At the top of the largest hill, gazing out over all of Cochabamba, is a huge statue of Jesus, arms outstretched as if to embrace or to entreat, and rendered in white stone. It is an image you can see from virtually anywhere in Cochabamba.
On 16th, we climb that hill to see it. On 17th we go to visit the ancient Santa Teresa Convent, a Carmelite convent dating back to the eighteenth Century, now with only a dwindling handful of nuns, living in the more comfortable building adjacent to it, and under rather different rules to their original counterparts.
They knew a very different Jesus. In fact, as I reach the top of that hill and take my first close up glimpse of his face, it seems to me that our global conception of Jesus is undergoing somewhat of an identity crisis.
"Oh." I say, stopping and frowning up at the statue.
"What's wrong?" asks M.
"Well it's just...it's just I don't know if I like his face..."
Jesus, in this conception, is looking out over the town with all of the usual nobility, but rather less obvious compassion. He looks concerned, there is the suggestion of a frown, though none of anger and nothing to suggest anything so simple as 'disapproval'. But he seems just a little, well, less kind.
Jesus, as depicted in words or art in the UK, or more precisely, in the tradition of Christianity I tend to belong to, has a long suffering, but overwhelmingly patient face. The outstretched arms, so consistant in artistic portrayals of him, seem, in conjunction with that face, to be opening out purely that we might run into them. It is the face of a Christ that loves children and animals, that might sweep you up into his arms and whisper sweet words of forgiveness and reassurance, ultimately inviting, but also, perhaps, a little too uncomplicated.
Looking further at the carved face looking out at us, it occurs to me that it is rather more realistic. A Christ looking out over a humankind which, though loved, and still beautiful, is cannibalising itself through war and greed, and suffering terribly as a result, a Christ contemplating a long, bloody, and humiliating death for the sake of this people, with all the complexities involved in any great love, and facing the enormous challenge of guiding a flailing humankind through the immense mazes of their own creations, understandings or misconceptions of what it is to be good, and what it is to be God, knowing they probably won't listen - might well portray a rather more complicated set of emotions, than simple, and rather soppy looking, kindness.
Our understanding of such complex emotions should, given the notorious complexity of human emotions, be rather better. But there is something, I think in all of us, that hopes for simplicity, for a straightforward black and white set of rules, which we can grasp in our human hands, and follow. We want rules from our Christ, we want wisdom and justification, nothing so messy as emotion.
And yet, the rules themselves, are complex. How could they be otherwise? Is it possible to create something which can span cultures, ages, individuals and multiple linguistic translations - and have it be simple? Surely the only way to make a concept stand through time, is to use stories and metaphors, images and proverbs? And yet, this method of communicating meaning allows, perhaps rightly, for multiple understandings, for each individual to read the same text and confer on it a special meaning.
"I am the way, the truth and the life," reads one inscription at the foot of the statue, "nobody comes to the Father except through me."
It's a well known verse. But M doesn't like it.
"Isn't it arrogant?" He asks, "to insinuate that all other religions are wrong. Isn't it the verse that has given Christians throughout history the justification for bloody crusades and patronising attitudes to indigenous peoples when colonising islands?"
Actually he is not so direct as that, those are my words and my bug bear, but his thought is along similar lines.
"It has been used like that," I say bitterly, because everything in me rails against the way my faith has been used to harm others, "but as I see it, that's not what it actually means. I think it's actually an opening up of the ideas at the time about access to God."
To explain, Jesus was talking to a society which had made up its own, ever more complicated and ever more exclusive, rules about God. You had to sacrifice a dove, which were enormously expensive and sold for a profit in the temple grounds. You had to be seen to give lots of money, with no leeway given in respect of how much you actually had, only certain people could speak directly to God so you conducted your relationship via expensive intermediaries and if you were ill, menstruating, or conducting your life in a way the rich temple authorities considered 'unclean', you may not have been allowed in the temple at all - and only in the temple could you worship God...
A relationship with God was an expensive business, for some perhaps not possible, and more and more barriers were being piled in the way. Jesus, in my view, was cutting through all that, and opening up the telephone lines to all.
