I want to read to you the centering thought for today's Order of Service as a way to begin the telling of my journey to the amazing city of Oaxaca, in the state of Oaxaca, on the southern coast of Mexico. It was a journey that signaled a sea change in the depths of my heart, that invaded the very center of my being like a glorious swarm of honey bees creating a thunderous and wild song, somehow foreign, yet completely natural.

"Ella hace crecer sus rosas mas fuertes en el suelo donde mas se les necesita . . . en el trochemoche total de la humanidad cuyos cantos, sonidos y lamentos so la base exacta para la musica armoniosa del cosmos."

"She grows her strongest roses in the soil where they are most needed . . . in the complete trochimochi of humanity whose singings, sounds, and cries are the exact basis for the harmonious music of the cosmos." ~ Clarissa Pinkola Estes - "Guadalupe: The Path of the Broken Heart ~ The "she" Estes is speaking of here is the Virgin of Guadalupe, La Virgin de Guadalupe, the powerful archetypal figure who is central to the history and the identity of the people of Mexico and so many who claim Mexican heritage here around La Bahia de San Francisco, the bay of San Francisco and throughout el suroeste de los Estados Unidos, throughout the southwest of the United States.

The image of the vibrant life of humanity, played out in a vast collage of sound---in cries and singing, whispers and laments, songs of victory and survival, in both the painful keening of loss and the joyous celebration of love---that image of humanity, as Estes says it, in the whole "trochimochi," the wild and luscious mixing of life, that image of humanity is where we shall journey this morning. For that is the journey that was visited upon me as I visited that great land south of our country's border.

I went to Oaxaca to study Spanish. That was my first and primary goal. I wanted to study Spanish in order to increase the range of my skills for ministry. Yet beneath that goal, there were other desires, unnamed; muted desires I'd carried throughout much of my conscious life. I wanted to submerge myself in a culture that was not white, that was not bound to a northern Euro-centric cultural path; that was close to the earth, and rich with a life of the heart---the unashamed heart, the heart intimate with tragic sensibility, the heart unabashed in its passion and in its celebration of the body and of death.

I wanted, too, to step off, somehow, from the plateau upon which my inner life seemed to be resting. Or was it hiding? Hiding from the possibility of a wider and more spacious vision for my self and my life; a vision that signaled life-altering tremors, tremors that shook the foundations of long-lived attitudes about middle age and elder hood that I hardly knew existed, but that were never-the-less beginning to choke off the creative and affirming enthusiasm for life that has ever fueled my sense of identity.

So . . . I journeyed to Oaxaca to study Spanish. Yo hice un viaje a Oaxaca estudiar Español. Solamente estudiar. Only to study Spanish. But, of course . . . with all my not so hidden desires at work below the surface of my consciousness, inside the delicate, yet durable, pericardium of my heart, with all those desires at work, the journey became more, so very much more, than a lesson in Spanish. There is so much about that city, la hermana ciudad de Palo Alto, verdad? (you perhaps know that it is the sister city of Palo Alto), there is so much about Oaxaca I could tell you: its temperate climate, somewhat warmer than the peninsula, but swept with daily rains in the summer; its bustling commerce; its history as the birth place of many significant Mexican patriots; its funky, charming and elegant architecture, fronting its well traveled streets with courtyard-protecting, multi-colored facades; it museums, botanical gardens, galleries---and its churches, complex baroque structures, beautiful, yet embarrassingly ornate in their gold leafing and wealth; its thriving artistic and craft communities; its horrendous class divisions; its visible, unavoidable poor.

The poor. Los pobres. En Oaxaca, los mas pobres son las indìgenas triqis. "Triquis" is the name given to the poorest of the poor. The indigenous, los indios, in Mexico---and here, people of color, people of ethnicities outside the northern European stream, unstoppably, reflect the future of what we will become, reflecting to us from the margins of our power where they are still forced to live.

On the streets and in the country side of Oaxaca, the implacable poor assaulted my all too impervious heart. And that was combined with a question that plagued me: "Who is Mexican?" The Spanish, gritty, mercenaries, lusting for wealth and adventure invaded---and with a guile cold as steel, superior arms, incredible courage and unspeakable barbarity, they tore at the very God-heart of the Indian peoples. There were only two then, you see, the Spanish and the indigenous. But as the conquest crushed down upon the indigenous people, the race mixing spread---one way, only one way it spread: Spanish men taking Indian women. Los Mestizos, the mixed bloods, the third "race," the Mexicans were born out of that violent issue---emerged out of the violence of wholesale rape, and also out of the horrific decimation of the Indian population by the assault of diseases, against which their immune systems had no response, in only a matter of years millions were swept into oblivion. The full story of the creation of the Mexican body, of Mexican culture, is far more complex and labyrinthian than this, of course, and than I have time to tell here.

