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Location:8 Calle Oriente,Antigua Guatemala,Guatemala
Thursday, July 26, 2012
La Virgencita Guatemalteca
"¿Quién es ésta que se asoma como el alba, hermosa como la luna llena, refulgente como el sol, imponente como escuadrones abanderados?"
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Wednesday, July 25, 2012
Upon the Votive by Our Door
I have yet to describe or comment much upon the habits and customs of our house here, owing defense due the privacy of my own. Tonight I invade this near silence sharing this lone image, of the shrine near our front door.
After dinner (circa 8 o'clock) the lights in the common areas go off. There is little spare income for electricity here, you see.
The lone light you see when you come through our front entrance after dinner is a votive candle illuminating two icons, those of Our Ladies of Guadalupe and Fatima:
Stuck in the corner, almost out of sight, but with flowers before them.
I, of course, like and approve this custom very much. It is yet one more of many things that makes me feel well and at home here.
Our Ladies of Guadalupe and Fatima pray for us, and bless our homes. Ruega por nosotros Virgencita.
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Location: 8 Calle Oriente,Antigua Guatemala,Guatemala
After dinner (circa 8 o'clock) the lights in the common areas go off. There is little spare income for electricity here, you see.
The lone light you see when you come through our front entrance after dinner is a votive candle illuminating two icons, those of Our Ladies of Guadalupe and Fatima:
Stuck in the corner, almost out of sight, but with flowers before them.
I, of course, like and approve this custom very much. It is yet one more of many things that makes me feel well and at home here.
Our Ladies of Guadalupe and Fatima pray for us, and bless our homes. Ruega por nosotros Virgencita.
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Location: 8 Calle Oriente,Antigua Guatemala,Guatemala
Wednesday, July 18, 2012
Tuesday, July 17, 2012
Personal Note, July 17th 2012
Today, while I was walking home from the Bodegona, I noticed that I was smelling things very subtly.
Or, rather, much more subtly than I have for years.
I quit smoking almost three years ago in Medjugorje. The first week of September, 2009.
People can say what they want about the apparitions there. I know a lot of people have judged them to be false. Maybe so. All I can say is that of all the major Marian shrines I have made pilgrimage to (including Lourdes, Fatima and Guadalupe) Medjugorge is my favorite. It is beautiful there, a little village with a humble church nestled between two Bosnian hills... The place, like all great shrines, is overrun with pilgrims, and the lines for confession there are the longest I have ever seen. Dozens of priests in dozens of languages, lines of hundreds of penitents at every hour of the day.
If the apparitions are false, then that is odd fruit.
I know nothing about the apparitions or the seers. I can only say Medjugorje is amazing, a powerful place. One that I had a strong sense of forboding at, a sense of premonition like I have only felt a few times before. A sense that has always been followed by some consumation. I was very impressed, and was changed somehow.
I smoked my last cigarette there, the morning I hailed a cab away to Dubrovnik. I have not smoked since.
It's funny how I used to love to smoke - I never was a regular smoker, often going weeks without smoking at all. I never felt it as an addiction. I did it with friends, and almost always with good tobacco. As a social act, smoking is sublime. Drinks and a couple bowls in the pipe.. When it is a deliberate, conscious act, and you are paying attention, smoking can be one of the finest pleasures on earth. I often felt the hobbit, you see. It was good..
But not good enough.
The problem is that we all too often do it - like we too often live, eat and work - mindlessly, mechanically. So when I began to start to smoke more often, sometimes a half pack a day for strings of days - and when I began to roll cigarettes with the Frenchmen in Bourguillon, and began to become a full blown smoker, well..
I knew I had to stop, for good.
For while one in ten smokes is sublime, the negative consequences to the body are vast. One of the worst is that you lose most of your sense of smell. And when you quit, it doesn't immediately return. Your body takes years to recover from the abuse..
Years. As I say, it's been almost three now. This past year ambient tobacco smoke has begun to really annoy me. I am thankfully now a re-confirmed as a non-smoker. And now abruptly, just today, I seem to have suddenly recouped some of my long lost sensitivity. Maybe not all what once had as a child, but a stiff modicum of it. I suddenly noticed I was smelling things like I haven't in years.
It was mildly religious, in that I became plutot vif, quickened, slightly ecstatic. The world again leapt with forgotten vibrancy and texture.
Every thing vibrates with sense and poignancy. We are as open nerves receiving the vibration of creation's song; the light, the sound, the scent, the taste..
Taste and see..
How things are good: Gratias Tibi Beata Mater Maria,Virgo et Regina.
