Off on a Spiritual Journey
Trip Start
Jan 31, 2008
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14
18
Trip End
Jul 16, 2008
Colo, Chile
Sunday, July 6, 2008
The Guru
Mariano Puga was born into one of the richest families in Chile around 1930. Educated in an English college in Vitacura, the richest municipality in the country, he lived in a house that in 1960 cost US $1 million. He studied architecture in the Universidad Catolica, with which he participated in missions and volunteer work that exposed him to his country's poor and profoundly transformed him. In the university, he met a mentor who urged him to drop what he thought Catholicism taught him and instead to go and read the gospels, to find out who this Jesus actually was. There, he would say, he fell in love with this merciful but demanding Jesus who defied the conventions of his time in radical allegiance with the poor and outcast. He decided to become a priest, leaving his girlfriend, who said, "I know not to mess with this kind of competition [Jesus]." His father, being a noble but practical man, offered to finance a series of low-income housing developments that Mariano could design, but he refused.
As a priest, he started working in the realm of higher education, but after a few years he joined the movement of "worker priests" and moved to the largest mine in South America, Chiquicamata, where he and a few other priests worked in the mine all day and ministered at night. Later, he moved back to Santiago, where he continued working, this time as a painter, and was the parish priest of the Villa Francia, a community of cardboard shacks, Pudahuel, the working class community near the airport, and finally La Legua of which I have spoken several times. During this time he did not accept a penny from the Church hierarchy. He always lived as the poorest in his community; he never even had money to buy a space heater.
But my, was he successful. He was one of the main practitioners of liberation theology in Chile throughout his time in Santiago, approximately 1970 to 2002, which included the democratic socialism of Allende, the military dictatorship of Pinochet and the more recent democracy of Aylwin, Frei and Lagos. He led marches and rallies, and unsurprisingly, he was taken prisoner by Pinochet's men seven times - once in the famous torture center of Villa Grimaldi. In all of the communities, but especially La Legua, he is revered. The mass still bears his hallmark form, everyone talks about him and many cite him as the one who converted them, including Pato. Even outside the poor sections of the city, his name is recognized; Googling his name brings up a lot of results.
Then in 2002 he changed gears completely and moved to the tiny town of Colo, Chiloé, the island far to the south famous for its distinctive native-Catholic religiosity. There he serves as parish priest for a large number of rural towns, goes around evangelizing and provides all-around support for the poor. However, this stage of his ministry has certainly been less "successful" than the previous ones. It's hard for him to break into the culture, he hasn't deeply touched many lives and congregations haven't grown much. Still, his faith shows no effects; he has an amazing capacity to keep going at an advanced age despite lackluster results.
The Trip
Earlier this month, I enjoyed two great masses in La Legua, the second of which was presided by Mariano Puga; the church was packed. I wanted to meet him, and I did for a couple minutes. He threw out an invitation to come visit him in Chiloé, which at the time I considered a long shot. I was planning to go skiing with my friends, anyway. Luckily the next week my friend Clay, along with Pato and Maria from La Legua convinced me to go. So I left - three buses in Santiago, one plane flight, and four buses in the south left me and Gian Pablo, my traveling companion going to spend two weeks of spiritual retreat with Mariano to prepare for a one-year trek around South America living with poor communities marked by martyrs from the era of the dictators (think Oscar Romero in El Salvador) and finding out about the new churches they are creating. At the end of our last bus ride, now into the night, we began to walk toward Colo, which was probably about 8 km away. We tried hitchhiking but no one picked us up. After about forty-five minutes in pure darkness, Father Mariano came upon us in a truck with his next door neighbors. They picked us up and took us straight to a house in the next town, where he warned us that someone had just died. Entering the house, I quickly turned my attention to the odd chants being said by a woman under her breath near the open casket. This must be some indigenous exorcism ritual, I thought. I tried to converse with a few people, to comfort them, but I coudn´t. I was more out of my place than any time previously in Chile. So I sat and just listened with the other mourners to the woman chanting (the chants turned out to be Hail Marys said at light speed) for a few hours until we went home. That experience done, I began my real stay in the town of Colo. One night of hanging out and talking with Father Mariano and the neighbors, one day of messing around, trying to fix a washing machine, and feeding cows, another night of discussion, mass, an impromptu English lesson, and a trip back to Ancud with Father Mariano and the weekend was done. But in between the interstices of time we (with Gian Pablo) read the Bible together, prayed, and listened to Father Mariano´s stories of his life and of those of his mentors.
The Questions
Something that I had already realized but that came through loud and clear was the balance that one has to walk between on the one hand, having a good time (pleasure) and on the other hand, fulfillment or purpose. In the arena of religion this plays out as thinking of the religion as no more than identity vs. taking seriously the demands of the faith. I mention this because it was easy to see that, despite perhaps that the experience of living abroad is very "purposeful," my day to day existence has been more "pleasure seeking" (as I can tell by the fact that I can go out on weekdays while my Chilean friends most definitely can not). This weekend in Colo was certainly the opposite. It was not very much "fun," although I did have a good time, but much more reflection and thinking about the way forward in my Christian walk. It served as a wakeup call in that sense and a reminder to put Christ first in my life, above any limited loyalties.
I also asked Father Mariano about more pressing questions, for example what I would do with the next year of my life after college. Last year I had planned to do some kind of mission or volunteer work, but my experience volunteering here had taken some of the edge off of that type of service, and I was leaning toward trying to practice my profession of urban planning straight out of college. Within that profession, I would be trying to orient my work toward things that would really help the poor; I am willing too to live in a poor neighborhood in order to a) understand better the neighborhoods that I'd be trying to plan and b) follow the incarnational model of Jesus who made himself poor and mortal from the highest of heights. With regards to this, I asked Father Mariano for his opinion about why he rejected his father's offer to build low-income housing for him to design to follow the priesthood. He said that he felt that the priesthood was really his calling, he studied the calling of Peter, in which Jesus turns Peter the fisherman into a "fisher of men," and finally he said that he really couldn't understand the world of the poor from above. Even designing public housing he wouldn't come to know their true reality; the reality of the poor person is determined much by his or her work, and he felt that he had to come to know that. Of course I had just hoped that he would sanction my "easy way out" of living my profession and still living the lifestyle that I feel is Jesus-like, but he issued another challenge that I will have to think about. It created within me the question of being "useful." To my eyes, anyway, it seems more useful to be an urban planner with a heart for the poor than a painter with a heart for the poor. Secondly, watching Father Mariano in Chile, while inspiring, is a bit sad. A man with so much talent (and with a history of immense success) is struggling a lot there, at least in terms of getting people to understand him and connect with Christ. On the other hand, when I posed this question to Gian Pablo, he replied to me, "Do you know what Jesus did for the first 30 years of his life? Nothing, he just prepared for what was to come." In any case, these are going to be questions that continue circulating in my head for years, I'm sure, to come. Coming back on the bus and plane from Chiloé, I was immensely glad to have met a person of such force and obvious closeness to God, and to have him stir up questions within me, so that my semester won't have been a gain in theology but a loss in faith experience, but a time in which things were planted that I could continue seeking in my life.
