Indigenous American Advent Meditation: Seven Sevens and an Envoy for Juan Diego (again)

Ben Camino's Indigenous American Advent Meditation: 

Seven Sevens and an Envoy for Juan Diego (again). 

I know it's rather late in the day, but still today, at least on some continent somewhere, it is the feast day of Our Lady of Guadalupe, the subject of the great Catholic miracle story involving indigenous Americans, specifically colonized Mexican peasants, early in the sixteenth century. It's a wild story with lots of twists and turns, and a great debate, ongoing, as to how one should "take" the story -- the lady having been appropriated both by colonizing Spaniards and colonized Americans over the years. There's some very interesting work on this by historians, art historians, and, of course, religious writers, but I leave those questions now to the side. 

Growing up on the border of Mexico, my Catholic faith was immersed in traditional practices that might not have been as normative in places like . . . Indiana. Although I'm happy now to say that, as I write in the following poem, there is now a shrine to Our Lady of Guadalupe in Warsaw, Indiana, less than an hour from where I used to live. And a sizeable Spanish-speaking congregation, many first and second generation immigrants from Mexico and Central American, with whom, usually, I meet on the vigil of the feast, which is when the really big celebration is. Now I am in Texas, near San Antonio, so I was part of the ultime Our Lady of Guadalupe extravaganza at the Cathedral last night, which lasted from something like 6 p.m. to 1.30 a.m. 

During Advent 2012, when I started writing what I came to call an "ironic advent meditation" every day, I certainly knew even less what I was doing than I do now. I generally wrote something every day, usually pretty late in the day because of work commitments, and posted it on Facebook. No fancy blog stuff. Usually no pictures. I was making things up. The posts were intended to be unlike any inspirational Advent meditations ever written, directed towards those who, like me, did not respond to those. They were like scented candles, when I felt the need to rip hearts out of chests. 

So that same year, I had a friend who the PREVIOUS year (2011) had attended the OLG vigil celebration down in Florida. And that experience had a great deal to do with getting her back to church. I was, at that time, in a period of moving from a sort of non-denominational evangelicalism in which I had never been comfortable, to an evangelical Episcopalianism, to what I felt pretty certain would eventually be some sort of evangelical expression of of the holy, catholic, and apostolic church -- the church of Aquinas, Francis and Clare, Benedict, and (eventually) Chesterton. 

So I went. And I got home early in the morning on December 12 (maybe 2.30?) and hammered out a poem. And posted it on Facebook. And the NEXT year, I published it on my blog (and have posted that version every year since). In 2015, my good friend Oz Hardwick published it and six other of my poems in a book featuring several medievalist poets (as we pretentiously called ourselves).  

Not that I'm vain or anything (do I hear laughter?), but I do love this poem, and both the reality and visionary unreality it captures. My friend Jennifer reads this out loud some years and chokes up doing so, which also always chokes me up. I choke up when I read it out loud too.  

Next year, come visit me on the December 11th and we will go together for the songs, and the flowers, and the bread and wine, and the dancing and the tamales. And maybe there will even be a pageant of the story, as there was last night at the cathedral. And maybe the archbishop will come up to you, as he did to me last night, and say, you look hungry, should I go get you something from the rectory? (I said no). 

Seven sevens means, seven stanzas of seven lines. An envoy is something tagged on at the end of poem, usually directly addressing someone (a real person or maybe someone in the poem) but also serving to comment or interpret on the whole thing. 

One final thing, if you get lost and don't quite understand where you are or what you are supposed to be seeing or feeling, thank you. Here's the poem, the original vision (of 2012, not 1531). 

SEVEN SEVENS AND AN ENVOY FOR JUAN DIEGO*

Just last year Jill said

that nothing was finer or ever would be again

than the celebration of Our Lady of Guadalupe

in her local church, in Florida,

with the mariachis and the dancing.

Alright, I’m not sure she said dancing,

but this is not journalism; just shoot me when it is.

 

So I took a trek, I made a pilgrimage,

I mean, I left the Protestant comforts of home,

and drove fifty miles on 30 West to Warsaw, Indiana that is,

where the closest shrine to Nuestra Señora obviously was,

having read about it in the Catholic Directory, if there is such a thing

and met at midnight with what felt like half a million Mexicans,

I mean at least a hundred of us standing and only one of us a very tall gringo.

 

I knew there would be mass, but in my ignorance

I knew so little how (so) much more to expect.

The singing, the children, the costumes, the flowers and families together at the shrine,

the processionals, the professionals, the prayers,

and, inconveniently, my heart ripped out of my chest and blood all over the pew.

My mother, my father, every love I've lost, which pretty much includes them all,

walking through the door, zombies too now, empty and bloody as hell,

 

finding me there, then, together, parading down the aisle,

nuestros corazones heridos all turned to flowers in our hands.

We kneel together, music all around,

a song to the lady, the one Diego wrote,

Las Mañanitas, a birthday song for the precious one you love:

Despierta, mi bien, despierta, mira que ya amaneció

ya los pajarillos cantan, la luna ya se metió.

 

And it's not exactly a miracle that everything smells like roses,

since there are perhaps a New Year's Day parade's worth of them

piled under her feet. And, yes, sometimes the celestial music

is slightly out of tune or the trumpets are just obviously showing off.

But it really doesn't matter about the roses or the guitars or the outfits

because you find yourself mumbling,

I've been bleeding a long time, a long long time.

 

And it goes without saying that this is the lady

with eyes like the western ocean and scars like Barranca del Cobre

who once whispered, "you may touch my feet my pilgrim

but my thighs belong to Padre Nuestro en los cielos,”

who fed you berries by the road by the river your sorrows looking up into the dream of her face

by the mountain by your childhood by the constellations,

who even now weeps for your loneliness.

 

And then, so as not to die here,

you get up from the kneeler and retrace your hungry steps,

go forward for the bread, though they’re stingy with the wine.

After, in the unfinished basement, you share tamales and abuelita chocolate and dancing

with folks you'd swear you've seen before.

It’s clear they knew your father better than you did, though they were born after he died.

For they knew to call him Carlos, which you were not allowed to say.

 

Envoy

Adios, then, Juan Diego, but you know now where you are if not yet who you are.

And, perhaps, at least a little, why you came this way.

To bear witness, to these, los campesinos preciosos,

each with a message from the lady,

for the powers that be, for the white priests in dark robes--

the future is flowers,

hiding in a poor man's cloak.

*revised and re-posted from December 12, 2012; corrected from the later published version in New Crops from Old Fields: Eight Medievalist Poets. Edited by Oz Hardwick. York, UK: Stairwell Books, 2015, 89-91.