By Carlos Mendoza Álvarez
On the fourth Friday of Lent, it is a Zinacantecan tradition to begin the rituals of covering the saints with purple cloths over their faces and placing flower mats at their feet, accompanied by prayers, candles, incense, and ancestral music, to prepare them for Holy Week, the culmination of the celebrations. Mayordomos, alférez, temples, and sacristans—titles of the lay guardians of the tradition—bear the heavy burden of the preparations, while the ansetik (Women) lie for hours, dressed in their black skirts embroidered with flowers and a white headdress on their heads, adorned with colorful ribbons, sitting hieratic with a candle in their hands, wrapped in large leaves of Ch'entikal jabnal, praying to the cohort of saints on behalf of the community.
At the same time, in several Zinacanteco-related areas, massive concerts are being organized for Easter Sunday, featuring modern Christian music that will bring Tsotsil youth together around famous international worship groups. These concerts have a charismatic and intimate devotional style, closer to the urban, Protestant-influenced trends so popular in Central America, Brazil, and the United States. The organizational effort for these events is evident, as are the high costs involved, and the colonization of the collective imagination that these forms of modern Christian music represent. These modern Christian music is so popular for its use of pop rhythms and instruments, and its individualistic and sentimental mystical tone, so prevalent in the Western world.
Both currents of Christian religious culture, traditional and modern, coexist in the same Zinacanteco territory, sometimes flowing like streams into a single river, other times running through separate channels leading to different paths. The crucial question is whether both currents can nourish the communities and strengthen their unity in the face of the new challenges posed by the flower industry and the burgeoning commerce that has significantly raised the standard of living for the Zinacanteco people, bringing new ways of life. Or, will these religious differences provoke a schism that weakens the social fabric that, for centuries, has withstood cultural onslaughts in both colonial and modern times?.
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Just 12 kilometers away, the city intercultural San Cristóbal de Las Casas is a bastion of Roman Catholic religiosity, with a strong emphasis on vibrant pious devotions and a sacramental practice unlike anything I have ever witnessed in Mexico in my thirty-eight years of ministry. In the last four months, I have seen confessions unlike any I have ever seen in my entire pastoral life. Thousands of people approach the confessional with devotion and trust, most with a conscience focused more on the complexities of sexuality and individual vices than on caring for their neighbor like the Good Samaritan of Jesus' teachings and caring for Mother Earth as the poorest of the poor, as Leonardo Boff reminded us, a message echoed by Pope Francis. Devotional celebrations are multiplying in every neighborhood, whether to celebrate the patron saint or to observe Lent with prayers and rigorous religious practices.
In that context, I proposed a series of Lenten meditations in the Temple of Santo Domingo, during four Thursdays of Lent, to offer alternatives for preparing for the Easter of Jesus inspired by the spiritual tradition of the Dominicans and the mysticism of the Mothers and Fathers of the desert.
Following the meditative path of Lectio Divina, Every Thursday we began with a light meal, as a way to prepare for biblical meditation. At the start of the meeting, I would highlight some central theological points of the narrative to be meditated upon, read through the lens of medieval and contemporary theology, such as the feminist exegesis of the prophet Hosea and the Samaritan woman, the decolonial theology of disability, and mysticism. apophatic or the refusal of Meister Eckhart.
The following minutes were intended to focus on body posture, external and internal silence, and rhythmic breathing, in accordance with the ancient practice of heart prayer. Hesychasm, tuning the inhalation to the ancient phrase Kyrie eleison to thus receive divine compassion within, holding the air-spirit for a few seconds, followed by exhalation with Christe eleison to offer the world the life they had received. With the help of Abraham Mena as instructor, that initial breath was accompanied by brief reflections to focus the heart on the biblical text for each Thursday: the desert as a spiritual place, Jesus in the desert, the man born blind, and the Samaritan woman, as stories to learn to to be born againwhich is the Lenten journey that leads us to Easter. One of those sessions was accompanied by music from Handpan, a modern percussion instrument created in Switzerland at the beginning of this millennium, inspired by the ghatam Indian and the gamelan Indonesian music to be played with the hands, music that awakens to the sound of divine harmonies.
Once our bodies, minds, and hearts were prepared, we carefully read the passage from the Bible that told the story of Jesus' encounters with vulnerable people in the process of resurrection, inviting each person to pause on a phrase, perhaps a single word, that captured our intention, to inhabit this text and allow ourselves to be inhabited by a sonorous word that is alive as the divine Word.
We concluded with a reflection to connect what we had experienced with everyday life, in the present context, and with a song from the musical tradition of the ecumenical community of Taizé, in France, which allowed us to close with a moment of gratitude and praise, to be sent back into the everyday world to bear witness to what we had meditated on.
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And as part of the Lenten triptych in the Highlands of Chiapas, we launched the initiative JobeLab with a discussion about the San Cristóbal School as one of the vertices of the triangle of critical thinking, re-existences of collectives confronting violence and the mutual support of people and communities open to the breath of Ruah divine in the cracks of society.
The exhaustion of the civilizational model we knew as modernity, with its expression of colonial Christendom, had already been diagnosed sixty years earlier in Cuernavaca by figures such as Ivan Illich, Don Sergio Méndez Arceo, Abbot Lemercier, and Sylvia Marcos. In Chiapas, jTatik Samuel Ruiz, the indigenous movement and the academic community close to the Mayan peoples had also grasped the need for new ways of life, communal organization and renewed ancestral spirituality as paths to follow in times of escalating violence and exclusion.
We had the privilege of hosting a gathering with the Chamula Muslim community of the city, accompanied by Sheikh Mudar Abdulghani. Together, we welcomed Sheikh Yahya Rodus and an international group of Sufi students for a shared reflection on God's forgiveness as a path to reconciliation among peoples in this time of violence perpetrated in God's name that is spreading throughout the world. With music by Nader Khan, a Pakistani-Canadian musician, we celebrated the meeting of two venerable spiritual traditions, Christianity and Islam, which, in their Sufi and Dominican versions, have experienced moments of mutual learning in the mysticism of silence, detachment, and the source of divine mercy.
From the Highlands of Chiapas now, as part of a flow of diverse thought and spiritualities that runs through these lands, we explore those porous areas of thought, culture and modes of communality that heal wounded humanity and the devastated Common Home.
Announcement of another possible world which, in Christian terms, we call messianic anticipations of the resurrection.
Sots'leb and Jobel, April 1, 2026
