April 4, 2007
Dearest Friends,As Easter approaches, my thoughts turn to you with even greater affection than usual. I’m praying that the Living Christ will touch your life precisely where you most need to experience something graceful and new, something surprising, something indestructibly reliable. May Easter find you wide open to the hope-against-hope it embodies, and may it make you more able and willing than ever to carry the healing peace of Christ to the suffering world.
I am thinking a lot about “carrying” these days. It’s Holy Week, and in Seville Holy Week is an intricate series of “carryings.” Shoulders are the key to the drama that unfolds in the narrow streets every day from mid-afternoon of one day until the wee hours of the next. The shoulders belong to the costaleros, the men (and a few women) who labor with surprising precision and delicacy underneath tons of gilt, wax, and tapestry. Mysteriously they work the huge religious floats (pasos) through ancient church portals, down narrow crowded streets, around impossible corners, in and out of the cathedral, and back again to their parishes. It’s an emotional affair that can last as long as 15 hours.
It takes strength to do this. It also takes selfless teamwork and lots of practice. And it takes a determination to identify physically with the patient, doomed Christ whose way to the cross is represented in gory baroque detail on each paso. The costalero’s aim is to bring the passion of Jesus and the grief of Mary home to his heart by means of his aching shoulders and exhausted feet. Some costaleros, like the hooded penitents (nazarenos) who walk with the paso and sweat buckets under their capes and pointed capirotes, are fulfilling vows made to God or to the Virgin, and for many the procession is penitence for sin—their own, and the sin of the world. (By the way, the old practice of self-flagellation has not been seen here in many years—the brotherhoods did away with it about the same time they began accepting female nazarenas and costelaras—in the mid-late ‘80’s.)
The acts of Holy Week are emotionally and culturally complex, of course. Not everything about it is “pure” religious devotion as we might understand it, by any means. (It took me a day or so to get over my expectation that the crowds that gather to see the pasos would exhibit a reverential demeanor, and to put aside my North American Protestant indignation that they do not! Holy Week in Seville is as much a raucous party as it is a sober religious observance, and there is much to ponder in this fact. Why did I expect it to be different? And how is it that nobody here seems to think it is improper, much less sacrilegious, to eat popcorn or yell at your spouse while contemplating a scene of Christ’s suffering and death?)
I have asked several costaleros and nazarenos the question, “Why do you take part?” In the end, most shrug their shoulders, as if to say, “What an odd question!” Taking up the paso or walking in the procession is simply traditional. It’s something you just do if you grew up in that neighborhood, were baptized in that parish, were inscribed in its brotherhood. One costalero told me a long story about the first time his grandfather took him to see a procession in which his father was participating. “You see, I learned it from him,” he said.
It reminded me of the stories people tell about going to Fenway for the first time with their fathers or mothers—children imbibing local rites from tribal elders, making an emotional commitment for life. Generation to generation—so it goes. (If you’re tempted to think the comparison frivolous, think again! Like Red Sox games, the processions are televised with—get this—a play-by-play announcer and a color commentator!)
The entire spectacle has its roots in the middle ages, and in Franciscan spirituality which was focused on the humanity of Christ. But Holy Week as it is practiced in Seville is much more a product of the Counter-Reformation. In that era, the processions were revved up to become an in-your-face-show of confidence, a display of everything Protestants detested. The Roman Church on parade with its images, incense, patriarchal ranks of clergy, and its marriage to the civil order, was making a defiant and unmistakable statement about its truth, its glory, its wealth, and its power. How simple and even “natural” this kind of triumphalistic Holy Week seemed here in Spain as few as thirty years ago when, even immediately following Franco’s death, the Church was, even more than the military, the most powerful force in Spanish society, and Spain was still a fully-confessional State!
