The Great Cross Caper.
By: Tom Jacobson
Tags: Life, Honduras, Christmas, Humor, Hotels

The Great Cross Caper.

Another Christmas in Gran Hotel Sula, Honduras.

Photo by Mateus Campos Felipe on Unsplash

The hotel had existed close to forty years.

In the center of San Pedro Sula, Honduras. The growth of the city threatened to move away from the center, from the central park, from the hotel. Most modern cities seemed to undergo this same evolution. It had to do with going to newer places, less crime in the street, less choking traffic, Hotels nowadays preferred positioning right next to or being a part of the ultra-modern malls that seemed to pop up overnight.

This was our case. The Sula, as they called our hotel lovingly. When we opened in ’69, we were the shining jewel of the city. Representing the most modern place, the place our local captains of commerce wished to have their daughters marry in. Often, local visitors lingered at the entranceway as the slow-moving traffic moved past on the boulevard. They hoped to get noticed. Sometimes, if a news reporter was looking for an easy last story and they happened to be at the entrance, they would photograph the visiting locals and ask them if they could mention them in the paper’s gossip column. That kind of place, back then.

No longer. Now it was doing everything we could to continue drawing our slowly dwindling guest count. Most hotels go through this slow downward trend. Hoteliers use terms like ‘reached its peak maturity and now going down…’. They might describe a property as being in distress, but that’s for when a hotel really is in trouble. We were at a stage where we had to upgrade our hoteliering efforts. Sometimes this meant thinking out of the box.

We weren’t quite at the ‘distress’ stage. We were at a point where guests no longer filled the hotel. The coffee shop continued to do landfall business and our Events department seemed to pump with a nuclear strength, fifty-two weddings a year, not counting all the many other social and commerce-related events, were nothing to scoff at.

Competition of the likes of Hilton, Sheraton, Hyatt had come to town and had mostly absorbed our bread and butter trade: the business traveler. These guests traveled with virtually unlimited expense accounts. When arranging their travel plans with their secretaries they never failed to say: ‘I want the best and the newest…’ That was that just with those words they now cut us out. So we had to reinvent and come up with new ideas, strategies. Our hotel was not a big chain name.

Independent operators compete against huge international chains. I don’t need to explain to you that a well-thought strategy is a must for a property to survive. I take some professional pleasure in saying: independent hotels has its manager and staff to do everything. Marketing, budgeting, accounting, recipe and menu design, purchasing, remodeling, modernizing, training, on and on. Chains have modules. Weak Marketing at the hotel in Buenos Aires? No sweat, they send a team from home office to teach the local staff what needs doing.

Nothing wrong with this but it always amazed me just how little a local manager of say the Hilton knew about everyday hoteling. Boiler repair contacts in Mexico? Say what? Didn’t have a clue. They had headquarters to worry about all these things. These managers were glorified storekeepers walking around and are hopefully at least shaking guests’ hands. Yes, there are always exceptions. Every once in a while I’d come across the manager that was comfortable talking about the proper presentation for Croissants to gathering the resources for repairing the giant Kohler-Deisel plant in the basement. The exception.

One idea that just came to me out of nowhere was a chapel!

After quickly determining that one of the guestrooms on the second floor would convert perfectly to a chapel, and after some planning we got the space set up. Painted the walls a soft baby blue, white ceiling. We pulled out all the furnishings and our carpenter built a beautiful cedar altar. Several paintings with natural settings went up on the walls. These were views of nature, an ocean scene, some blue skies. After we brought in suitable chairs and after lining them up in neat rows, we were done! That quick.

Christmas was just around the corner, so we decked the hotel out in decor. The staff outdid themselves every year decorating the place. The lobby held three beautifully decorated and lit up trees along with countless other Christmas things. Our Front desk looked more like it was a place to buy bright red poinsettias.

From the day we opened its doors, the chapel was in constant use. An employee group asked me permission to hold weekly devotionals as long as it wasn’t on the clock. A group of local Christians wanted to have their weekly service in the chapel, after which they’d go to the coffee shop for a snack. Word got around that besides offering a wonderful wedding dinner and dance, we now included a chapel. Soon the couples started using the chapel for the solemn legal ceremonies. It was perfect for those couples who perhaps did not want to go through the very drawn out and time-consuming and costly routine of lining up a local church along with the clergy and Father.

We also completed legal marriages ceremonies within the comforting confines of our chapel. Their parents, several family members, the lawyer representing the city’s municipality handling the legal documents were present, and it made for a perfect venue for this part of the marriage. Moments after the ceremony we’d roll in a pre-arranged cart full of snacks, hors d’oeuvres, coffee, and refreshments.

Please notice that all I’ve mentioned here mostly are the local folks of which ninety-nine percent were catholic.

The international missionaries who stayed at our hotel appreciated the chapel. Our missionary teams were often a combination of medical teams and a church organization. The arriving medical teams needed a place to store all their medical supplies, equipment, and the chapel worked perfectly. When teams were in, they would of course hold services in the chapel, often throughout the day!

So it was at the very least interesting to me I’d heard, if not grumblings, then certainly commentary about the chapel.

A week before I opened the chapel, I walked down to the massive cathedral just down the block in central park. The Catholic Church offered a completely stocked commissary of all things church-related including crosses, incense burners, incense, bibles, candle holders of all sizes, tapestry depicting the story of the Bible, and so on. It was there I bought what I thought to be the gemstone of the chapel. A beautifully detailed cross, at least two feet tall and Christ in his extreme agony nailed to the crossbeam. It was a piece of art, truly a thing of astonishment.

