I had never smoked anything before in my life. It made my head spin. The sun was just starting to set as we climbed back down the long stairway toward the Avenue of the Dead ...
When you renew your baptismal promises at Mass, the priest asks: “Do you reject the glamor of evil and refuse to be mastered by sin?”
I didn’t know what that meant when I was 17, but I was about to find out — on the Pyramid of the Sun in Mexico a few hours after an old woman hissed at me, like an angry cat, at the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe.
It happened the summer I turned 18 as a University of Arizona student in an immersive Spanish program in Guadalajara.
When the school offered a one-day tour of Mexico City, a friend and I signed up. We escaped the confines of our studies and spent a day gazing up at giant Diego Rivera murals and wandering through the giant El Zócalo plaza and Templo Mayor.
But the most memorable stop for me was one that wasn’t on the itinerary. In the afternoon the bus stopped in the parking lot of the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe and our tour guide informed us that the bus driver was taking a long obligatory break.
“You can go and see the shrine if you wish. It may be of interest,” he said. “Otherwise, please stay on the bus.”
So my friend and I, two professed atheists, headed up the walkway to see what this was all about.
If you ever wonder, “How can people see these amazing miracles and remain in disbelief?” I can answer.
I was definitely impressed that a peasant’s cloak made from cactus fibers in 1531 had survived as long as Juan Diego’s had, and with such a vibrant image. But I did with the information what I did with Ripley’s Believe it Or Not factoids in the newspaper. I tossed it onto the heap of unexplained mysteries in my brain.
It was a carnival of the strange and startling. There were rooms of crutches and wheelchairs that were left behind by people who were cured there. Poor, misshapen people dragged themselves along the ground to see the image. Wealthy pilgrims approached it on their knees.
We saw amazing things, but they didn’t touch us. We passed on the conveyor belt under the serene gaze of the mestiza girl, and moved on.
Time wasn’t up yet, we climbed Tepeyac Hill to where the apparition had taken place.
We walked into the old basilica and we stared over the heads of pilgrims at a life-sized crucifix. Some prayed Rosaries. Some reached out to touch the feet of the statue. Reverent murmurs and adoring eyes surrounded the thing. In the Mexican style, red paint seemed to ooze out of the nail-marks on the hands of the crucifix and streak from the wounds in Christ’s side and knees.
In my teenage way, I was desperate to keep an ironic distance from what we were doing. I made a joke about it and laughed out loud — and an old woman who was in front of me, praying, turned to face me.
She had a wrinkled brown face like my Mexican grandmother, and her eyes locked with mine with a weird intensity. Then, she hissed like an angry cat. It sent a chill down my spine, and it shut me up. I retreated to the bus, shaken.
The day ended at Teotihuacán, the ancient city of pyramids and ruins.
The Pyramid of the Sun there is the third largest pyramid in the world, and my friend and I climbed its long stairway. The pyramid has several tiers, and at the top one, my friend and I stepped off the authorized walkway and went around to the back. There, an American student and his girlfriend crouched against the wall with a hashish pipe.
The pipe was nearly done, he said, but he offered it all the same. My friend took the first puff. I took the last.
I had never smoked anything before in my life. It made my head spin. The sun was just starting to set as we climbed back down the long stairway toward the Avenue of the Dead – and we discovered one reason this is called the Pyramid of the Sun.
Our shadows stretched out like giants below us. We raised our arms in exaltation, feeling like giants descending a staircase from heaven.
But in the days and weeks that followed, that feeling of exaltation abandoned me.
The hissing woman was the image that haunted me. I had ridiculed a crucifix, and profaning the sacred is the very definition of sacrilege. The reaction of that old woman was the most authentic expression of faith I had ever witnessed in my life: an emphatic “Get behind me, Satan!”
In her eyes, my cocky self-confidence was evil and, and after her hiss, my giant conquering shadow was just a scrawny brat blocking the sun.
Eve fell for the glamor of evil when she “saw that the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eyes, and the tree was desirable for gaining wisdom.” For me it was a narcotic buzz on a pagan temple. But, like Eve, I felt naked and ashamed of who I had become.
So I am telling the story of how I woke up.
