When Octavio Esqueda was one year old, his little sister died.
Over the next nine years, her mother suffered five miscarriages. He remained an only child.
His parents had another daughter when he was nine, but she died several years later in a swimming pool accident.
“My parents had extremely different experiences with the two deaths,” said Esqueda, who grew up in Mexico and now lives in Southern California. “The first one brought a lot of despair to my parents.”
Between the deaths of their two daughters, Esqueda’s parents had left Catholicism and embraced evangelicalism.
“The second (death) was obviously difficult, but the difference is they knew they had hope in the Resurrection and hope in Christ,” said Esqueda, a Christian higher education professor at Talbot School of Theology.
“For people who don’t have hope in the Resurrection, or if you’re Catholic and there’s some uncertainty about where your loved ones are, you hope for the best but you don’t know Really. These tendencies to find connections with dreams or other forms are very important for people to keep this relationship alive.
Latin American and Latino perspectives on death are diverse and have been shaped historically by indigenous and Roman Catholic teachings and theology, resulting in syncretic holidays like Day of the Dead (Day of the Dead) and Día de los Fieles Difuntos (Day of All Souls).
With the more recent arrival of Protestantism in Latin America in the 1870s, and as many from the region immigrated to the United States, many Latin American evangelicals have adopted perspectives on death that they view as more faithful to the Word of God, while also trying to understand where their heritage should fit.
“Theologically, the majority of Latin American Christian evangelicals believe in James 2:26, ’The body separated from the spirit is dead,'” said Tomas Sanabria, who currently leads a congregation in the Evangelical Covenant Church (ECC) of 12 different Latin American nationalities in Chicago. .
“They don’t celebrate Day of the Dead. It’s a Mexican tradition. Culturally, many Mexican believers practice a popular syncretistic religiosity… celebrating their deceased loved ones. It is not the same among faithful Protestants. This is more the case of many people from the Roman Catholic Church.
Earlier this year, CT reported the findings from the Pew Research Center. recent survey Americans’ experiences with the dead, noting that “The survey did not specify how people dealt with these interactions, whether they thought they were mystical or whether they thought they might have natural causes.” For example, those who responded that their loved ones visited them in a dream included those who might believe their loved ones were trying to send them messages, as well as those who may have simply dreamed of a favorite memory with a family member.
Among all U.S. Hispanic Protestants, 27 percent report feeling the presence of a deceased family member, 20 percent have spoken to deceased family members about events in their lives, and 12 percent report having had loved ones deceased who communicated with them. (Pew provided this information to CT.)
A third (34%) of all Hispanic Protestants say at least one of these things is true about them. In contrast, 47 percent of all U.S. Hispanic adults and 54 percent of all U.S. Hispanic Catholics say the same.
Just over half of Hispanic adults (53%) reported being visited by a deceased relative in a dream. Among Christians, 41 percent of Hispanic Protestants reported it, compared to 62 percent of Catholics.
Just over a third (42%) of self-identified evangelicals of all ethnicities reported receiving a visit from a deceased loved one.
For Latino and Latino believers, seeing or speaking with a beloved family member in a dream can be enlightening or healing. Such experiences can provide a degree of comfort and reassurance after the loss of a loved one or help develop a more nuanced response to death.
Esqueda, who moved to the United States as an adult, believes her Mexican heritage provides her with valuable wisdom in dealing with loss and grief.
“American Christians, or white evangelicals, tend to be optimistic. They don’t like to live with pain and suffering and like to move on. Memorial services are like celebrations, rather than mourning the fallen,” he said.
Latin American evangelicals, on the other hand, do not neglect or suppress the depth and experience of grief surrounding the death of a loved one, Esqueda says.
“We never move forward. Death is always painful. Death is always the vandalism of shalom. Yes, Christ conquered death, but death is still bad. For Hispanics, Asians or African Americans, we realize that pain and suffering are a part of life, so we deal with it better,” he said.
In other cases, a visit from a missing loved one can even offer insight into a person’s current reality.
During a season when Sanabria, of Puerto Rican descent, was regularly working in his community, a woman named Anita asked him a question. For several nights, his mother, who had died, appeared to him in his dreams and told him the words shakkul remah. Could they mean something?
