Today was one of those days when I traveled through a sort of portal. The door opened into glimpses of the past in Antigua and how it reflects through into the present. Its like when you’re walking in the forest. You pass between two giant trees like a portal and on the other side everything seems new and different.
The wind rustles the leaves around the huge fallen arches; forgotten magnificence thrown down by our mother planet in one of her periodic convulsions in 1773.
I felt gripped by a kind of silence, like a cloud of unknowing. Like in the movie Dead Poet’s Society when the boys look at the old photos and Robin Williams tells them to “Seize the day.” It an instant everything can change. This place carries a forceful reminder if you happen to feel open to it.
I sat for a while by the tomb of Hermano Pedro. He came to Guatemala with nothing in the 1600s; becoming a Franciscan priest and wanting to help the poor. He was so devoted to the sick and the poor that his tomb has been an important place of pilgrimage since his death. People come by foot from all over Central America for his day on April 21st. All those crutches belonged to pilgrims who experienced miraculous healings at the tomb.
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