Day 13
June 3, 2007
The local newspaper in Zacatecas is called El Sol de Zacatecas, and apparently it’s not exactly known for its prescient reporting or high standards of journalism. According to my sources, the reporters basically sit around a café all day talking to each other, drinking coffee and smoking cigars, waiting to run into foreigners to interview them about something. Once, they interviewed Rachel – the executive director of CDM – and got the story all wrong. For the rest of the news, they just go online. I saw firsthand the effort that goes into producing the local paper when I looked last week at Thurday’s and Friday’s daily papers sitting side-by-side. I couldn’t believe it, but both days had the same exact picture in the middle of the front page (Friday’s was cropped a little bit)! The picture? It was a handful of local politicians sitting around a conference table – not exactly the kind of material that you need to see twice.
Every Thursday night, the language school (Fenix) puts on Café Social, which means that the students and professors go out for something to eat and drink as a way to practice conversational Spanish and to get to know one another outside the classroom. Almost always, we go to a restaurant right in the center of the city (el centro) called Cazadores, which means “hunters.” Now I am no vegetarian, nor do I have any problem in principle with a restaurant that bears such a name. But there was something not quite right about Cazadores (beyond the fact that their chicken was not very good)… It took me a little while to figure out… It’s a nice location… The waiters were very friendly… Oh yeah, on the restaurant walls are large, framed pictures. Of course, the pictures are of various kinds of animals. But a quick glance around confirmed that they are all of endangered species! I kid you not. A bald eagle here, a poison-dart frog from the rainforest there, wolves, lions, and various other fauna, almost all of whom face the danger of extinction precisely because of hunting, or because of loss of habitat due to human activity. I assume they don’t serve up any of these animals, but it certainly didn’t help the taste of my chicken.
Nuestra caridad nace de la eucaristia. Our love (charity, caritas) is born of the eucharist. This is the banner that greets us this morning, on this Trinity Sunday, as we join in the celebration of the Mass at la catedral de Zacatecas. Again, parts of it are very easy to follow and understand, and parts are very difficult. It is hard to feel like I am actually participating, though of course it’s not really about my feelings. It’s like watching people in a sacred space that I really have no claim upon – doubly because I am not Catholic and I do not fully understand the language they are using. But I am certainly drawn there nonetheless, and grateful to spend time among the people of God, straining to make out the mumbled prayers, learning slowly when to sit, stand, kneel, and cross myself. I wish that we could partake of the eucharist here, but alas, what else is there to do but pray for the unity of the church, and to be grateful. To see the host raised up is to see the body of Christ, broken for us. Thanks be to God. Te alabamos, Señor.
