Guatemala Day 3: Orthodox Monastery of the Holy Trinity

Next spring my high school class from Tudor Hall School for Girls in Indianapolis, Indiana, will celebrate fifty years since our graduation. Some of us have been getting together regularly for the past ten years, but we are making a special effort to track down everyone before next April. One of our classmates was Inez Ayau Garcia from Guatemala. She stayed in Indy to attend Marian College, but after that we lost track of her. Last fall one of "the girls" found an article about her on the Internet. She is the abbess of an orthodox monastery in Guatemala.

"I'm going to Guatemala in January," I said. "Maybe I can see her."

With the information from the Internet article, our friend Paul Sywulka was able to make contact and set up a visit today. Paul drove us to Villa Nueva. Although the distance wasn't great, Guatemala City traffic made it an hour-and-a-half journey each way.

Other than the black habit and a few silver hairs peeking out, Inez looked exactly as I remembered her--that same infectious smile. The paper she is holding is messages that I brought her from other classmates. "That means we are all together in the picture," Inez told me.

She said she had always wanted to be a nun, a dream that she realized after one year at Marian College. Eventually she moved to the Russian Orthodox Church and thirty years ago returned to Guatemala where she founded the Monastery of the Holy Trinity on land donated by a friend of her family. There she has built a beautiful church.

A Russian iconographer came to supervise the painting of the interior with Bible stories from every part of Scripture. "It is the Bible that we must teach," Inez insists. In the Orthodox church all sorts of symbols remind worshippers visually of truths connected with the various stories. I would love to systematically teach my Sunday school class from pictures painted all over the chuch--pictures that they would look at (and hopefully remember) when they were getting bored with the sermon.

All around the sanctuary the word "Holy" is painted in every language they could find.

The setting is fabulous, overlooking a lake south of Guatemala City. Inez took me up to the roof to enjoy the view.

She's a pretty agile lady considering it has been nearly fifty years since our high school graduation. She couldn't understand why I wasn't comfortable standing on the curved roof of the nave (right) to converse.

Inez's great-great-grandfather founded Raphael Ayau Orphanage in the nineteenth century. The monastery took it over and rescued hundreds of children whom they placed for adoption with Orthodox families around the world. They were building a new orphanage and school on the monastery property when all private orphanages were nationalized and they were forced to return children to the nearest relative no matter the conditions of the home. The facility now serves as a retreat center.

It was so good to see Inez again after so many years. She is warm and friendly and has a huge heart for God, for his Word and for the children whose lives she has been able to influence for good. I longed to have her join us for our next retreat where we could sit and share stories and get to know each other as women with so much in common. I encouraged her to travel to the class reunion in April, but she has so many responsibilities and doesn't want to travel that far. She invited us all to come to Guatemala for our next retreat. Sounds like a good idea to me.