Quetzaltenango, Guatemala's second-largest city. It starts at night. Why? So that at the end of the climb, you can watch the spectacular sunrise.
The Maya's long journey has taken many centuries; but look—the dawn!
Marilyn and David Henne lived among the K'iche' people in Guatemala for over two decades, helping to translate the whole Bible, as well as training scores of bilingual school teachers and Maya writers.
Photographer Ken Fast, a former Wycliffe Canada worker, spent many years in Central and South America—both in childhood and in later years. He is currently director of Northern Rain Studio www.northernrain.tv.
Originally published in Word Alive, Fall 2005.
www.wycliffe.ca
Used with permission of the author. Copyright © 2005 Christianity.ca.