Making Peace

Rudy and Shirley Nelson

IN THE fall of 2002, we were commuting weekly between our home in Albany , New York , and a film editing studio in Marlboro, Vermont, a two-hour drive. That trip was seriously complicated by a long strip of construction on Vermont Route 9 in Searsburg, just west of Marlboro. With frequent single-lane traffic holdups, we had ample opportunity to observe what was going on. But with one exception—a new bridge over a creek—we couldn't come up with a single clue to explain what all those state-of-the-art monster machines, dump trucks, and dozens of hard-hatted workers were accomplishing week after week, except moving millions of cubic feet of earth. Did they really know what they were doing?

But then a bit of sour humor injected itself. After all, if you can't recognize an objective correlative when it keeps whacking you on the head, you shouldn't call yourself a writer. At first we asked an idle question: would they finish their project before we finished our own? From there it was an inevitable escalation to the heart of the matter. Would we ever finish? And did we know what we were doing, or were we just moving things around from pile to pile? These were not new questions. We'd been asking them for more than four years.

As it turned out, we beat the road crew. Their product, if it can be called that, covers about four linear miles. Our product is something you can hold in your hand, a VHS tape. Or, measured as time, call it seventy-two minutes. Its concreteness ends there. It's a story, a documentary about the involvement of religious forces in the recent civil war in Guatemala , the struggle for formal peace, and the on-going struggle for justice.

Its components are predictable: a dozen Guatemalans tell the story out of their own memories and perspectives, hosted by various gringos who are recognized authorities on the life and history of Guatemala.

Described like that, the project presents itself as a matter-of-fact affair, a strategic goal at the end of a straight road without bumps and dust and delays of traffic—very likely even boring. Yet something about the video seems to reflect the uncertainty and adventure in its creation. We'd prefer to think that the uncertainty and adventure are Guatemala 's—bloody, heroic, and treacherous. No smooth new roads there. But a question viewers ask us consistently is how in the world we managed to get ourselves into this fracas in the first place—a middle-class, stay-at-home, “retired” U.S. couple, inexperienced in contemporary filmmaking. Well, it's usually put more politely, but that's what we hear, and we say yes, and readily add to our list of disqualifications: far from fluent in Spanish and only moderately acquainted with Latin American affairs.

We were certainly out of touch with recent film technology and terminology, but not wholly unfamiliar with the genre. We had spent several years, early in our marriage in the fifties, working with a dozen others in a Christian film company, where we made 16-millimeter movies with a blatant message, some of them pretty bad, some surprisingly good. We were all amateurs, but our colleagues included some excellent talent. There were no questions then about what we were supposed to be doing (we were obnoxiously confident), though there were lots of questions about how. Technology aside, as we began Precarious Peace we found the problems to be pretty much the same. It came down to a series of searches, not just the obvious ones—for funding and endorsement—but for a clear goal, the right use of the medium, the right story, the right point of view.

In fact, you could say that it's all about point of view—not primarily about the point the producers want to make, but about the video's attitude toward the content and participants.

We had found a fancy word for this—architectonics—years ago in Norman Sims's anthology The Literary Journalists. Sims describes architectonics as an elusive “element of form that relates the parts to each other and to the whole.” That sounds like the purpose of a good outline, but the word elusive is the key. There were times in making Precarious Peace when we'd have given anything for a stable working outline, a neat package, a treatment that held true, something resembling a script, but instead the point of view was constantly forming and (in good Presbyterian fashion) being reformed. Throughout both the production and editing stages, the compelling factor was the tension between maintaining control and letting it go, and this, above all, put teeth in the question: What are we doing? What on earth do we think we are doing?

Back in the fifties we eventually moved from film to print, and print became our home. We never expected to go back to film. Then about ten years ago, we began to take a new look at some of the remarkable stories hidden in the history of Christian missions. Popular literature about this subject has tended to fall into either hagiography (pietistic, romantic, and often hair-raising tales of missionary exploits) or exposé (cynical critiques of misadventures and foibles). Two BBC producers, Julian Pettifer and Richard Bradley, recall that in the late 1980s, when word began to spread that the BBC was planning a series of documentary films on missionaries, their friends and acquaintances greeted the news with “incredulity or even hilarity. It seemed inconceivable to them that there could still be missionaries out there trying to convert ‘the heathen.'” It was a rather different angle of missions that interested us—the controversial interrelationships of the church with cultures of the non-western world, a development that Joel Carpenter, Provost of Calvin College, has called “the biggest story in the modern history of Christianity.”

