Yesterday I returned from a week of personal time in Guatemala, a land where the beauty, complexity and contradiction of life is visible in its extremes. I was working in Guatemala 20 years ago after college and it was there that I felt my first clear call to priesthood. The call came from an unlikely direction: the sprawling outer limits of the Guatemalan church, where the faded imperial Spanish Catholic forms held an older and very much alive Mayan religious reality.

I pulled at one of those twisting threads a few days ago when my husband Javier and I traveled into the one of the most traditional areas of the Mayan highlands. I wanted to show him that unique Guatemalan religious blending at the shrine of San Simon or Ma Ximon, a sort of renegade saint, who is an older Mayan deity overlaid or syncretized with the disciple Judas! He is sort of a patron saint of unrepentant sinners. Ma Ximon’s statue does not live in the church with the other saints, but is housed in a moving location, and he has his own priests, or cofrades, who guard and care for the shrine. We asked around town for his whereabouts, and found him a few kilometers out of town in a stucco shed decorated vividly with streamers and dried gourds.

The statue itself is a primitive carving, draped with scarves and neckties, with hats stacked on its head, all brought as gifts. Remembering the protocol, I had brought a pack of cigarettes, and one of the cofrades opened the pack, pulled out a cigarette, lit it, and stuck it in the saint’s mouth, carefully knocking off the ash throughout our visit.

On the great processional days when all the saints get brought out of the church and paraded around town, Ma Ximon always joins the procession, sidling in with his sacredly drunken priests and marching through the streets with the whole tilted band of wooden and human saints as they celebrate with dented trumpets and clouds of incense, and melting away down a side alley back to his shrine when the procession crosses the threshold of the church steps.

Popular liturgy like this says so much; it often speaks a different truth than the official dogma and is worth paying attention to. Ma Ximon demonstrates how people and categories who get written out of the story, who are refused a place at the table, always find ways to write themselves back in. The instinct that we are all beloved children of God is at least as strong as the instinct that some are sheep and some are goats.

The messy comprehensiveness of the church in Guatemala helped me discover my call; I wanted to work in a part of the church that spoke its particular language boldly, yet at the same time realized that God was already having a conversation with all of humanity and that our collective call was to listen and learn as well as speak. I was attracted to the Episcopal Church’s wonderful comprehensiveness, messy and ungainly at times, but ultimately in pursuit of truth as God continues to unfold it, one which follows scripture’s trajectory of ever-widening circles of belonging, and Jesus’ own controversial example of breaking bread with the wrong people.

I suppose with that pack of cigarettes I had just technically sacrificed to idols, and my childhood Sunday School teachers who had taught me to color within straight but narrowly drawn lines would have felt a disheartening sense of failure, but I experience something profound in Ma Ximon’s tenacious endurance despite the official church’s attempts to stamp him out.

Talk of our own imminent sign-on-the-line Anglican Covenant promises more exclusion and division than it seeks to heal, but I’m not losing much sleep over it; the banished will continue to discover themselves loved by God and will continue to write themselves back into the story. Ma Ximon will keep joining the parade!

I think one of my Lenten projects will be to look for him around the edges of church.