Sacred Time, Sacred Space

I found out that in the “old days,” the Christmas season extended for forty days, like Lent. It ended on February 2, the Feast of the Presentation or Candlemas. This feast commemorates Mary and Joseph’s visit to the Temple to “present” Jesus to God. Here we meet Simeon and Anna, elders who sense unprecedented holiness in the young couple’s infant.

Falling halfway between winter solstice and vernal equinox, February 2 is also a pre-Christian holy day. In Ireland, it marked the first day of spring. Christmas, Epiphany, the Feast of Christ’s Baptism, and Candlemas all celebrate epiphanies of Christ as  Light triumphing over winter’s darkness. We bless candles on this day, commemorating a final epiphany before  “ordinary time” resumes. It was around this day that I entered monastic life in 1975.

One of my first memories of Roman Catholic worship was mass in the monastery’s half-underground chapel. Its narrow faceted stained-glass windows illuminated a wooden tabernacle adorned with a wrought iron cross. The reds and blues of the windows spilled onto the plush white carpet. The slump block walls were bare, except for small sconces for nighttime reading. Between masses, the portable altar disappeared, as did all other furniture.

Monks and guests sat on the carpet and leaned against the cool walls. It smelled like frankincense and bees’ wax. This kiva- and cave-like quality spoke to me deeply. Having lived briefly with families in Afghanistan and Mexico, I suffered anxiety and insomnia in suburban Arizona’s air-conditioned and malled divorce from the desert’s raw beauty. I found solace lying down under the stars or descending barefoot into the Institute’s chapel.

Weaned from Abstraction

And I found a confusing solace when attending mass in parishes beyond the monastery. Their “tackiness” was new to me. The protestant churches I had attended were restrained. But I was exposed to what seemed to me garish statues, plastic flowers, and the unfamiliar devotions of Mexican-American Catholicism. Overly intellectual and getting weaned from abstraction, my sense of beauty shifted.

These churches and communities revealed the spirit and artistry of the people who have inhabited the American Southwest for centuries. Gradually, over forty years in the Southwest, I exchanged my air-conditioned suburban isolation from the native environment for something earthier, more “primitive.” It took a while, partly because I was so focused on learning about monastic history and practice. I zealously absorbed the spirit of European Catholicism and the Carmelite tradition.

But after thirty years of monastic life, I found myself in a new context, as a teacher, writer and priest falling in love again with the physical desert and the desert spirit of the artists and arts of New Mexico and Colorado.

Sorrow, Glory, Night

A common thread, from then until now, is my love for Candlemas, the Feast of the Presentation, and a gradually deepening devotion to Mary through Our Lady of Guadalupe and Our Lady of Sorrows and Solitude as represented in retablos (paintings) and bultos (statues) in the Spanish colonial style, adapted to available indigenous pigments and materials.

When I entered monastic life, I took the name David of the Presentation. The name appealed to me because the Presentation is a “family” feast: Joseph and Mary bring the Child Jesus to the Temple in Jerusalem. It also appealed to me because of the mysterious Simeon who intuited that this infant was “destined for the fall and rise of many in Israel, and to be a sign that will be contradicted.” Why must something so good and beautiful provoke so much unrest and resistance?

To this scriptural association of Mary with light and sorrow, glory and a pierced heart, was added the Blessed Virgin’s association with evening and night. Monks recite or sing Mary’s Magnificat, Simeon’s Nunc dimittis, and the hymn Salve Regina at Vespers and Compline.

I learned that the “night” was St. John of the Cross’ central poetic metaphor for harrowing and divinizing growth. For John, it is a “happy night” because it unites us with our Beloved. It is the “night truly blessed” proclaimed at the Easter Vigil, “when heaven is wedded to earth” and we are reconciled to God. I sensed that under the Shekina-like canopy of Mary’s maternal presence, we need not “fear the terror of the night … nor the plague that prowls in the darkness.”

As a child I suffered nightmares, and this pairing of night and maternal protection touched a vulnerable spot in me. But John’s erotic imagery echoed the Song of Songs and gave me some intuition that despite the difficulties of celibacy, this solitary commitment need not be sterile; it may become life-giving.

Sapphire and Turquoise

Years after discovering St. John of the Cross I discovered Dante, who introduced me to Mary’s association with light. But the Blessed Virgin of Dante’s Paradise is Queen of everlasting day. And although I am awed by “the lovely sapphire / whose grace ensapphires the heaven’s brightest sphere” and whose presence makes heaven “more divine,” I have a deeper devotion to the earthbound New Mexican images of the Mother of Sorrows.

In the nineteenth century, holy men in Northern New Mexico carved images of the Virgin with her heart pierced by Simeon’s sword, or standing alone as Our Lady of Solitude, a crone whose power comes not from exaltation in heaven, but from earthly loss. Nuestra Señora de la Soledad is a woman who has lost child and husband, who has endured the “Seven Sorrows” that began with Simeon’s premonition and ended with Jesus’ excommunication and death. She wears turquoise for healing.

A Contemporary Santera

Years ago in Santa Fe I offered a seminar on grief in which we read poems of faith and despair. As poets voiced the fears, anger, and sense of groundlessness that death and loss inflame, we shared our own sorrows.

One day we visited the home studio of Arlene Cisneros Sena, a contemporary santera who painted the St. Joseph reredos in the Santa Fe Basilica’s Blessed Sacrament chapel. Her home is populated with scores of santos, paintings and statues depicting the lives of Jesus, Mary and the favorite saints of New Mexico. These are not objets d’art. They are presences. As Jesuit collector of santos Thomas Steele puts it, these images participate in the life and love of the saints they represent. Arlene’s house is full of light and color radiating from these images.

Many of the pigments derive from native minerals, vegetables, and even insects that burrow beneath the skin of prickly pear cactus. The paintings are varnished with sap from piñon pines that flourish in arid New Mexico.

Yes, we saw images of the Mother of Sorrows and Our Lady of Solitude and Christ Crucified. But the atmosphere surrounding these images gave us strength and hope because they mediated the living presence of the communion of saints.

Tortillas and Candlelight

As I look back on my life and my devotion to the Feast of the Presentation, I rely more on the Woman in the unrefined retablos and bultos of the churches of Chimayó and Ranchos de Taos, New Mexico. Not Dante’s celestial Virgin or Mystical Rose in the undying day of Paradise, but the roughhewn figure who fashions tortillas and listens to her children’s banter and woes, anxieties and dreams.

French philosopher Pascal did not surrender to the God of philosophers. The God of Abraham and Sarah captivated his mind and heart. I find myself in a similar position. Philosophers and theologians are not much help to me when tragedy strikes. I need a friend. I need the earth. As the Aztecs knew, I need flower and song; a brokenhearted woman with a candle in her hand on a dark February night.

An earlier version of these reflections may be found in Season of Glad Songs: A Christmas Anthology.