The importance of that was one thing; what to do with it was another. It would be a mistake to infer that as collaborators we were operating with one mind. In this partnership Shirley is usually the first to entertain impossible dreams, which are met initially by a cautious or alarmed silence, then negotiated, you could say, into more workable terms. She was imagining a dramatic series for television based on the story of Mary Slessor, the outrageous Scottish missionary to Nigeria, a woman who embodied the tensions of the nineteenth-century “scramble for Africa.” Though in time we set Mary aside along with the idea of a dramatized series, it was she who introduced us to Andrew Walls, founder of the Center for the Study of Christianity in the Non-western World at the University of Edinburgh. We had sought out Walls for help with Slessor research. He gave us that help, but more importantly, he gave us himself. So today's foremost missiologist became our first consultant.

Whatever rough vision of the project we had been forming began to be shaped now by the prophetic reading Andrew Walls gave to history, calling on the church to take a new look at itself in all its cultural contexts. Consequently, we found ourselves part of a lively conversation in the international academic world—dozens of scholars examining together the phenomenon of worldwide Christian mission and its various influences on present-day society and national affairs. This was rich stuff, but it was not filtering out to the general population, or to the churches, where we believed it was needed as background to informed dialogue on the future of global Christianity. The topic was fairly new. Observations like Walter Brueggemann's—“God's mission is much larger than the horizon of the church”—were not common currency.

We became convinced that a series of documentary films centering on stories from different corners of the world would be the most effective and accessible way to bridge the gap. Nigeria would be the locus of the pilot. We immediately secured Bill Jersey as the producer. Bill had been a co-worker with us in those early days of filmmaking and had gone on to establish Quest Productions in Berkeley, California, earning forty years of awards as a documentarian. With Andrew Walls and Bill Jersey at our side, we thought we had it made. We built a body of consultants and began the search for both grants and institutional backing. At the end of a year we came up empty, our first hard lesson in fundraising and endorsement.

During all this time Rudy was also traveling back and forth to Guatemala in connection with a developing partnership between our own Presbytery of Albany and a Mayan presbytery in the western highlands. In many ways Guatemala seemed even more appealing than Nigeria as the subject of a pilot. We had fallen in love with the African story, but Central America was, well, closer to home, and therefore a more realistic place to start. It held up a mirror in which we could see ourselves, as a nation and as a church, in a long, ambiguous relationship with a neighboring culture.

Guatemala was still a volatile country in 1998, and we knew we would be immersing ourselves in controversy, artistic risk, and even the possibility of personal danger. Peace accords had silenced the guns of an ugly thirty-six-year civil war only two years earlier, a war in which—as determined by a United Nations–sponsored truth commission—the government murdered its own people. In the course of the violence, some two hundred thousand were killed or disappeared, with torture and intimidation common military tactics. Guns left over from the war were everywhere, politically outspoken people were still being kidnapped, and vigilantism was increasing in the hill country. Fear dominated everyday life and we were not sure we could get anyone to talk to a camera. We willingly accepted those terms, but something else loomed larger in our minds.

Robert Stone, whose novel A Flag for Sunrise captures the insidious threat of violence in Central America during the 1970s, says that a novelist who deals with moral and political dimensions must assume, above all, “the responsibility to understand. The novel that admits to a political dimension requires a knowledge...intuitive or empirical, of the situation that is its subject.”

