I took this photo the other day on top of the tallest peak in Central America——Volcán Tajumulco, which stands at 13,789′. For the last twenty minutes of the climb, one passes 14 stations of the cross (los villacruces) depicting the path Jesus Christ was forced to walk while carrying his own cross to the place he was to be crucified. This photo is of the final station, which sits near the volcano’s peak. As you can see, it was well attended this day by a group of worshippers holding forth a catholic ceremony; wailing, singing, pleading, and chanting pervaded the air——the wind would blow their sounds to me in successive, turbulent gusts, varying the intensity of the sounds and the extent to which I was included in the intimacy of their strange sermon. It’s hard to describe the noises they were making, but mourning is the closest I can come with words. It sounded like a group of men and women lamenting the loss of a loved one——as if they were letting someone go at last, albeit reluctantly. Only, I don’t think this ceremony had anything to do with mourning. I think these were religious worshippers speaking to their God in a manner long ago forgotten by my distant ancestors, hence the reason those sounds were so uninterpretable to me. And yet, these people, though certainly Mayan, were undoubtedly catholics, the very same faith within which I too was brought up. So why did their practice strike me as so foreign? It was more than simply that they held their service on top of a volcano. It was something about the emotions they were so clearly channeling——something I had never seen before in a religious practice, something I suspect has been long lost from the catholicism I knew and practiced as a child. A catholic mass at St. Joseph’s Parish in Libertyville, Illinois is a neighborly occasion——well-dressed families, smiles shared amongst the pews, and gospel songs sung reluctantly and quietly, so as not to stand out from amongst the masses. It was in many ways a beautiful thing, certainly boring for the children, but charming in retrospect. What it was not, was ecstatic or tragic. Although the word was tossed around repeatedly, it lacked any and all spirit——feeling more like a tightly harnessed subtle joy for the deep believers, and but rote mechanism for those dragged along by parents or by pressure from their peers. Was there something particularly dry about the Roman catholicism that came to America in its waves of turn-of-the-century Italian immigrants, something that for the Spaniards, in turn, had not yet dried up by the time their catholicism was forced upon the Mayan world? I suspect not; I suspect that that vitality (that spirit) had long been lost from Europe by the time of the Columbian Exchange, and that what I saw, or rather heard, on Tajumulco was a spirit indigenous to this land——a spirit that was never conquered, but rather simply donned a new mask when forced to do so. A point that has been made by scholars many times before is that this may not have felt too unfamiliar——this catholic mask. The Maya worshipped a Maize God, whose primary feature was the life-giving death and rebirth of the maize kernel when planted in the Earth. And their obsession with blood is well documented; blood-letting ceremonies were a common occurrence in the Mayan world from Pre-Classic times through to the Spanish conquest. The Maya even had a cross, their’s representing the four cardinal directions. So when cross-bearing Spaniards arrived on their Caribbean shores and marched up into the highlands preaching a bloody god who sacrificed himself and was resurrected to give life to his followers, the Maya didn’t lose everything, from a spiritual perspective, when they were brought into the catholic frame. In fact, they may have kept the most important part of their faith alive, the same flame burning brightly for “Jesús Cristo” and “Nuestro Padre” that once burned for the Earth deities of the Mayan worldview. They still climb the same volcanoes to plead with a passion I can only imagine to be anciently rooted——a passion that the occidental world in large part has lost. And of this ceremony’s attendees, most impressive to me were the old women who undertook the climb, with huge bouquets upon their backs to lay flowers down at the foot of the cross. If I asked them, I’m sure they would tell me it was for the Holy Spirit, for Jesus, or for God. But the holy trinity can be worshipped just as effectively from the comfort of one’s own home or local chapel, therefore failing to justify the climb. Perhaps this is wrong of me, and I’m denying them the integrity of their truly catholic sentiments, but I couldn’t help seeing through the iconography and verbiage, and imagining these elders laying their flowers not at the foot of the 14th station of the cross, but upon the rim of the great Tajumulco, soaked in clouds.