What I do want to tell you about my personal journey there has to do with both resistance and devotion. Resistance to the external forces of violence that fomented the emergence of a new cultural reality. Devotion to an inner vision of reality that created a consciousness of deep religious nurture and protection against the forces of exploitation and annihilation.

In my attempts to understand the history of the vast land of Mexico, as it was expressed in the creation of a different people, I was led through the intertwining pathways of devotion and resistance by way of the singular and intimate image: The Virgin of Guadalupe, La Virgin de Guadalupe, Guadalupana. Here is the story. By the second week of my time in Oaxaca my mind was fatigued and thirsty. Fatigued by struggling to use the language and to understand it---and thirsty for thoughts beyond simple sentences about material survival. I went to an English language bookstore to find something to read that would slake the intellectual draught I was suffering. In that store, I found this book: La Diosa de las Américas, Goddess of the Americas, edited by Ana Castillo. In that book I found this article: "Guadalupe: la ruta del corazòn roto." "Guadalupe: The Path of the Broken Heart," by Clarissa Pinkola Estes. In it she writes, "When I was seven years old, the grown-ups from my home and school life told me that I had at last reached 'the age of reason.' " To help her make this transition, those same adults told her that for thirteen days she would see and hear things, "that will call for your help, your hands, your heart for the rest of your life." In particular her beloved auntie said to her "You are a little child and you can still see what most who are older no longer care to see, you can see what needs help." I have been waiting for over four months to read this story to you. It's one of the most powerful passages of literature I have ever encountered. It's a bit longer than what I would normally include in a sermon, but I am hoping that the strength and intensity of her writing will compensate for that. Here is Estes' story:

So, many things did I see during those thirteen holy days that my aunt had prepared me for. . . . one of the most startling I saw as I wandered down a dirt road through the far woods. A little ways down the road a big sheriff's car, in an even bigger cloud of dust, skidded to a stop off to the side of the road where a little deeper in the woods was a stick-pole encampment of some of the hobo people who regularly jumped from the freight train up road and stayed for periods of time in our neck of the woods.

I think there are times when you can smell mal-intention coming. I quickly jumped into the field at the roadside and lay down to hide, amongst the dry stalks there. The deputies jerked aside the canvas flap of the stick-pole tent and charged right in. Less than a minute later, amidst all hell breaking loose and with terrible sound of cook pots clanging and falling and scuffling sounds, and much crying out and epithets, one deputy dragged a half-naked man in manacles from out of the canvas hovel.

He was dressed like many who lived hidden in that part of the woods, many who came up from the hills . . . His torn scrappy T-shirt was gray with oils, his trousers were stained with paint and dirt. He was unwashed, unshaven, uncombed, and, like a bull roped to the ground, his eyes were rolling, his mouth slobbering as he cried out what sounded to me like, 'Milady! Milady!" The deputy shoved the disheveled man into the patrol car and slammed the door and ran back to the tent.

As I watched frightened and horror-stricken, I thought I heard in my head a calm and gentle voice asking, "Do you love me?"

"Love you? Love you?" I thought. My anguish over what I was seeing was so great I could hardly comprehend the words being spoken into the ear of my heart.

"If you love me, comfort them."

"What?" I thought, trying to understand. Before I could react, the deputies dragged a screaming woman from the tent. She struggled against their manhandling of her. She wore only one shoe, a broken-down black flat. The men had hold of her so-thin arms, like a corpse's almost, and right before my eyes they bent her arms backwards to angles not truly possible. And she was all flaming words and flailing limbs. She screamed and screamed and for one breathtaking moment I felt she looked directly at me, appealing directly to me, though surely she could not have seen me in the dense field across the road. "Help me, help me," she cried in the most pitiful manner.

One officer had pulled her head back by her long hair. Another was trying to pull her sweater up out of the back of her trousers to pull it up over her head like a hanging hood. "Help me, help me," she screamed again and again.

I heard a calm voice in my panicked heart ask: "Do you love me? If you do, then help me."

I felt deeply confused, yet I shot up like a quail. I had sudden turbines in my legs, my arms reaching ten feet ahead of me, my lungs filling with a gigantic thundercloud. My head back, I ran like a crazy child the distance down and across the road. The deputies were pushing her into the car, they were slamming the door on the couple. The officers piled into the front seat and slammed their own doors. I could still hear the woman screaming: "Help me, help me." Completely panicked but somehow able, I thought, "Yes, I will help you." Agonized still, but in a new way, I thought, "But how? How?"