Our project was not fiction, which put us even more under the onus of getting the facts straight. It demanded that first of all we acknowledge the enormous influence of own country. As one of the video's commentators says, “It was the United States, the Central Intelligence Agency, that got the ball rolling on this horrible epidemic of violence” when we overthrew Guatemala's democratic government in 1954. Add to this our continued sponsorship of the subsequent military regime. Stone's advice also meant that we needed to make a clear-eyed assessment not only of the political history, but of the thorny issues of religion as well. On one hand, it's hard to question the fact that Christianity in Guatemala has often been in league with the forces of domination. It arrived hand-in-hand with violence in the Spanish invasion of the “New World” and has been entangled with it ever since. No missionaries to Guatemala , from the Spanish Roman Catholic clergy of the sixteenth century to the Protestant educators and Pentecostal evangelists of the twentieth (the majority U.S. sponsored), have been able to escape the shadow of violence, whether overt or insidious. On the other hand, there has always been within the country's religious communities a creative minority that has worked for freedom and justice.

Somehow these facts had to permeate the video, not just as specific information but as part of the film's inherent structure and mood, its architectonics, its narrative arc. We thought finding the right story would solve lots of problems, pulling the disparate parts together and opening windows to background history and other data. But the right story would elude us for three more years, along with funding and an institutional home.

Our first format was a trio of reports about U.S. citizens who were in Guatemala for very different purposes—a cultural anthropologist, a Methodist schoolteacher, and a Roman Catholic missionary priest—all three targeted as suspicious by the Guatemalan military government, with their lives and work in imminent danger. These were riveting and important stories, but ultimately they were about North Americans. After working on that approach for a year, we abandoned it with regret, wiser about our intentions but uncertain about how to proceed.

So here we were with a complicated subject, no money, and no formal aegis. Smarter people might have walked away or altered the nature of the job. Not that we saw ourselves as big-shouldered. We said from the start that we wanted to be part of a team, not the experts but the visionaries, the writers, inasmuch as writing is part of this medium. This was the tacit agreement with Bill Jersey, who was standing patiently in the wings while we got our act together.

Then wonderful people began to join us. As we look back now on the four-year period we spent in production—from early 1999 to January 2003—we're not reluctant to view as miraculous the introduction of collaborators who were knowledgeable, articulate and, as it turned out, personable on camera. One by one, as we met them, these people carried the project to a new level.

The supreme example of that occurred on a day in August of 1999 in Guatemala City . We were there to interview Presbyterian mission co-worker Dennis Smith. In one of his parallel lives, Dennis teaches communications at Cedepca, a unique ecumenical institution that offers religious leaders a conceptual space for pastoral and human rights training.

In Rudy's first trip to Guatemala in the summer of 1987, he had heard Dennis give a briefing on religious and political affairs in the country, an analysis with impressive breadth and penetration. This was a guy who knew everyone—politicians, bishops, guerrillas, army officers, and Mayan peasants. He agreed to be our “in-country collaborator,” a grossly inadequate title for the role he was to play for the next three and a half years. We knew that as North Americans we would always be outsiders in Guatemala . Dennis was a North American too—brought up on the coast of Oregon, a graduate of Wheaton College—but he and his family had so deeply immersed themselves in Guatemala for more than twenty years that he had become an authentic inhabitant of both worlds. We were confident not only that we could trust him for perspective, but that Guatemalans whose cooperation we needed might trust us because they trusted him.

One of Dennis's contributions that day was to call our attention to a book on his table—a newly released paperback by a Methodist missionary journalist named Paul Jeffrey. We could hardly miss the relevance of the title, Recovering Memory: Guatemalan Churches and the Challenge of Peacemaking. Here was responsible, hard-nosed journalism with a profoundly Christian perspective, by a writer who had been living in Central America for fifteen years, reporting to publications throughout the world. Doing a film version of Jeffrey's book was not practical, but it gave our rangy ideas much better focus.

One other person sitting around the table at Cedepca was Matt Samson, a cultural anthropologist whose subject expertise is the relation between Mayan spirituality and Protestant thought. Our amazing fortune was that Matt, who had recently agreed to join the project as a consultant, lived just outside Albany, a mere fifteen-minute drive from our house, and therefore was vulnerable (as Dennis and Paul, a thousand miles away, were not) to desperate calls for immediate help.