Of course that is one view. Others interpret this differently. Many believe it really was a statement to the effect that all other religions and concepts of God were wrong and should convert to Christianity. Some factions, interestingly including some branches of Catholicism, a key religion of this country, still take the view that your path to God must be conducted via a priest intermediary.
The face of Jesus, depending on your viewpoint, can look very different.
The second inscription, "love one another as I have loved you", brings to mind another of the major points of discussion in respect of what exactly, might have been meant, namely Jesus' entreaty to "love the lord your God with all your heart, and all your soul, and all your mind."
As part of his 'summing up' of the key two principles to follow in pursuit of a Godly life, along with the famous and rather less ambiguous "love your neighbour as yourself", this should be one of the most straightforward, right?
But in fact it causes many people to knit their brow in confusion, and to follow very different paths according to the way they interpret it.
After all, is it possible to love a God with ALL your heart, soul and mind? Surely there needs to be some room given over in your heart, to spouse and friends and family, in your mind to your work, your plans, your moral choices? Wouldn't a literal obedience to that endorsement render you intellectually and physically incapable of carrying out the most basic requirements of life?
Personally, having struggled with this for years, ("Are other people really doing this? How are they managing? My heart is already full with loving fellow humans. Do I have to evict them?") I found a more reasonable understanding via a very good friend some years back.
Love for a God feels very different to love for another human. It can't be compared because a God cannot easily be compared to a human. Love for someone physically in front of you, which takes a physical or an actual form, is different to love for a concept you can only vaguely begin to give form to, and which is, in fact, more powerful than you can imagine and which is in and of everything you see, feel and touch and indeed, created it.
In my mind loving the lord your God with all of your heart, soul and mind, involves embracing all of life, in the belief that you have it purely through His design, that everything beautiful that you see and love in the world and in others is part of that God, that everything you do for others, you do, indirectly for that God.
Your love for God is therefore expressed in your gratitude for the good things in life, in your willingness to enjoy it, and to expect good and strive hard to put it there, if it isn't there already.
This, however, is entirely at odds with the, also very popular, view, that the world is a place you should be somehow avoiding, full of temptations and shallow desires, and that the best way you can love God is to shut yourself off from it, mentally or physically or both. In the most extreme of these views, the act of feeling comfortable or happy in this world is in some way wrong, a hindrance to your focus on more lasting treasures, such as your eternal heavenly home. This world is an evil, broken place and you should be wishing daily for your ticket out of it. In the lesser extreme the logic does follow, there are a lot of distractions here and loving the lord your God with all your heart rather insists that you do optimise space by shifting focus, and sidelining other things.
Personally, I think a God who created this world would be rather sad to see me shrug it off and ignore it wholesale, preferring my full engagement with it, but perhaps with a little discernment. But what do I know? I know only one face of Jesus, the one through which I understand his teachings.
But there are many, many others, equally valid and, given that this is a huge, superhuman deity we are talking about, quite possibly equally real.
The nuns in the original eighteenth century Santa Teresa convent, took a vow to shut themselves away, forever, from the corrupting influences of the world. And every influence counted as corrupting. The walls of the convent are three metres thick, and stretch high, only allowing a small view of the sky in one little courtyard, its walls even higher and deliberately unscaleable. There are rotating shelves on which the nuns could place a shopping list, to be swivelled round so that they had no contact and no sight of, their shopper. There is a hatch through which the priest could slide the communion bread, with curtains to ensure no sight of the church, and a separate place where the nuns could sit and sing, and hear the sermon, without perceiving anything else of it, particularly any young men of the town. Hair being a thing of vanity, they wore their hair short, and the long locks they may have previously treasured before their entry into the convent were cut off and used to form the hair on the many models and icons of the various female saints which adorned the convent for the sister's reflection. Once they passed through that door, they would never set foot, or even eyes, on the outside world again.
