The Custom and La Costumbre
I heard a minister compare the church in America to an old house on a trailer being moved through a town. He had seen such a house, inching forward to find a place to be set down, traffic backed up behind it with the blowing of horns and people yelling “can’t you just get that thing out of here?”
I remember the brick and mortar church I grew up in. It left a huge file of mental images in my memory, the color of the stained glass, the deep red of the crown of thorns, the modern fresco of floating saints and being able to see the bottoms of their feet as they hovered in heaven, the huge iron cross outside that I thought looked more like an airplane, and the smell of the wooden pews where I lay after passing out during one of my preadolescent growth spurts.
Christians are church building people, expressing faith in their carved stone and steel organ pipes and Tiffany glass. It wasn’t always like this. In the early years of the church people worshiped in homes, like the home of Lydia the purple dye merchant in Thyatira. The Amish continue to worship this way. During the centuries of persecution Christians worshipped in secret. When the Christian sect merged (some would say were taken over) by the engineers and architects of Roman imperialism, everything changed.
Not that the land itself has always been unimportant. There has always been sacred ground, and sites like the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem and the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem are important for their location. The Notre Dame Cathedral, according to legend, was built where the bishop had a vision of the church and drew his vision on the ground. The sites of visitations have become church buildings, like the Basilica of Fatima and the Rosary Basilica at Lourdes. Similarly, the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe is near the site of a miracle in Mexico.
These sites become destinations for pilgrims, but the ground beneath the places where Christians gather for corporate worship is usually unimportant in and of itself. The earliest settlers built church buildings not to celebrate the mountains and forests, but to have a place that reminded them of another continent – places in which they could shut out their dark and dangerous surroundings and implore God to protect them from it. Congregations may become attached to their handsome buildings, but not to the dirt beneath them. Where a new church is placed is an economic decision, since land is a commodity bought and sold, owned and traded, like a used car.
We share these American continents with people who reject this view of the value of land, particularly land made special by the universe, sacred, imbued by generations of calling spirits and angels to a certain location, for a special purpose. Non-native Americans shake their heads in disbelief that tribes will not give up their claim to the sacred Black Hills for a billion dollars. Non-native courts dismiss arguments against a private ski resort using reclaimed sewage to make snow on the sacred San Francisco Peaks, after hearing arguments that they have no capacity to comprehend. The words might not exist in English to even argue the case. The English language and the European custom grew up together.
There is another custom, called in Spanish La Costumbre. La Costumbre refers to ancestral beliefs. Although rooted in religion, even Mayans who practice Christianity often have an attachment to the land that is far deeper than any possible economic or sentimental value. Land is consecrated for use and homes and villages are ceremonially aligned to be in harmony with the earth. Many grievous offenses against a family can be reconcilable, but after the taking of land there is no reconciliation. Non-native gringos have been disappointed after trekking to sacred places only to find ‘nothing there’. They want something to prove that the site is holy, something to take a photograph of and post on Facebook, a statue or a pyramid. The place itself is inconsequential.
But it is not inconsequential. The place is sacred because of the place itself, the wind that blows there, the messages received there, the spirit who has lived there or will live there in the future. One of the more common manifestations of God invoked in the Mayan religion is Heart of Heaven, Heart of Earth. People have mistakenly assumed that this expression names two gods. The ‘heart’ is the spirit that both creates the material world and imbues it with life. Heart of Heaven is often named alone, but Heart of Earth is never named alone. The earth planet is both a creation of God and brought to life by the spirit that breathes through the universe. Physical locations on the earth, like ‘physical’ locations in time (the days), are given their worth by the creator.
‘When you petition the Heart of Heaven you are in conversation with the universe.’