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The image appeared on the cover of a Sunday bulletin, produced and distributed by one of Guatemala City's most conservative neo-Pentecostal mega-churches. The picture presented the face of a young teenage girl, her eyes closed, lips wet, and skin kissed by a soft, transcendent light; the young woman's head was even tilted to the side in what Jacques Lacan would calljouissance(1998). Across her pink lips read Psalm 4:6: 'In peace, I lay myself down.' This image, stitched together by the church's media relations department, makes a sly reference to Gian Lorenzo Bernini's sculpture,St. Teresa in Ecstasy(1652). The statue in Rome presents one of Teresa of Ávila's (1515–1582) mystical experiences of God, which the sixteenth-century Spanish saint narrates with unblinkingly erotic imagery. In her autobiography, St. Teresa writes how 'the great love of God' often left her 'utterly consumed,' 'penetrated to [her] entrails,' and made her 'utter several moans' for both the 'intense pain' and its 'sweetness' (Peers 1927: 197). With St. Teresa in mind, my own reaction to the church bulletin parroted Jacques Lacan's response to Bernini's statue. 'She's coming,' Lacan commented, 'There's no doubt about it' (1998: 76).

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