As a recent seminary graduate, Sanabria agreed to look up the phrase in his Greek and Hebrew lexicon and discovered that, in Hebrew, it could be translated as “a time of mourning over the loss of a young child shot to death “.
When he revealed this to his followers, she burst into tears.
“She explained that when she was in high school she had an abortion and no one in her family knew, not even her mother,” Sanabria said. This encounter prompted the woman, now in her thirties, to seek therapy.
Sanabria, who was raised Catholic before embracing Pentecostalism and later joining the ECC, does not believe that the dead remain in a “state of consciousness” or “know what is happening here on earth.” .
“The Bible says we go into a deep sleep and there will be a second coming when people rise from the dead,” he said. “Only Jesus Christ can raise the dead from the dead.”
But dreaming of a deceased loved one doesn’t mean that person exists in our current reality, he says.
“(A) demon or devil cannot read your mind. So how can a deceased person be on your mind, in your brain, or in your mind? A dream is a dream.”
Some Latin American evangelicals have no interest in adhering to the Catholicism of their ancestors, but are curious to learn more about their ancestors’ indigenous understanding of the world.
In the Mexican context, “death is not something we fear. It’s not seen as an ending, it’s more of a transition,” said Roslyn Hernández, who works at the Fuller Youth Institute and is also a spiritual director.
In the Nahuatl tradition, for example, “it was believed that people leave this world, that we go to another and continue our journey,” Hernández said. “It wasn’t like when a family member died they were never thought of or remembered again. »
Hernández spoke with family members who studied their genealogy and did his own research.
“I looked more into the spiritual traditions of my ancestors (like plant medicine) and tried to integrate them into my own identity and spirituality,” she said.
Growing up, Evelyn Perez remembers members of her Guatemalan family emphasizing to her the revelatory importance of dreams. However, few relatives participated in cultural practices related to the dead.
But when Protestantism came to his family’s hometown, “many (native) customs were suppressed because they were considered bad,” said Perez, who works with ECC church leaders on the West Coast.
During the Protestant Reformation, “the world of enchantment was very scrutinized” to the point that today, “Western theologies tend to consider anything spiritual outside of Christianity as suspect or bad,” explains Noemi Vega Quiñones , holds a doctorate in science. ethics at Southern Methodist University.
“The Bible itself recognizes different spiritual realms and different spirits, and some African and indigenous theologians will also recognize that we live in a spiritual realm…but Protestant theologies tend to favor objective reasoning (asking:) What is who is palpable? What is factual? she says.
Nonetheless, Vega Quiñones remembers growing up in a home that recognized and “normalized” the spiritual realm.
“I grew up hearing ghost stories from friends and family. Feeling the spiritual aspect of a place, like a room, was not unusual for me,” Vega Quiñones said. “I didn’t pray to the dead or talk to the dead, but I regularly remembered my deceased loved ones, like my grandmother, to continue to motivate and encourage me.
As a child, she had frequent nightmares and “saw a lot of bad (spirits) around me.”
“My mother said, ‘Focus on Jesus, pray to Jesus.’ Jesus has more power over these other things. The blood of Jesus will protect you,’ referring to Hebrews 9,” Vega Quiñones said. “She never said, ‘Oh, these evil things don’t exist.’ She never made me feel bad for having nightmares or dreaming of scary things.
Christians must develop a theology of the dead that is grounded in the Bible, says Vega Quiñones. After all, the Bible contains unique and varied accounts of interactions with the dead, she says, citing Jesus’ mention of Hades, Deuteronomy’s instructions not to consult the dead, Saul and the medium of Endor, and the great cloud of witnesses of the Hebrews.
“In the end, Jesus did come to bring healing, truth and goodness to the world. God is the Creator of life, and God is also God over the other spiritual realms, including the dead.
“I hope we will be okay with the mystery – with not knowing – and just be respectful of the biblical wisdom and the collective wisdom that we have as a people. …If a Christian wants to have a sound theology of the dead, we must examine the entire biblical record on this subject and not just cherry-pick aspects of it.
