Holy Moley Week

Paddy, Harry, and Olaya

The party was just the beginning of my sister Beth´s elaborate plan.

Monday brought cards, letters, cards... cards from my Grandpa Scott (who is 94), Aunts Gloria, Esther, and Nancy, three women who went to high school with me, more than two dozen former pilgrims, both my sisters, and  several cousins (my cousin Barbara included a book about caring for donkeys and mules!). Sonomi sent another invitation to walk the Shikoku 88 Temples pilgrim trail in Japan. 

It was Holy Week in Spain, so mail delivery was spotty. When mail arrived, it came in plastic shopping bags! Cards, more cards, and gifts too: books, a Pittsburgh Steelers Toalla Terrible (in Spanish), a spectacular hand-knitted shawl, three kinds of curry from India, a cheddar cheese (!!!) from Australia, via England, delivered on Monday by Joe The Intern from Liverpool.

The birthday jongleurs

One other spectacle happened on April 4: Someone rang the doorbell just at dusk, and I ran down to answer it: Outside stood four grinning Spaniards. "We are here to sing Happy Birthday!" they said, and they filled up the entryway, accompanied by a shiny red accordion and a big orange sign, sort-of written in English. They sang it once in the entryway, in Galician, and again, in Castellano, in the house, so we could get a picture. I wish I had remembered my camera makes movies!

It was rather confusing to me. I only recognized two of them: One was our neighbor Milagros. Another was Luis, a restaurateur from Sahagún. The other pair I never saw before in my life, far as I know (and Paddy is not in the habit of admitting accordions into the house.) Everyone tried to explain at once. The accordion man is from Moratinos originally, his wife is somehow connected to the camino hospitalero program, and knows me from a FaceBook page. They live in A Coruña, way over in Galicia... and my sister Beth had sent an e-mail, and they were in town (with their accordion) and so why not?

Okay. I can dig this. I still don´t know how Luis got involved, but I will let that go.

When my actual birthday arrived the rain poured down. We haven´t had a decent rain here since December, so all the farmers smiled great smiles and the fields grew greener and more lush by the hour. We didn´t make it to Leon to see the great Holy Thursday processions, but me and Joe went to Mass here in Moratinos, and to Sahagun in the evening to see the penitentes parade in their pointed hoods. We went to church on Thursday and Friday, Saturday night and Sunday morning. It was glorious. We is righteous!

Serious penitentes in Sahagún

And all that churchness culminated in our little iglesia on Easter morning, where Don Santiago decided we should have our own re-enactment of "El Encuentro," a favorite Easter-day procession in towns all over Spain. The Blessed Virgin statue was bolted onto the palanquin and decked with rosemary branches. We don´t have another palanquin, or a detachable Jesus for that matter, so the priest put a sanctified host into the monstrance (a wonderfully-named silver-plated display case for holy wafers) and let it represent the Jesus image. And at the right moment, when the choir began to sing, four women took the corners of the palanquin and hoisted the BVM onto their shoulders and headed out the wide-open front gates. The virgin and all the women of the church made a left outside the door. The monstrance and the men went right.

We met in the alley by the dumpster. We set the palanquin on the ground and someone took away Mary´s black mantilla. Don Santiago turned around and led us all singing through the plaza and back into the church for the big Resurrection Mass.

The only unusual and wonderful thing about this was this year, I was one of the women who carried the Blessed Virgin. It was very heavy and unweildy. It filled my Protestant bones with fear, and set my Calvinist ancestors spinning in their graves at the sheer idolatry of it all. But my heart went pitty-pat with excitement. I felt like I had won the big prize, like I had achieved something truly worthwhile -- even thought I don´t have a purple hood, I was carrying a paso like a penitente! (Carrying a paso is something I have secretly hoped to do someday, but did not know how to achieve. I only had to wait six years!)

the penitentes of Moratinos meet Jesus in the alley

New Life in the Old Pueblo

Leticia, Manolo, and The Star of the Show

They are Flor and Angeles, Hilario and Feliciano, Segundino and Angel and Manolo. The sisters are small and slender and fond of flashy fashions.

The brothers are short and portly, with spectacular smiles.

They share the same cheekbones and chins. They are fair enough to pass for Irish, but they´re Castilian to the bone.

Seven sisters and brothers, they grew up in Moratinos and still work together on their parents´ homestead. This weekend they gathered into the corner house on the plaza mayor with all their children, spouses, aunts, and uncles – 29 people altogether.

This is not unusual out here in the pueblo. Big families were the norm, right up to the 1980s.

It is not unusual that Igor, one of the sons of this family, a couple of years ago married Leticia, a daughter of the family who lives on sunny weekends in the house next door to ours. And this afternoon the vast assortment of friends and relations on both sides, and both ends of town, donned their Sunday clothes and descended on the church for the baptism of Asier, the much-anticipated firstborn great-grandchild.

The church was mopped and dusted and decked with flowers. The bell rang, and Angel and Pin set off sky  rockets. The 90-something great-grandparents – a bisabuela and a bisabuelo who now live in care-homes far away – gloried in their front-row seats, their faces radiant to see their old village and neighbors again.

The parents stood at the font, a 700-year-old stone cup that´s tucked under the stairs, and offered up their offspring to a Christian life. The baby was duly sprinkled with holy water, and shed not a tear.

Igor and Leticia were baptised at this font. Their mothers were, too, and Leticia´s mother´s father, and who knows how much farther back. Baptisms didn´t used to be so special.

This is the first baptism here for a good six years, Leandra told me.

At the turn of the 20^th century, 120 people lived in Moratinos. The young men and maidens grew up together and married one another at this altar, then baptized their children at this font. They knelt here to receive their first communions, and turned up for Sunday Mass and rosary prayers if they were one of the respectable families. And when they died, their families gathered into the church to mourn. The church is still the heart of Moratinos, but these special events are landmarks, remarkably rare.

And so it was, back 20 generations or more, a thousand years. And so it continues, just not nearly so often. Not when the population stands at 21 souls, all of them over age 40.

We spilled out of the church into an Indian summer afternoon. Manolo and Flor and Angel threw out handfuls of candy, and old and young scrambled like gulls to snatch up the goodies. The families stood on the church steps and smiled for the cameras.

The sun was brilliant, the smiles luminous.

From there on the steps of the church you could almost hear Moratinos´ heartbeat. 

proud family

more of everybody

the whole crowd, except photographers