Today, however, it is considerably harder to fix it in the landscape of such a radically different society. The hierarchy is increasingly reactionary and isolated, the populace is only nominally Catholic, and the government is fiercely socialist, lay, and “laicizing.” And yet…millions of taxpayers’ Euros fund Holy Week, schools let out, government shuts down, and as one columnist put it, referring to the many images of Mary that vie with each other for pride of place during Holy Week, “even we atheists have our Virgin.”
It would be easy and not unreasonable to get cynical about the commercial, political, and religious/institutional interests at play here during Holy Week (no one here is naïve about the multiple exploitations of this observance). It’s also agonizing to think about what it must be like to be a Jew or a Muslim in Seville for these seven days. I have tried, but haven’t been able to find any to ask yet. All the same, I resonate with what that columnist wrote—“even we atheists have our Virgin.”
Even knowing what I know of the brutal, repressive history that is the historic underbelly of this extravaganza; and even believing what I believe about the dangers of unthinking fervor, aesthetic seduction, and religious exclusion, like that atheist, this Protestant has not been able to resist completely the strange appeal of this display. And I spite of my observing, critical self, plunging right into it is helping me live towards Easter with more awareness and devotion than I would have thought plausible.
I don’t think this is just my Catholic background reasserting itself. Something else is also at play, but I haven’t had time yet to sort out just what it is. I will write you more about it when I am able to make my way through all the different images and impressions to formulate something cogent (I hope!).
For now, I am left thinking about costaleros, about human shoulders and the various loads we carry on them, about the companions with whom we carry those loads, and about what motivates us to keep up the pace despite the weight and the obstacles. I am thinking about the mix of exhaustion and joy, depletion and exaltation I am told the cuadrillas (costalero teams) feel as they put down the paso at the end, the way they weep and embrace each other, the bond that forms among them on the way…And I wonder if this isn’t akin somehow to what Jesus meant when he said his yoke was easy and his burden light. I am also asking what scenes from the gospel story we First Church disciples take to the streets every day on our shoulders—what message are we making palpable to the crowds by the way we live and work, serve and rest, love and play?
But you get my drift, and so before I become unbearably allegorical, I’ll close, leaving you with some snapshots that I hope will get posted on the church bulletin board, and with a promise to write to you again after Easter, on my way to France and Chartres Cathedral for phase 2 of this amazing sabbatical journey.
It’s getting to be late morning now, and time to get ready for my day (and night!) on the streets—I need to pack a sandwich, make sure my camera batteries are charged up, shove an extra sweater in my bag for after sundown, mark my route in the Holy Week procession guidebook, lace up my sensible shoes, and head out the door to join the throngs.
I’ll take my place among the sandwich vendors, the balloon sellers, the clean-up crews, the Guardia Civil, the French and German tourists consulting their street maps, and the very clean American students enjoying their junior year abroad (why do they look so clean? I dunno, but they do!). I’ll ignore, or maybe even smile at the Spanish teenagers sloppily making-out, the children making a racket with toy drums and trumpets, and the older, more formal older folks making disgusted noises about the making-out of teenagers (but not about the racket of the kids—did I mention that the Spanish shamelessly indulge their children?).
While we all wait, and wait some more, I’ll eavesdrop on chit-chat about upcoming weddings and what to wear at Feria, and who’s relationship is in trouble, and whose boss is an honest-to-God stinker. I’ll endure the pushing and shoving, the ear-splitting hollering of hellos to neighbors across the way, the cigarette smoke, and the very public consumption of alcohol by just about everybody.
And when finally the drums can be heard, and then the cornets, and the first of hundreds of pointy capirotes appears above the crowd, and the baroque paso finally comes by on the shoulders of the costaleros, and the unruly crowd shushes itself, and what passes for silence in Spain descends, I’ll get a lump in my throat the size of Greater Boston in spite of my best efforts to be cool. And contemplating the paso, I’ll remember Jesus and all his kindness and his many graces. And I’ll remember how often I’ve received them because of you.
Happy, glorious and fruitful Easter, dear First Church!
Abrazos,
Mary