I came up alongside the back end of the big sedan just as the car began pulling away. I yelled out loudly . . . I felt I pulled in the breath of windstorms and that I thundered out as strongly as I could, just as I had witnessed the old women do in the healing rituals, "In Her name and all that is holy, do these people no harm!"

The deputies startled and braked the car. I just had enough time to throw myself across the trunk where the faces of the two haggard and manacled souls gazed up at me with what seemed like excellent wonder. I just had enough time, one split second, to use three of my fingers at once to make the Sign of the Cross on the dusty back window and cry out, "These souls are under my protection." Now the car window was rolling down on the driver's side. I skidded off the car and fell to the road, seeing my own reflection in the mud-specked hubcap. Now the door was opening on the driver's side. I scrabbled to my feet, and ran as though a demon were chasing me. I ran and ran like a crazy thing far into the field.

The patrol car pulled away and kept going. Over my shoulder I could see the crosses on the back window of the car. I had made them big, all three of them, all intersecting, big and bold. Like Her [Guadalupe]. Igualmente. Like the hearts and souls of the man and the woman they took away. Igualmente. Like the true hearts and souls of the unawakened men who took them away. Igualmente.

I did not know what I enacted then or later. I am not even certain yet these many years later. I only know I followed rather than led. After the sheriff's car was gone, I crashed deeper and deeper into the forest until I found my way to the creek, sat down, fell down really, and could not get up again for my legs shook so. My stomach was sick. I finally rolled on my side and threw up. I crawled over into one of the hanging scrub oak warrens, lay facedown for a long time, breathing in the rich healing fragrance of the iron-filled earth of my home. I cried many tears about matters that I can hardly explain. Later, I walked into the river with my big awkward shoes on. I lay in the loving water, not as Ophelia, but as baptism, reburied into the life of the living once more. I do not know what the man and woman did wrong. Likely nothing. Talking too loud, making love too loud, or just by their presence disturbing the gentry who had come to build big houses out in the woods and who we knew were made uncomfortable by us, the truly rustic. I only know that the sounds of thuds of fists on bone is a truly sickening sound and sight . . . [Yet] Life went on. But for me, not as before.

Though I could go on as before, pick self up for thousandth time, millionth time, and go on because there was nothing else to do, because it was a wrong time in the culture wherein there was no direct help, no aid, no looking to see what was wrong about the things I had witnessed that day and more---still, I could never forget. I had had a strange moment in time, what I someday would come to understand as the transformative moment, as when lightning strikes, and all vision and knowing is changed in an instant. On the road with the people in the woods, I thought I had seen the holy people being manhandled. Through the back of the car window, those poor imprisoned innocents, I thought I saw for a moment, both of them, man and woman, as mi Guadalupe. I thought for a split second, saw in both of them mi Guadalupe suffering. I thought I saw Her being assaulted. This was the end of my life as I had know it to that time. "Do you love me? Then help me."

I promised then that if I kept hearing Her call, I would try to keep going where sent. As you can see, I am a fool for Her completely. I am still going.

What I now believe is that the call Estes heard, and continues to hear in her life, "Do you love me? Then help me," the call that calls her to do justice and to practice mercy, that call was also a call to me.

I have pledged to listen and to respond, as best as I am able using reason and will, insight and passion, to live my life, ever more deeply committed to creating peace and communities where respect and love can flourish.

Finally, however, in some way or another, some form or another, that call from La Virgen de Guadalupe is a call to all of us. That great power within the human heart, coming from who truly knows where---from some God/dess, some force of nature, some mysterious deep human need for authentic connection---that power calls all of us to live out our values---for truth, for justice and compassion---values that we often disregard, or smother with busyness or with our panic to get the next task done, to please the next customer, to solve the next immediate problem, to assuage the most pressing pain we want so much not to feel. The vision that La Virgen raises, as protectress, as fierce, yet loving advocate for life lived mercifully and justly---that vision/voice so beloved by the Mexican peoples, is a call to all of us . . . here . . . and now.

Where is your Journey to Oaxaca leading you? What force within you is calling: "Do you love me? Do you love life? Do you love your life? Do you love those whose lives are entrusted to you? If you love, then act! Then step forth, with courage and passion!

Shortly after my return from Oaxaca, I found this quote I think it is appropriate to end with. It is from the great, late African-American, San Francisco Minister, the Rev. Howard Thurman. Speaking as a man whose people have been marginalized, blocked, and unjustly carried off by sheriffs for centuries on this continent, he said:

"Ask not what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive . . . then go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive."

Let those words, so like La Virgen de Guadalupe's words, let those words be today's lesson, today's call to our hearts.

Ashé-Amen-Ameen. Shalom. Blessed Be.
Gracias y Namasté.

What is your reaction to this sermon? Please send comments to Reverend Kurt Kuhwald