Religion is an curious beast.

Here’s another reflective post for you. Last Sunday I went to mass with my family. Catholic mass that is. They attend the church that is next to my bus stop called La Concepción, presumably for the virgin conception of Jesus. I always find it interesting to attend a church I am not accustomed to. The practices are always different, the people are different, and the attitudes and beliefs are different. It’s a lot harder to understand the beliefs of the group when you can’t really understand what they are saying, so I got a lot of observation in on the practices and people. Let me tell you, it’s a little unnerving to see and hear a huge group of people saying the same thing at the same time when you can’t understand it. I think if I had heard one person say the prayers, I could have understood, but it was impossible for me to pick out more than a couple words here and there when everyone was speaking at once. I also had a hard time understanding the homily because the preacher used a microphone and didn’t speak very clearly.

The practices of a church really are rather important. I tried to follow what everyone was doing, but it’s difficult, especially without a Catholic background. I had to stand or sit in silence for most of the service because there was very little written material which I could have used to follow along. People just know what to say or do and when to say it or do it. I don’t.

All in all, the service wasn’t that different from Catholic services I have been to in the states. Here, they have no songbooks or hymnals, everyone just knows the songs and sings along, and there weren’t bibles in the pews (I don’t think I’d ever been to a church without bibles in the pews before), but the order of events and the things they did were basically the same.

This probably isn’t a bad time to dive into my observations of religion here.

As many of you probably know, Ecuador is Catholic. That is not an exaggeration. I think the statistic is 95% Catholic. For this reason the country has many laws against various forms of post-incident birth control and the sex ed. here isn’t exactly great. But those issues are for a different discussion.

Even though the population is Catholic, many are not very devout practitioners. There are the people who go to church every Sunday and will talk to anyone about religion, even before soccer (which is saying something here), all the way down to those who have maybe been to church 5 times in the last 6 years but still believe in all the doctrines and ideologies. Then there are the people who don’t identify as Catholic per say, but they are still Ecuadorian, so they know all about the saints and the religious practices of the other 95% of the people in their country. The Catholic religion here is woven into every-day life. There are saints and crosses all over the place and references are made to biblical things and no one really thinks twice about it. And they understand the references, which totally fly over my head when they are in reference to something uniquely Catholic. What really gets me is the saints. There are very few that I know anything about, and their names change in Spanish anyway, which just leaves me lost.

There’s also an interesting mix or religions here (I think you’d call it syncretism, but I’m not sure since I only really know the word for it in Spanish…). Basically, in the more indigenous populations, the people have held onto some of their pre-conquest beliefs, but they are some of the most devout Catholics here. It’s a strange mix. The most personal experience I’ve had with this syncretism is with the stories that I collected as part of my Lit. class project (By the way, I should be able to post a translated version of one of the stories some time in the next couple weeks). One of the stories we were told was about three large animals that were “captured” to prevent them from eating the people, but at the end of the world they will be released to eat the people again. Clearly an old story believed by the people, kind of like the story of the Apocalypse. Except that before these animals are released, God will save all the righteous believers and take them to heaven. Huh? It was just such a surprise for me to hear that mix of beliefs. Especially since the story seemed to be completely finished before that bit was added.

Something I found interesting though, was the responses of my classmates in my Quichua class to the question “What religion are you?” I thought for sure most of them would answer “Catholic,” but it turns out about half of them identify as Agnositc. I kind of wonder if that’s partly due to the fact that they are all college students and, in my experience anyway, college students are much less likely to be “believers” than any other portion of society. But, once again, that’s a topic for another discussion.

And that’s all folks. Until next time anyway!

I feel like this might have been a confusing post, so if you have questions feel free to post them and I will try to answer them.