Monday Meditation
Hi everyone
The Santa Cruz Festival de Valle de Maize occurs from May 15-27 in San Miguel de Allende culminating with a huge celebration this coming weekend. The main objective of the festival is to give thanks for the blessings received during the past year and ask for a good rainy season and an abundant harvest. El Valle del Maiz is one of the oldest neighborhoods in the city. The majority of its inhabitants are of Chichimeca or Otomi origin, and during its festival, people venerate the Santa Cruz, in a mixture of Catholic and pre-Hispanic traditions. The celebration venerates a Catholic symbol, such as the cross, but also performs indigenous dances and rituals like the blessing to the four winds, part of the Chichimeca culture before the Spanish domination. As one person put it: “The Spanish brought the Catholic religion, which was unknown to us. We adopted all their rituals, but we had the need to continue with our original customs that we practiced before the conquest, and we found an opportunity to do so at the party. ”
This year it coincided with Pentecost. In San Miguel that means all the surrounding neighborhoods of the Valle de Maiz begin shooting fireworks before sunrise with even more fervor than usual. Seemingly outdoing one another with the sonic booms, the churches also return the favor with responding fireworks accompanied by multiple bells. I’m listening and looking on our rooftop, all the while the white-winged doves, curved-billed thrashers, great kiskadees, rufus-backed robins, great egrets, white-faced ibises, vermilion flycatcher, Inca doves, broad-billed hummingbird, great-tailed grackles, golden-fronted woodpeckers, and bewick’s wren greet the morning as if it were nothing unusual. I’m not making this up.
For the Pentecost celebration here is a call to love life and cherish it. I preached a full sermon not easily excerpted If you would like a copy, send me a note.
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Our true hope in life is wakened and sustained
and finally fulfilled by the great divine mystery
which is above us and in us and round about us,
nearer to us than we can be to ourselves.
It encounters us as the great promise of our life and this world:
nothing will be in vain. It will succeed. In the end all will be well!
It meets us too in the call to life: 'I live and you shall live also.'
We are called to this hope, and the call often
sounds like a command
- a command to resist death
and the powers of death -
and a command to love life and cherish it:
every life, the life we share, the whole of life.
― Jürgen Moltmann
The Source of Life: The Holy Spirit and the Theology of Life
The view from our roof top as the sun breaks the horizon over the neighborhood of the Valle de Maiz.