It’s Peru!

It was great to hear today that my assignment with the St James’ Society will be to Peru. They say there’s a lot in a name even if when I was named after St Martin de Porres nobody would have guessed I would be working in or around his home city!



Happily I will be working in the same country as three other English priest friends: Fr Kevin Dring is working in the North of the Country, Fr Joe Plumb is working in the Amazonian Eastern region and Fr Darren Reid near Lima. There are currently 17 priests from the Society serving in Peru and I am looking forward to working alongside them in the time ahead. My final destination will probably be decided when I have had a chance to see the current possibilities and meet those working in the various parishes.

Jurassic Park...

One of the claims of Bolivia is that it is a real microcosm of the natural beauty of the world. It has everything from Amazonian rain forest to soaring snow capped mountains, from fertile plains to the high desert of the Altiplano. It is a country of superlatives - the highest city, the highest lake, the most extensive salt flats (Google Earth gives a great view of these) and even the world's most dangerous road!



Bolivia boasts a number of national parks all with unique character. Toro Toro is one of these and we set off for there recently to spend a weekend in amazing surroundings. 70 miles doesn’t seem a great distance to travel but those 70 miles translate to an uncomfortable and often downright terrifying 8 hour bus ride. Memories of smooth tarmac roads are soon left behind and dust and pot holes are the order of the day. Road works on a bridge simply mean you go through the river and there are times, looking hundreds of feet down into the valley below, that a safety barrier would be a huge reassurance. Our bus spluttered its way up the hill and eventually arrived at its destination, even if it was to fail us on the way back. It was clear the driver had an ever diminishing selection of gears and the unmistakeable smell of overheating metal meant it was no surprise when the gear box totally gave up leaving us to hitch a lift back to Cochabamba with another passing tourist bus.



Toro Toro surprisingly doesn’t take it’s name from the Spanish for bull, but instead from the local Quechua word for mud. The fact the word is repeated simply makes the description more accurate as we were to find out after a heavy night’s rainfall!



The mountains are spectacular, I imagine a geographer’s paradise with multi coloured layers of rock pushing up from the valley floor and a stunning canyon boasting great rock formations.













Even back in the age of the dinosaur the valley was known for its mud and one of the great features of the area is its dinosaur footprints, moulded into the mud which then became the local mudstone which characterizes the area. These are still to be seen, including some prints of what must have been a sizeable long-necked beast.



It was also good to see rural life in this remote spot - there was day of local entertainment raising awareness of the plight of many children in Bolivia, whose lives are so often blighted by neglect and abuse. Again, as I’ve seen in other parts of the country, it’s a simple way of life and often a precarious way of living. But people still know how to celebrate.

Confirmation Day

The town of Parea may not look much as you pass by on the road to Oruro but it boasts the oldest Church in Bolivia dating back to the 1530’s. It was also one of the St James’ Society’s first parishes in Bolivia back in the 1960’s. Although it was the earliest settlement high up in the Bolivian Altiplano, it was soon overtaken in size by Oruro with its mining community attracting people from across Bolivia. The parish is now run by a Liverpool priest who has previously worked in Bolivia with the St James’ Society, Fr Joe Bibby.



It was great to spend a weekend there recently, especially as the parish was celebrating Confirmation for 40 young people. It’s largely a rural community and it’s a bumpy four hour drive to some of the outlying parish communities. Mass is celebrated once a month in the main Parea church and then, on other Sundays, at another of the thirty communities in the parish - a very special occasion for those places which would only celebrate mass once or twice in a year.



One of my last memories back in Peterborough was the celebration of Confirmation and as we celebrated the Mass with those 40 Confirmation candidates I was remembering vividly the celebration back in April and reflecting that there is a great bond between those young people from the high mountain planes of Bolivia and our 19 young people from low lying Peterborough on the other side of the world. The sense of hope that we are never alone in this life but always bound in unity by the Holy Spirit was very much a part of both celebrations. The challenges in life will be quite different for both groups and yet fundamentally the same - as St Paul puts it “to speak the truth in love” (Eph 4: 15). In some ways the challenge is clearer here in Bolivia - the lies of injustice and indifference are much easier to see and define. In the Western world they may be more subtle and clouded by the frenetic activity of modern life. Confirmation though is a great way of recognising our deep lying equality across the world - all of us have the same dignity and the gifts of the Spirit are given to all, the same Spirit of joy characterised these two celebrations which have strengthened and inspired me this year.

All Saints & All Souls

Living in South America is to live with two great dominant realities - the reality of a rich indigenous culture with its customs, beliefs and practices and the reality of 500 years of Spanish and European influence. Perhaps no other feast shows the coming together of these two realities more than the celebration All Souls’ day. Indigenous religion remembered its dead to the extent of actually bringing out the bodies of relatives to celebrate with them the beginning of Summer (around the month of November). Feasting and dancing marked this day when the blessing of the dead was sought for the year ahead. Marks of the approval of the dead were good rains and a good harvest. All this coincided with the celebration of All Souls’ day and so it is that the celebration is now such a mix of customs. Not being comfortable with the practice of bringing out the dead from their graves, the Spanish conquistadors began the practice of bringing human images made of bread to the graveside for the celebration of All Souls’ day - a convenient way of recognising the communion and fellowship of all God’s people, living and dead, without the presence of a loved one’s bones!



The practice of celebrating the day with a meal and festive atmosphere has certainly endured and Cochabamba cemetery is packed on All Souls’ day with families all spreading out a table of food and drink - especially remembering the favourite dish of a loved one!









As we pray in November for all those who have died, there is a real sense here of faith in the Resurrection, a real sense that death is not an end but a new beginning and so there is a great sense of celebration. In a way life here reminds us that we begin November with the celebration of All Saints - a joyful statement of faith that God’s will is to bring all together in the Kingdom of light, happiness and peace. And those who are with God in that Kingdom are one with us in prayer and faith. It is in the spirit of this feast that we pray for the dead in November in the belief that those we pray for are on a journey of great hope and joy.

The history of evangelization has always taken into account the work of the Holy Spirit already active in any culture and it has always been a sensitive issue of how we build on that work and what we bring to a culture that is new. What aspects of any culture call for conversion and change and what aspects are the building stones of faith. In all we do to evangelise and bring Christ to our world we always do well to remember that He is there before us!