Warming Augustine's heart

We're just back from a weekend spent in Santa Fe, our region's old capital. A city the size of Dunblane, situated in a sub-tropical valley an hour away, it is renown for its Colonial architecture and scarey Catholicism. Even our hotel reception had a statue overlooking customers: Moses holding the 10 commandments and pointing to the second one which in the Catholic Bible prohibits taking God's name in vain. Is it a warning against trying to offer the hotel divine promises instead of paying the bill.

On Sunday evening I stood with onlookers at the door of one of the popular Catholic churches. The priest's diction was excellent, his liturgical leadership faultless and his sermon on the trinity would have warmed Augustine's heart. There was the usual confusing nonsense about Mary, the ringing of bells and, which I though a little unkind, just a rapid Our Father for the dead. What surprised me above all was how few went forward and took the eucharist: maybe 30 out of 160. And the Highland Free Kirk hasn't had an influence here.

On Sunday morning we attended an established Protestant church. There were just six of us in the congregation addressed by a rapid-speaking, Bible-quoting, pentecostal lady. I've been thinking all weekend as to how very difficult it would be to have an evangelistic mission in this city. Maybe in Jerusalem the same thought crossed the apostles' minds. Although they were with that incredible optimist, Jesus.

Photo: St. Barbara's Church and the Catholic Seminary, in Santa Fe's "Bitter Weeping Street"

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A wonky couple of days

Only two weeks to go before semester finishes. Students are pretty stressed out. They cheered on Friday when class finished. Had a visit last night from an ex-evangelical pastor who's joined the Catholic church and now teaches religion in a an upmarket monks' school. He was keen to justify his actions so feel he's not at peace with the move. It made me think how poor the care of pastors is when things get difficult for them. And how astute Catholic clergy are, more so than their evangelical counterparts. Reading New Testament Theology by Philip Esler, who's trying to justify praying to the saints. Feel it's been a wonky couple of days.
Read more
Image
We’d love you all to visit us. So I hope what I write won’t scare anyone off. On Saturday afternoon, we went to see a comedy about French cooking. Before the film started, instead of warnings about mobile phones, there was a chilling re-enactment of children being kidnapped by guerrillas from a Colombian village. It was screened to make us remember another reality. The next day we heard of an entire football team, called the Peanut Men, being taken and murdered. They evidently sold peanuts on the border with Venezuela: not the most likely reasons for assassination. And last night two of our best loved lecturers, Don and Elizabeth Sendek, were attacked when their taxi drew into the Seminary residency. They lost their laptop, however mercifully not their lives – the city’s murder rate is escalating, the robbers were armed, and Don fought back. Before all this happened I had compiled a video of our students’ regional night with their different dances. h...
Read more

Night of the full moon

Image
It was the night of the full moon and we were invited to the cemetery. We were glad to have our street-wise friend Alejandro with us. There was a gap in the large railings that seal the entrance, just enough to allow a person to get through. Large bowls of fire lit our path as we walked amongst the towers of the dead. Burials are upwards in Latin American cities. We didn't really want to go and had no idea what to expect. The invite had come weeks before and without much thought I had given my word. Olwen put on a pair of comfortable shoes, Alejandro wore an american football top and I decided on my leather jacket for protection. That was justified when thunder cracked above the cemetery. Certain images still remain in my mind. There was the man completely in white who walked with a slow deliberate step: the angel of death. There was the young girl with a bouquet of flowers which she destroyed; we saw her entire life. And there was the patience and s...
Read more