It was with some pomp and circumstance, as much as can be mustered in dusty, burning hot, San Pedro Sula, that I helped install the cross above the altar. Though I am not a strong churchgoer, the moment took me. Some of my staff had tears, and all placed comforting hands on my shoulder as they filed out back to work.

“No son, no, no, Oh dear, you can’t put Christ on the cross in a protestant chapel honey.” My Mother chuckled, adding: “Your Christian missionaries will have something to say about that, you’ll see.” I told her thanks for the advice, said our goodbyes, and hung up.

As though someone heard her voice and as I was leaving my office that same evening, a voice called out to me. “Tom? Tom?” I turned to see one of my missionary regulars sitting comfortably in one of our plush lobby sofas. The early evening light glowed softly as it always did this time of day.

“Hey, John. How are you, good to see you. Anything I can do for you?”

John, a much older man, came to Honduras and worked for a global church organization with countless local groups. He was what I called a loner, and did not travel with a group. In our conversations, he’d said he’d been coming to Honduras since before we opened the hotel in ’69. He was like that guy in the Satanesque movies where the priest in the black frock, bible in hand, does battle to the death with the big bad guy himself. He wasn’t catholic, however. John was the kind of guest who could ask me to paint the hotel green, and I would. I shall refrain from saying what church in the US he came from so to avoid any unneeded flack. Were I to say how he dressed, many of you would know immediately what church he was from.

John chuckled a warm rumble that rose from his chest. I swear he may have had a just barely visible halo. He said. “It’s a beautiful chapel, Tom, allow me to congratulate you,” He stopped, folded his hands over his lap, and continued: “There’s just one thing. The chapel is for your missionaries, most of them are protestant, Christians, Evangelicals if you will, that’s just fine. There’s just one thing. Christ isn’t on the cross in our churches.”

“What’s that John?” having gotten my attention, and now hearing my Mom’s words again, I pulled up a chair. “Please explain.”

Which he did. Very quickly he ‘reminded’ me because he was ‘sure’ I knew better, (which I sure as hell didn’t).

“In a nutshell Thomas,” often he’d drop the Tom and used Thomas instead, “In a nutshell, it goes like this: the Catholics put an importance in the memory that he was human. Jesus was a human flesh and blood like us and God was the one that orchestrated everything that happened to Jesus. So if we take Jesus off the cross then we’re not getting the entire picture.”

We grew quiet, the soft lobby Christmas music filling the comfortable space. The front desk just a few yards away, blinking in lights and busy with guests reaching for fresh-baked Christmas cookies.

I smiled and thanked John. I assured him I needed to make a greater effort at understanding ‘the story’. My mother of course had tried her best to teach us kids about the birth of Christ.

The solution was almost obvious. As we were servicing all forms of Christianity. Something we took very seriously.

My accountant, a catholic (if not staunch), became a little miffed at what I did to fix the ‘problem’. He was a small, unassuming man with a hopeless string of a mustache and deathly afraid of social encounters. To have placed him out in the middle of my lobby to meet and greet our guests with welcome cocktails would have killed him. He also possessed a rich sense of humor, though all too often at the expense of ‘lower’ employees. This was my chance to get back at him.

He was dead set against the chapel, expense and added work, and so on. A penny-pinching accountant, he was almost impossible to please, for which I was grateful. At times, though, it’s necessary to loosen up a bit. So I told him the chapel would need some representation.

“What’s that, sir?” His attention suddenly on my next words.

“When the groups arrive from the airport, I want you to welcome them at the entrance as representative of the chapel and explain its hours and how they can store supplies there, like that, okay? By the way, I’ve asked Mercedes to make a nice frock for you, like a church gown. Not quite like a minister but something that shows this is your role.”

He looked like he’d just gotten the worst news possible. I’d done stuff like this with other staff, so he believed it. His eyes suddenly took on a look of fright, brows formed a high arc, anticipation of hell on earth.

“What will I say, sir? I mean. How? Oh God, sir, I’m not so sure I can do this…”

“Just think of how your wife will treat you, Roberto.” It was a hotel-wide fact that his wife had recently caught him red-handed with a happily willing fellow churchgoer, according to accounts one of those knees up on the pew sort of thing. His wife, who was a stunning beauty, threatened to put a knife into him before they calmed her down. In fact, this was 1993, right after the famous case of Bobbit, the wife who removed her husband’s penis for infidelity. The quiet joking around the hotel after the accountants' scandal was that Elena, his wife, was going to ‘Bobbitize’ him. She was a staunch lady of the church. So the joke was rather than ‘baptize’ him she’d ‘Bobbitize’ him, you got it… I assured him this involvement with the missionaries would bode well for him.

His eyes reflected the line of thought. As though he realized an otherwise utterly impossible reprieve was being handed him on a gold platter. “Oh God Señor, I, I, don’t know but…”

As for any potential upset concerning the cross, the ultimate solution was to do a quick switch of the crosses, one without the figure of Christ the other with depending on the church group, Christians and Protestants versus Catholics. Our carpenter had fashioned a beautiful cross of mahogany, without Jesus, and just as tall as the other for our missionaries. The altar doubled as a cabinet with plenty of space in which to respectfully place one or the other cross. Yes, there were the times where one group followed the previous minutes later, which called for some pretty deft handiwork switching the crosses.

It worked wonderfully.