Anyhow, I have been in a mild funk these past two weeks, and have left this here blog aside. This week is my last in Guate. A frame shift is coming, and as it happens I think the blog here shall become rather more fecund. I think that I've shed the extraneous attention that I once may have had, and that anyone still following this has merited the grace of my pearls.. Such as they may be..
So they shall be strewn for your collective delectation, my dear public. I begin to write.
Tonight I write merely to tell you that I can smell. Deo gratias. Ay, Just thought you'd like to know.
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Location: :8 Calle Oriente,Antigua Guatemala,Guatemala
Posted with BlogsyTuesday, July 3, 2012
Monday, July 2, 2012
Monday, June 25, 2012
Sunday, June 24, 2012
Friday, June 22, 2012
Church of San Francisco, Antigua Guatemala: May - June 2012
I've been scandalously derelict posting here. Not from lack of available material, but rather from being preoccupied with other things. As these coming two weeks are very likely the end of my time here, I am heretofore resolved to post daily, both material from Antigua and a few essays that I have had gestating for a while.
My current 90 day visa runs out on July 4th, which while I am going to get an extension, that date also is the day my parents plan on flying down to visit and join me upon a grand tour of the rest of the country. That will be the coda to my beautiful time in Guatemala, a interlude twixt this idle and my coming push south.
In any case, tonight I post some images I've taken the past two months of the wonderful church - el Templo de San Francisco - that is just across the street from my house here. It's a Franciscan mission that was established in the 16th century, and the building - though ruined repeatedly by earthquakes, and rebuilt many times over - is one of the oldest European structures in the Americas. The current facade dates from the 18th and 19th centuries, and is quite beautiful in a colonial baroque manner..
The tomb of the local saint, San Hermano Pedro, is off the front of the nave. The pilgrims flock here. There are many daily masses, all well assisted, and daily confessions heard for several hours every afternoon. There are fiestas with bands and hoardes of people every significant feast day (meaning several times a week) and the courtyard has some of the best cheap eats vendors in Antigua. There are about a dozen Franciscan priests and brothers here, and many other religious from various orders (the Missionaries of Charity I spotted were visting here, and there are currently three brothers from Fr. Groeschel's Friars of the Renewal from the Bronx hanging out here, too..) that frequent the place.
I needn't tell you that the grace of this church being found upon my doorstep (something that I had not planned, but like Antigua in every other sense just sort of happened to me) is one of the main reasons I have been here this long..
Because it, and the people who attend it, are beautiful. Look, see:
I'll post some images of the interior (which cameras are putatively banned from, but I'll sneak a few of on the sly this coming week, anyhow) soon.
SS Francis, Hermano Pedro, and Our Lady of Poverty, pray for us.
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Location:8 Calle Oriente,Antigua Guatemala,Guatemala
My current 90 day visa runs out on July 4th, which while I am going to get an extension, that date also is the day my parents plan on flying down to visit and join me upon a grand tour of the rest of the country. That will be the coda to my beautiful time in Guatemala, a interlude twixt this idle and my coming push south.
In any case, tonight I post some images I've taken the past two months of the wonderful church - el Templo de San Francisco - that is just across the street from my house here. It's a Franciscan mission that was established in the 16th century, and the building - though ruined repeatedly by earthquakes, and rebuilt many times over - is one of the oldest European structures in the Americas. The current facade dates from the 18th and 19th centuries, and is quite beautiful in a colonial baroque manner..
The tomb of the local saint, San Hermano Pedro, is off the front of the nave. The pilgrims flock here. There are many daily masses, all well assisted, and daily confessions heard for several hours every afternoon. There are fiestas with bands and hoardes of people every significant feast day (meaning several times a week) and the courtyard has some of the best cheap eats vendors in Antigua. There are about a dozen Franciscan priests and brothers here, and many other religious from various orders (the Missionaries of Charity I spotted were visting here, and there are currently three brothers from Fr. Groeschel's Friars of the Renewal from the Bronx hanging out here, too..) that frequent the place.
I needn't tell you that the grace of this church being found upon my doorstep (something that I had not planned, but like Antigua in every other sense just sort of happened to me) is one of the main reasons I have been here this long..
Because it, and the people who attend it, are beautiful. Look, see:
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I'll post some images of the interior (which cameras are putatively banned from, but I'll sneak a few of on the sly this coming week, anyhow) soon.
SS Francis, Hermano Pedro, and Our Lady of Poverty, pray for us.
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Location:8 Calle Oriente,Antigua Guatemala,Guatemala
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