The sky was already pitch black when the driver told us to get off. “End of the line,” he said. “There’s not really much left past here, so we don’t continue.”
My companion Gian Pablo and I plunged into the cold of a southern winter’s night. Our conversation turned from logistics to life, and then to the cosmos. Likewise, our senses: we almost ceased to feel the dirt upon which we walked except for once or twice an hour when a car or truck would kick up some dust on us as we tried to hitch a ride. We knew that this detachment from the world we knew meant that we were getting close to the spiritual source we had come to experience. We thought that he was still an hour or two’s walk up the road, but then a car approached us and stopped. Stepping out of the passenger seat was the man himself: Father Mariano.
Ecstatic to have made it to my destination, or so I thought, I was surprised to find out that we were not heading to the priest’s home where Gian and I would be spending the next few days; instead, we were on our way to a funeral. Upon entering the house , we encountered a woman chanting some undecipherable native mantra to a crowd of forty and, presumably, to the cadaver in an open casket. In the kitchen, I tried to initiate a conversation with the grandmother of the young man who had died. Quickly I realized that my efforts were inept. Father Mariano had led me into a situation more glaringly “real” than anything before – their grief, my helplessness; their generosity, my extreme undeserving. I could not help but ask: how the heck did I even get here?
The story began with a desire to experience life in the developing world during my study abroad experience in Chile and find out where God was in this world. Once I expressed the desire, I was in for a wild ride. On my first day of class, someone made an offhand comment to me that the “Latin American Theology Seminar” was actually a class on liberation theology, and I signed up right away. The professor then recommended that I spend my Good Friday at a Stations of the Cross procession – but not the normal one you’d see in any Catholic diocese. This march involved thousands of people hiking one mile up a hill to the Villa Grimaldi, the most infamous torture center of the Chilean dictator, Augusto Pinochet, all the while singing and remembering the political prisoners who were brought up the hill to the center to be killed just as Jesus was brought up Golgotha. In the midst of the sometimes-joyous, sometimes-solemn procession, I spotted a French girl who had come to speak in one of my classes. She then invited me to the city’s “Resurrection Party” in the main square on Easter at midnight, where she introduced me to a friend who lived in the infamous neighborhood of La Legua, known to most by the crime reports on the nightly news. She invited me to her church in the neighborhood, and the second time I attended her son became ill a few hours before the mass. She told two of her friends to welcome me instead, and in doing so gave me the support network I needed to set down some (shallow) roots there.
These friends, Pato and Maria, made dinner for me and others every Sunday night after mass. We built a relationship based on our respective walks with God, and they began to share stories with me about Father Mariano, who was the priest in La Legua until 2002. He could do this, he could do that, he made me a Christian, he never tired of Alicia, the drug addict, he made me care about the world outside me, he sent so-and-so’s kids to school, etc. Obviously, they said, you need to go meet the man. Nonsense, I would respond, he lives an entire day’s journey away from the city. But then they told me his story, and things changed. I had to go.
Mariano Puga was born around 1930 to the owners of the Viña Concha y Toro, the third largest vineyard in the world. Educated in the best schools in Chile, Mariano was studying architecture at the Catholic university when a mentor told him to forget the Catholicism he had known and study the real Jesus in Scripture. According to him, “I fell in love with Jesus that day, and I have never fallen out of love with him since.” Passionate and driven, he set out to be a priest. He even inexplicably rejected his father’s offer to design housing for the poor that his father would pay for, choosing instead to move to a mining town, where he worked in the mines six days a week and on Sundays gave mass. At the age of thirty-seven he returned to the city and served as parish priest for the next thirty-five years in the poorest sections of town, such as La Legua. He always lived as humbly as the least of his community, never owning as much as a space heater, and he never accepted a penny from the church or his family. And yet his impact was tremendous, as I could tell from Pato and Maria’s stories. Not only in the personal realm, but the social as well – he was one of only a few people in Santiago known openly to oppose the dictatorship. For this, he was jailed seven times and tortured in the Villa Grimaldi for a month and a half. Finally, in 2002, he picked up everything and moved to the thirty-inhabitant town of Colo, Chiloé.
My trip to his new hometown involved two buses, a two-hour flight and then four more buses before we could begin the walk in the cold. In the house with the funeral, Father Mariano stood up and addressed the people sitting around the empty casket, “This man is not dead. Say it with me, this man is not dead. He lives!” His simple assurance and forcefulness shocked both me and the other mourners out of the daze caused by the chanting, which I later found out was a locally adapted tradition of seventeenth-century Catholicism. In the midst of something so oppressively mundane, he spoke of something that was on a different plane entirely, reflecting an orientation and faith very distinct from those of everyone else. And yet it was real, and visceral – this uncanny ability made him a special creature altogether. For the next two days, Gian Pablo and I observed and questioned him as to what made him so different: how his faith glowed as I had never seen before in anyone, how he lived in cultures so different from his native one, how he was able to sacrifice incredible things for his calling and purpose. It felt like a kung fu movie. We had gone long distances to meet our guru, who through active ministry, spiritual disciplines and conversations sharpened us and reoriented us for battle. Yet he also showed us that merely learning from him couldn’t match what he could show us through accompanying him in his ministry, through participating in real life. I left with less figured out, perhaps, but profoundly impressed, challenged and refocused in my life.
Muslims take their hajj to Mecca and Hindus bathe in the waters of the Ganges, but Christians lack a common pilgrimage. Some go to Santiago de Compostela in Spain, others to the Holy Land, but by and large in Protestant Christian spirituality little significance is given to places (it’s a little too hokey or undemocratic) and thus to the idea of a pilgrimage. If anyone is able to meet God anywhere, why travel across the world? This misses the point. Pilgrimage is about being a pilgrim, about the journey. It is about seeking God and putting yourself on the line in order to do it. It is as much about letting God take you to unknown, unplanned places as reaching your destination.
It is no coincidence that most religious legends and epic movies involve a real, geographic journey like this. I urge you to try it – start with a desire to explore some idea, or place, or people. Express that desire and be open to people’s responses, not worrying too much about whether or not this is exactly what you want, and without being too tied to your schedule. Preparing the journey is just as much an exercise in trusting God as going on it. And then just enjoy the ride. May God lead you beside still waters, guide you in righteous paths and maybe even walk with you in the valley of the shadow of death.