97% percent of people in Timor-Leste are Catholic; that number doesn’t well explain the passion that many have for the church. In my village of Ermera, typical Sunday mass spills out beyond the overflow auditorium and into the street. Special masses consume the entire village.
This love story started with Portuguese colonization, but the church never penetrated more than a quarter of the country in those 500 years. The huge growth in the church in Timor is due to Timor-Leste being conquered by Indonesia in 1975. During this brutal occupation in which a third of the country died, the church became both refuge from terror and a unifying symbol for the resistance. In 1989, then pope John Paul II became the first pope to visit Timor and held mass outside the capital. The visit played a role in attracting international attention to the humanitarian crises occurring in Timor; ten years after the visit Timor was able to vote in a UN sanctioned referendum in which independence won by nearly 80%.
Today, in the same place where John Paul II held mass now stands a small statue in a large traditional building. This place is called Tasi-Tolu and rather than its holy legacy, I remember it as my personal hell as it served as my bus station to enter and exit the capital during my two years in Timor. I used to wonder how the men who were paid by the busses to drag travelers onto their bus could be so mean in such a holy place. This is especially pertinent considering how the statue of John Paul II that is housed in the prominent building of the bus terminal at times becomes a traveler.
In my second year of Peace Corps service, the statue went on tour throughout my district of Ermera. It was carried on foot from school to school with each school housing it for over a week and holding mass and other cultural ceremonies. I was able to witness the hand-off of the statue from nearby Ponilala to the high school I worked at. Alongside the passion for the Catholic church also exists continued commitment to traditional cultural ceremonies, as one can see from all the photos and videos. The hand-off was a surreal mixture of familiar Catholic pageantry and new-to-me traditional Timorese garb, music, and dance.
We took about a month off of school to accommodate the statue and its ceremonies. Each of my two schools took about a week to build and later deconstruct the structures to host mass as well as an additional week each of hosting. During the hosting, the statue resided in a classroom and was guarded by teachers and students who took shifts being with the statue at all hours, including camping at the school overnight. This last detail was nice for me since I lived next to the schools and was easily able to visit the teachers and students while they cooked dinner and hung out.
For me, this was likely the coolest thing that I saw in my entire time in Timor-Leste. The ceremony, the devotion, and the mixture of seemingly disparate cultures were all so unique and beautiful to witness. Unlike so much cultural tourism that occurs in the world today, none of this was presented for a curious foreign audience, it was done entirely by and for the people living there. Globalization is homogenizing culture; tourism keeps traditions alive, but only as spectacle for the rich; yet in this village, and in many villages just like it, traditional ceremonies and rituals live on and the devotion that fuels them continues to burn.
One day the generation of women who know how to play the ritual percussion will die out, to be replaced by a generation whose musical education is exclusively in Tik-Tok dances. One day, like so many groups around the world, the people of Ermera will trade the traditional for the perceived modern; they will trade old rituals for Christian rock megastars and televangelists or perhaps skip entirely into the world of the agnostic. It will be their right to do so, of course, as well all deserve to make our decisions of our self actualization. But one day, the sun will swallow the earth and destroy the remnants of all we ever held sacred; but for at least one day, we had something beautiful — ritual and devotion coming not from one or many hearts, but from generations of hearts manifesting into the sublime. I was exceptionally fortunate to witness this; I am very happy to be able to share it with you. I hope you can find the same amount of joy in the photos and videos as I did experiencing it.
Watch my Reel to watch and listen to the videos