Which is an admirable, and frankly amazing, sacrifice, assuming all the sisters were there by choice. Unfortunately it was socially very fashionable to have a daughter in the convent, a great honour, in fact, to be enjoyed by those lucky family members who got to stay outside and enjoy it. If you were unfortunate enough to be born the second daughter, you would, quite literally, be bought into the convent, there being a rather hefty price to be paid to admit you in. Whether you liked it or not, your future would be sacrificed for the vanity of your family, and to ensure their entry into heaven. This Jesus, the face of whom looks sternly down through the thick stone walls of the convent, is one of social nicety - and social strata. The nuns were split into groups, depending on social status and the amount paid to buy their entry. The luckier ones spent their time praying and sewing, the others were not very much more than slaves to their more affluent sisters. This Jesus does not require equal sacrifice from his subjects. He is oddly at peace with the social hierarchy of the outside world, replicating it without irony, inside the convent.
And this Jesus has no mercy. We are shown a small, cramped stone corridor, not tall enough to stand up in and not wide enough to sit down. The sisters, historians believe, would be walled up inside this corridor for days as a punishment for any transgression. It seems that the sister in charge did not know a Jesus who whispered forgiveness and love, but a powerful overlord, wielding thunderbolts and lightning.
But what of the poor sisters in the corridor, being punished? Our guide shows us markings on the wall. There are the usual lines to delineate the passing of time, or try to, which are common in various prisons across the globe, particularly the more horrific ones. But there are also, over and over again, and seemingly by different hands, the three heart shapes familiar to the sisters, which represented Mary, Jesus and God.
"For hope" says our guide.
Perhaps those captive sisters, alone in the dark, drew the hearts as part of a plea to a Jesus who they believed had condemned them to this fate. Perhaps as a cry for mercy. Perhaps as a comfort, a sense of compassion, of company. Maybe the hearts drawn by each different hand, represent to their artist, a different Jesus.
As for Teresa herself, she escaped from the convent twice. This is, don't forget, a situation you escape from, not a voluntary act. Both times she was caught with two boyfriends at once.
I rather like the sound of Teresa.
"Two boyfriends!" says one of our party, in laughing mock disapproval.
"Well if you're know you're likely to get caught again," I tell her, "you haven't got much time to waste. Better cram all your life experiences in quickly.'
In fact Teresa, after her second capture, decided the answer was not in flight, but reform, and it is thanks to her dedication to changing the system from the inside, that the present day nuns have a very different experience. I suspect her concept of the nature of Jesus would have been unrecognisable to the culture inside the convent at the time.
Nowadays the nuns know a new face of Jesus, one which permits external excursions, rejects the unfair hierarchical system, but preserves a sense of a life devoted. We see the nuns in the streets, on errands of mercy, or buying their own groceries. They live in the building adjacent to the old convent, which is warmer and, though not luxurious, more comfortable. They are, though probably not without some social disapproval, free at any time to break their vows and leave.
Interestingly, the system now works based on personal choice. There are still some in their number who choose to shut themselves away from the world every bit as completely as their original sisters. They know another face of Jesus, every bit as real to them, every bit as valid.
Throughout this journey I have been struck by how many different concepts of God there are, around the world. In some places God is in the earth, in some in heaven, in some he manifests himself in multiple forms based on myth and metaphor, in others he is an empty chair, an inconceivable power.
I have strong suspicions, talking to people who are, equally fervently, practising different faiths, that we are all of us searching for the same thing, and that all of us have found it. We just disagree on what it looks like, and the details of its teachings. We have more in common than we have in contrast, though mostly we chose to argue.
But what I have perhaps forgotten in commenting on these things, is that even within the exact same religion, our personal God figure looks very different.
And why should he not? Don't human beings also have many facets, many moods, many faces? How much more so a God? Particularly when framed by a human imagination.
We have perhaps all found slightly different Gods, even within the same religion. So why make such a distinction, why claim right or wrong, between different conceptions, even different religions?
Maybe the best portrayal of Christ is as a multi faceted, literally multi faced Janus type figure. But we'd struggle with that, in the West at least, where we like to portray our Gods as human.
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