Soon we were led to others—our Roman Catholic advisor, Edward Cleary, director of Latin American Studies at Providence College; Virginia Garrard-Burnett, author of Protestantism in Guatemala: Living in the New Jerusalem; John Watanabe, cultural anthropologist at Dartmouth; and Martin E. Marty, who graciously agreed to introduce the video. These are the principal on-screen gringos, though other advisors gave important off-camera guidance. But as they would all say themselves, they are only the links to the film's stars (as they were to us), the Guatemalan participants, Catholic, Mennonite, Pentecostal, women, children—persons whose lives in themselves were worthy of documentaries, like the poet and peace activist Julia Esquivel, for one, and Bishop Alvaro Ramazzini, who continues his criticism of the government in the face of repeated death threats.

Then there are the in-country filmmakers and archivists whose work is so beautiful and irreplaceable. Viewers ask us where we got the footage of the war. It came from José Vásquez, a veteran cinematographer in Guatemala City with a treasure house of material. We had learned from Bill Jersey that while we could probably get any scenes we wanted from stock footage providers in the U.S., it would cost us at least eight hundred dollars a minute. José gave us what we needed for one tenth of that price, most of it material he had shot and edited himself. His artistry spirals throughout the length of the video.

Filmmakers and technicians were the only people we ever paid, in both countries. Most of the time we were running on empty. Our own Albany Presbytery had given us a start-up grant of two thousand dollars, and churches and individuals made contributions with a generosity that humbled us. But there was never anywhere near enough to plunge ahead with a full production schedule, and at crucial points the only way to keep going was to dip into personal resources. We had learned that four hundred thousand dollars would be about average for producing a video for an hour television show. Even after we decided we were not making this primarily for television and arrived at a lower goal, we still kept thinking about how many hungry people that money would feed. The people of Guatemala we wanted to portray seemed much more important than the process of making a video about them, and there was always more irony than we liked in the expense of telling their story.

In the end, the project cost slightly more than one hundred thousand dollars, and that only because of in-kind services—in particular, Bill Jersey's. But there was still the question of where that one hundred thousand would come from. We scoured the foundation directories, wrote dozens of inquiry letters and, when appropriate, applications. We asked ourselves repeatedly if we could or ought to go on. However much confidence you have in the importance of what you think you are doing, lack of funding is bound to spell a lack of validation, and at times doubt stopped us dead in our tracks, and we were ready to stay stopped if we were convinced we should. We understood the reluctance of foundations. Too many projects like ours had fallen by the wayside, in spite of funding. We joked about finding the secret cave where documentaries, like elephants, go to die. But quitting would have been a betrayal of the people who had joined us and given us their time and expertise, and it was never a real option.

The worst moments brought lovely surprises. For a long time we'd been trying to find a way to interview Paul Wee and Philip Anderson, the Lutheran clergymen who had brokered talks between guerrilla and military representatives in a crucial summit in Oslo, Norway, backdoor diplomacy that paved the way to the final peace accords. The two men lived in Washington, D.C., but traveled a lot, and at the times they were available we had no money to pay a camera crew. The news media had by-passed this remarkable story and we wanted to give it the attention it deserved, not just for the sake of Paul and Phil but also for Jorge Rosal, the member of the guerrilla intelligentsia who broke the ice at Oslo by openly acknowledging his own mistakes.

Shirley remembers spouting off like a cranky kid: “Lord, how about a little miracle here?” and getting what sounded a lot like an answer: “Why don't you grow up and do it yourself?” We told Paul Wee that we were about to come down to D.C. with rented equipment and shoot the interview ourselves. That must have scared him, because within a couple of days we got an e-mail saying that he had contacted a filmmaking couple in the area, Leigh and Kris Wilson, who worked regularly for Twenty-Twenty and other TV newsmagazines, and they had generously offered to donate a day to the project. Their equipment and skill were state-of-the-art, and of course they did a first-class job.

The Oslo event was certainly a salient one, but still not the keynote we thought we needed. Of the stories we had heard, most were either not accessible to us or would demand the kind of technological boost we were reluctant to impose. We were determined not to dramatize any event with actors, re-stage anything, or use narration over extraneous scenes of sunsets. The realities of the country needed no phony dressing up. In the words of Nancy Vásquez, the Guatemalan university student who brings part one of the video to a close, “Things really happened here. I mean, you can hear about things that happened in a fiction or a movie, but here things really happened.”

