Mayan Ceremony

On Wednesday May 10th, we spent the majority of the day at the worksite. We worked for around 8 hours, then returned to The River House for evening. Mission Guatemala had planned a cultural experience for us for before dinner. A Mayan family came to present a portion of a Mayan ceremony to us. The full ceremony would have taken hours, but they gave us the 20-minute experience. With the spiritual guide standing in the middle with a small fire burning, we all kneeled around him in a large circle. Various colored candles lit the fire, each of which signified different things:

• Red: energy, strength, blood, the ways in which we treat each other

• Black: the color of the night and the rest that it brings, the hair of the Mayan people, the color of the skin of our brothers from Africa

• Yellow: determination, the skin of the Asian peoples, seeds, and corn

• While: purity, our brothers and sisters of other various cultures, the color of the palms of those who have already passed

• Blue: the infinite universe, the sky

• Green: nature and life

The spiritual guide continued in prayer for a couple minutes until he gave us all a few gifts. In one hand, we each held two candles and in the other hand, pine sap and inscents. He walked around the circle and blessed each of us one by one. He asked us for our names, then he prayed over us while splashing a little bit of his blessed water onto our forehead and chest. We were then instructed to kiss both ends of the candles and put them into the fire with the pine sap and inscents. By the end of the circle, after we had all placed our things in the fire, it was burning very strong. He explained to us that this strong fire meant that our connections between each other were strong. He concluded the ceremony by having us all kiss the earth and join him in prayer. We were told to pray in any language we wanted and to pray to anything that we felt spiritually towards.

It was beautiful because the ceremony was all about our relationships and energy between one another. Our individual cultures, religious beliefs, and languages did not matter. I think this moved me a lot because in today’s world, it feels like those labels carry great importance. It sometimes feels like I can’t be friends with a republican if I am a democrat, or that I can’t get along with a strongly religious person if I’m not quite sure what I believe in. It is important to remember that what’s important is not who you vote for or who you pray to, but how you treat others and how you foster those relationships; especially towards people whose opinions differ from your own. Additionally, this lesson came at an ideal time. For the first week of our trip, a service team from the University of Purdue was at the River House and the work site with our group. This was a challenge because their ‘why’ for service was in the name of God. Our ‘why’ was in the name of service and becoming global citizens. The very first night we met them, they challenged us to see which group could create the best prayer for dinner. This was very off putting as many of us aren’t religious at all. The ceremony was a good reminder that they are just people too and our differences really didn’t matter. We were all there to help serve the community and learn new perspectives.