Encountering God’s Love Beyond Language
By Fr. Michael Carmody
July 6, 2026
Day 3: CHICABRACAN l
Book the air fare. Check. Clear the schedule. Check. Pack the bags. Check. Arrange for airport transportation. Check. Inoculations. Check. Foreign currency exchange. Check. This sounds like prep. work for a memorable vacation & a foreign mission trip shares several features. But the intention is profoundly something different.
Our team intends not to go shopping or sight seeing but rather to visit fellow Christian pilgrims living in what might be regarded as Third World poverty. Certainly Guatemala enjoys the bles
sings & challenges of the 21st century modern urban environment. Our bus trip through major cities & smaller towns encountered traffic congestion, pollution, over crowding, billboard over saturation, etc. Some vacation.
When we left all of this behind early on Monday morning, we headed out to a much less familiar rural landscape. Relatively spacious paved motorways gave way to narrow one lane unpaved washboard surfaces with generous pot holes. If you’ve ever seen vintage photos from 19th century frontier USA, you have a clue as to contemporary life in the village of Chicabracan.
To be fair, it is true to say that the elementary school we visited was adequately modern with electricity & working toilets. The church where we celebrated Mass was a single room with plastic chairs. Electric lights? Yes. Running water? No. Sacristy? No. Parking lot? You made me laugh. So did the elementary school students who were probably as happy, enthusiastic, & full of unbridled joy as any, anywhere.
I only visited 2 family homes & both units were constructed, floors & walls, with homemade adobe mud & straw bricks. Climate control? You made me laugh again.
And yet these simple, hard working Catholic faithful were as loving, kind, generous & hospitable as any I’ve ever met.
The adults I met spoke an indigenous idiom, K’iche or Quiché, most did not speak Spanish & none spoke English. Through a young man’s talent & understanding, we were able to share the spirit of God’s love in a 3 language encounter with brothers & sisters who, just hours earlier, had never even met.
Love, indeed, may well make the world go ’round, but at the very least it makes the trip worth while.
– Fr. Michael Carmody