In the Sunday New York Times, December 28, 2003, ten months after our video was completed, an article by Dave Kehr surveyed “The Year in Documentaries.” We read with extreme interest his view that the documentary (or the nonfiction film) “has increasingly become a genre divided against itself.” On the one side, says Kehr, are “the heirs of the cinema-verité movement,” their intent being to “record reality with as little intervention as possible, to confront the spectator with more or less unvarnished truth that asks viewers to draw their own conclusion.” On the other side are filmmakers who use every “device available to them...to shape the raw material into an argued, structural piece.”

If we had articulated Kehr's aesthetic gulf to ourselves in the production and editing stages of the project, we would have had a better sense of the bridge we were trying to build across it. Making those Christian films back in the fifties, we didn't use the word aesthetic, but we wrestled with the urge to create art while we were delivering a message. The right and privilege of making art of any kind was still held in suspicion in the evangelical world that was our context in those years, and we never came up with any satisfying answers. Now we found ourselves faced with the same question. How could this video be called art when its purpose was to be informative? Skilled camera work and editing were essential, but there had to be something deeper. We satisfied ourselves that we were working in the genre of oral tradition—that is, celebrating the mythology of re-telling, and to borrow Kehr's wording in hindsight, “with as little intervention as possible.” It was our job as artists to accept the realities offered to us and embody them videographically in a way that enhanced but did not reshape them to make them carry our message. A good video (or any good art) is not about the artist or the process and techniques of creating. It's about the subject.

The question, obviously, was how to honor oral tradition and also allow for a cross-section of informed interpretation. We decided there would be no interpretation. Our commentators were to do no more than shed background light on what the eyewitnesses were telling us. Were we naive? Inevitably. Whatever our intentions, in a video absolutely everything is interpretation. The stance it takes toward its content and participants will be reflected accurately in each millimeter of footage—the camera work, the editorial choices, positioning of scenes, the musical segues and lighting. It's a risky road to travel and there's plenty of opportunity for self-delusion. Because of Guatemala 's violent history, every bit of territory this video touched—whether the war, the peace process, the plight of the indigenous population, the parts various religious groups played (and continue to play) in all of that—was seeded with ideological land mines.

What we're talking about, of course, is point of view. Please hang on to that as we return to the matter of story.

Late in the fall of 2001, Dennis Smith told us about a story that seemed exactly right. It was time to go get it. By now we had collected a dozen interviews as well as historical archives and local color. Our interviews had been translated and transcribed into over four hundred pages of hard copy. It was time to wrap up the production stage and this looked like the best and maybe the last chance. We contacted Bill Jersey. His company, Quest Productions in Berkeley , had a free week coming up in March and he offered his own time as cameraman without charge. But, even conservatively, other expenses figured at more than fifteen thousand dollars. As it turned out, we had recently received an unexpected property tax refund and (this is the truth) a license from the production company DreamWorks to use the front of our house in the remake of The Time Machine, as it was being filmed on location in Albany. There was no hesitation. Who would dare to question such synchronicity?

The story Dennis discovered had been present all along, right under our noses. One of Cedepca's programs served women who were rebuilding their lives after the war, offering a network of support and information. That included a weaving cooperative in the city of Chimaltenango in the western highlands, run by three women, sisters in the Atz family. A staff member had heard their story and alerted Dennis.

At the worst period of what Guatemalans call la violencia, in the early eighties, this Cakchikel family had come under government suspicion for two reasons. They were part of an agricultural cooperative (identified as communism by official paranoia), and the father, Alejandro Atz, was a Roman Catholic catechist, one of a host of lay leaders among the indigenous Catholic population, another group considered subversive by the government. In a series of raids, some fifteen of the Atz extended family were killed or disappeared, including Señor Atz's wife and one of his daughters. This was a perfect example of the new kind of war waged in our last half century, with civilians—women and children—the victims, and rape and cruelty the weapons. Although the survivors had never told their story (keeping silent like thousands of others in the country's climate of fear) the Catholic Church's Recovery of Memory Project, in which thousands of personal accounts of atrocities in the rural areas had been tape-recorded, had created a safer atmosphere for talking.

