When I was in college at University of Dayton, I belonged to an organization called CIASP (Conference on Inter-American Student Projects). It was as a member of this group that I spent 8 weeks in the summer of 1968 living and working in a small village in Mexico, in the state of Veracruz, called Lerdo de Tejada. Eleven of us went down that particular summer, living in homes arranged by the village priest, and teaching English as a foreign language in a small and very primitive school in the neighboring village. It may have looked for all the world like we were the ministers, offering our services to the school system there, but in reality, the eleven of us were most surely the benefactors, permitted to be engulfed in a culture so totally foreign to us, expanding our narrow view of the world and its poor. For some reason, I was placed with by far the poorest of the families. While others had the relative comforts of indoor plumbing and a nuclear family with whom to live, my situation was different. For some reason (and I can’t imagine why) I was placed with a family who had no relationship with the Church at all. There must have been a backstory to this, but I was never privileged to its telling. They were not a traditional family: there was Argelia (the elderly mother) and her two adult children, both probably in their late forties, Angel, who was a schoolteacher, and Rosa, who had apparently no occupation. My long missives to my mom and dad betrayed a homesickness the likes of which I had never known, and I cringe even now as I think what this must have put my parents through, detailing time spent in the outhouse, miserable Montezuma’s Revenge, sleeping on the narrowest of cots in unbearable heat. Eight weeks can change a lot, and in those weeks I grew to have a fierce love and respect for this threesome who had taken me in and shared their poverty as if it were the finest of accommodations and the richest of foods.
The final chapter in my mission story came on the last day, the day we were to leave. Padre Manuel had suggested that we begin with Mass together, then disperse to our homes, and finally meet at the bus station. But my family did not go to Mass and there was no way I could leave them on that morning to join the others at church. They sat at the kitchen table, the three with whom I lived and the cousins next door, all very somber. They kept looking at me, waiting for me to leave for church. When I didn’t, they simply did not know what to do. This was not the “Juani” who was so conscientious about being with the group for all church activities. But I was at my Eucharist, right there in our kitchen.
In the liturgy we not only celebrate Christ’s offering himself to be bread, broken and shared, but we also offer ourselves to be broken and shared in the community, to and for others. This is why that final meal in Lerdo was so strongly eucharistic for me – through the strength and grace of God, this non-believing family had offered life to me from their own meager means, and from the well of themselves; they broke and shared their lives without counting the cost, for me, an unknown “gringa.” I, in turn, after some gentle coaxing, was finally able to reciprocate. And on that last morning we sat around a rough-hewn wooden table and ritualized our eight weeks of growing to love each other fiercely, as we shared tears and tortillas, their bread of life. I have rarely felt so aware of Christ’s sacrifice, embodied in a ritual meal, as I was at that one. I don’t mean to imply that this was more than a Eucharistic liturgy, but I had lived this Eucharist intensely for eight weeks, and it was there ritualized with all the appropriate solemnity.
This episode in my life continues to be as vivid today as it was some forty odd years ago. Although we kept in touch for some years, eventually that was lost. I’ve tried to track down the family using the internet, but without luck, and I realize that very likely Argelia and her two adult children have died. But the lesson they knew and lived and gave to me is very much alive, and I am ever humbly grateful.