The three sisters and their father were everything we hoped for, which is not to say things went by without crises. Two occasions that rose out of their participation are good illustrations of how point of view operated on the ground. On one of the scheduled days of filming, two of the women, Marta and Justina, had agreed to go with us to the mountain village where the massacres had taken place when they were children. As they told their story, they would be walking us through the very locations where they had run so often to escape the army. It was the heart of the story. Then, early in the morning of the filming, we got word in our Guatemala City hotel that the women were having second thoughts.

It was a bad moment for Rudy, who was carrying the load as active producer. A lot was at stake, money, time, very likely our last opportunity to shoot in the country. Bill, drawing on forty years of filming under difficult conditions around the world, was for putting on pressure. But Matt Samson, our anthropologist advisor, with years of experience working closely with Mayan people, insisted otherwise. Mayas have their own sense of social proprieties, he said, and the only way was to reach a consensus. It might take a few minutes or a couple of hours. Or we might not be able to go ahead with the shoot at all. Were we ready for that? After a moment in which he released the whole project to the winds, Rudy's answer was yes. It had to be their call.

So just outside of town, on our way to the village, we had a roadside conference with the women, while Bill and the soundman went off to shoot some local color. It became clear very quickly what was troubling the women. They had a worrisome picture in their minds of our bursting into the village with a truckload of equipment, and they thought we might try to film other people who would be reluctant to talk. When we assured them we would have one camera and one microphone and they would be the only ones we'd be interviewing, their anxieties dissipated and we went on to an excellent day of work.

A second day was spent with the family at their home in Chimaltenango and the weaving co-op. We knew from the start that of the three women Natalia would be the main spokesperson. She was nine years old at the time of the massacres, had a clear memory of events, and was willing to speak freely.

The expression of emotion tends to be a private matter for Mayan people. Natalia spoke on camera with remarkable composure, describing events on the day her mother was killed. In fact, she seemed so detached we wondered if the audience would catch the emotional wallop of this experience. But then she got to the moment when they carried her mother's body to the grandmother's house to bury her in the backyard. Before they could finish the job, the soldiers returned and the family had to flee for their lives. At that point in her story, Natalia suddenly broke down. There was complete silence in the room, not just for seconds, but minutes. Should we leave the camera running or should we turn it off? In tacit agreement, we let it run until she recovered her poise and finished the interview.

But it wasn't over yet. Months later, the decision would become an editing one. The camera run was much too long, of course, and every second counted. How much of the silence could we cut from the footage and still be true to Natalia herself? Her dignity was at stake, but so was the stark reality of the moment she was describing.

Shirley was particularly concerned that if we left in too much of the breakdown we would appear to be milking the interview for emotion. We had the option of cutting out that section altogether and letting a running text in English tell the rest of her story. But that would have been cheating. Natalia had given us a piece of herself and it was important to keep it. The problem was compounded by the fact that we had decided to keep the Spanish-speaking voices and translate in subtitles, instead of overdubbing in English. That was part of what we understood oral history to mean, to hear the inflection in the voices. We settled on a series of dissolves in a way that kept the completeness of the moment but reduced its length. It was one of the few times we used that device in the middle of a speech, and it took the skill of Kate Purdie, our off-line editor, to make it convincing.

It was to Kate's studio in Vermont that we drove through the road construction week after week in the fall of 2002, and there that we thrashed out the final decisions, moving the cubic feet of earth in our own small landscape. Point of view plagued us to the very end. The Atz family story had superbly drawn the intricacies and horrors of military violence. Paul Wee's story had portrayed the negotiations that brought an end to that war. But both were limited in their ability to carry us into the present, or at least not with the palpability suitable for the projection screen, where everything has to happen before our eyes or nothing happens at all. The real story of Guatemala , as Dennis Smith says in the opening of the finished video, is the overarching one of la violencia, the culture of violence that had dominated the country for centuries. This was our narrative arc, our architectonic, but while we owned it in theory, it was still not clear how the material remaining at hand would bear it out.

By now, more than thirty tapes of footage, hours and hours in screening time, sat like an overgrown baby on the shelves of our study, waiting for a slot—a service in a Pentecostal Church at the edge of a barrio, an evangelical school in the western highlands, and a Mayan fire ritual at a sacred site among ancient ruins. We had shot these disparate pieces without a real understanding of how they would fit together. What were they telling us?

The resolution was far more involved than we can explain, but we can say with accuracy that the secret was in the fire ritual. From the start we had hoped to include an authentic Mayan ceremony in the film. Until very recently it's been against the law to practice the rites of Mayan traditional religion, so they were done clandestinely, in the caves and forests of the mountains. In spite of more openness today, it remains a seriously divisive issue in the country, a matter of deep suspicion and fear. There are strict taboos among Mayans against filming sacred ceremonies, not only to protect privacy but safety as well. We wrestled with this for months, unwilling to offend, or worse, cause trouble for someone. Finally Dennis Smith carried an idea to his friend Antonio Otzoy, a Cakchikel Maya and an ordained Presbyterian minister with instruction as a shaman. Antonio consulted a spiritual leader, a young woman who frequently performed the Reading of the Fire, Julia Santo Cutzál. She agreed that we could be present with the camera if the ritual was arranged as a prayer for two things: world peace and a blessing on the video. It was perfect. We were deeply feeling the need for both, and the juxtaposition of personal and global concerns was no stranger than it would have been in a Sunday worship service at home.

On the designated morning, our gringo film crew arrived with simple equipment. As the ceremony proceeded we felt enormous respect. We were very much aware that we were participating in a ritual thousands of years old, and we approached it with a willing suspension of disbelief, as heirs of the Enlightenment, but not with cynicism. We had enough trouble with prayers of our own faith to question this one. At the climax of the ceremony, which takes over an hour, God speaks through the fire, in the nature of the flame and the shape of the ashes. We may not have discerned what Julia saw in either, but the message she got suited us just fine. The makers of this video had experienced many setbacks, she said, but hope flared up brightly: the project would prevail in the end. And world peace? We hope mightily that God heard that prayer, but if the fire offered an answer, we were not told.

We also tried not to read too much into the fact that a few weeks later we were offered a post-production grant of forty-five thousand dollars. It came from the U.S. Institute of Peace and would ensure the completion of the project. But another gift from the fire ritual is more to the point here. Antonio Otzoy, explaining the significance of the ceremony, refers to the centuries of oppression of Mayan religion and culture by both Protestants and Roman Catholics. This is exactly how violence is generated, he says, as the fire burns. “Violence can cause a separation between the body and the spirit of life that is our creator.” His Mayan grandparents called this disencarnación, a wonderful word you're not likely to find in a dictionary, Spanish or English.

Here was the focus we sought, the heart of the culture of violence, the insidious forms of it, not guns or rape or physical torture, but the systemic exclusion and racism that had fostered the war in the first place, with government and religion in a united force that led to years of genocide. As we finished the project, there was still no real peace in Guatemala , nor is there today, and as several of our spokespeople claim, there never will be until the indigenous people, well over half of the population, are allowed a rightful place in the life of the country.

What we needed on screen was already on our shelf, already provided by our participants: representatives of a dozen faith groups and political ideologies who disagree deeply about the role of the Maya in the country, ranging from a Mennonite academic who hopes for a “convergence” between Christian and Mayan theologies, to the other end of the continuum—a powerful megachurch publicly calling for war on Mayan spirituality, which it sees as the “cause of all the troubles in the country.”

Maybe we couldn't be wholly objective, but we could be fair. We could let everyone speak on an even plane with the same amount of screen time. What emerges, if we look at it without denial, is a largely negative answer to the question Martin Marty asks at both ends of the video: “Can people of different faiths cooperate in the human story to work for peace?” Some of our consultants were disappointed. Many viewers continue to be.

From the beginning we saw Guatemala as a microcosm of circumstances in many other parts of the world, and as such it's the story of continuing imperialism, greed and cruelty. But it's also the story of persistent hope, astonishing courage and startling beauty. Letting Guatemala tell its own human story seems like quite enough for the pilot of a series—or as an end in itself.

Visit Rudy and Shirley Nelson as Image Artists of the Month for September '06

Image#44 • Winter 2005