In The Silent Company Of Christ Crucified
By JAMES MONTI
The return of Holy Week each year brings with it a renewed longing to find whatever ways we can to spend this time with our Lord. This aspiration to be with Christ in His Passion is what runs like a unifying thread through all the rites and customs of Holy Week. I would even say that it is what still unconsciously tugs upon the hearts of those fallen-away Catholics who only show up in church to get some palms on Palm Sunday. For blessed palms are, as it were, a sacred “souvenir” of the Lord’s Passion.
In countries where the culture has been permeated for many centuries by the Catholic faith, this desire to be with our Lord in His sufferings developed to an exceptional degree, with many ordinary lay people becoming willing to spend long hours in prayer and demanding penitential processions precisely for this reason.
Of course, the modern collapse of faith in many of these places is threatening to snuff these practices out, or to turn them into little more than tourist attractions, yet just enough of the original spirit that inspired these practices in the first place survives for them to remain potent instruments of grace and invitations to conversion.
In cities and villages across Spain, Holy Week still manages to bring much of everyday life somewhat to a standstill, even if many of the spectators are turning a deaf ear to what these ceremonies are really all about. Their continued existence is a testament to their efficacy in conveying the message of Holy Week, such that even worldly tourists find themselves fascinated and captivated by the drama of salvation as retold in these rites. Many a conversion story has begun with a person of no faith becoming intrigued with what at first seemed to him or her just a curious Catholic artefact or custom.
Spanish writers and poets have repeatedly spoken of the unique beauty and mysticism of the “Night of the Passion,” as they call it, Holy Thursday night, the night when our Lord passed from the company of His apostles at the Last Supper into the hands of His enemies. “. . . And it was night,” as St. John tells us (John 13:30). Referring to the innumerable penitential processions that pass through the streets of Spain on this night, José Saez Sironi, in his reflection entitled Noche de cruces (“Night of Crosses”), describes it as the “night of habits and lanterns, of silence, of penitence and consolation, a night bright and dark, of muffled drums, of watchfulness . . . and of crosses, many crosses” (quoted in Homenaje a la Semana Santa de Orihuela, ed. Catedra Universidad de Alicante, Murcia, Pictografia, 2005, p. 108).
Speaking of the images of Christ Crucified carried all night through the city of Orihuela, Conchita Martinez Marin observes, “Orihuela does not sleep that night, accompanying the dead Christ who passes through its streets, pouring forth His love” (“La Poesía Religiosa Oriolana de Semana Santa,” in Homenaje a la Semana Santa de Orihuela, p. 108).
In the Spanish city of Valladolid, there is late on Holy Thursday night a procession with the striking title, “The Pilgrimage of Silence.” Although this procession was introduced less than a century ago, the lay confraternity that carries it out dates back to 1596 and the image of Christ borne by the participants dates from 1684. The story of the procession begins with the making of a life-size polychrome wood crucifix for Valladolid’s Confraternity of Our Father Jesus the Nazarene sculpted by one of the confraternity’s own brethren, Juan Antonio de la Pena (c. 1650-1708), a gifted and devout artist and the father of nine children.
After the confraternity lost possession of a large polychrome crucifix of the Spanish master Gregorio Fernandez (1576-1636) in a legal dispute in 1684, de la Pena was commissioned to carve a new crucifix for the brotherhood that would imitate at least the essential traits of the masterpiece they had lost. Known as “the Most Holy Christ of the Agony,” this crucifix depicts our Lord at the moment when on the cross He cried out, “I thirst” (John 19:28). The extremely lifelike face of the image is most remarkable, portraying our Lord with a partly open mouth as He utters His desperate plea, His head sinking down in pain and sorrow, His countenance spattered with blood.
It was in 1940 that the Confraternity of Our Father Jesus the Nazarene first proposed a new procession for Holy Thursday night to add to the other Holy Week processions in which they participated. In some respects it was really a revival of an older tradition of the brotherhood, which had conducted a Holy Thursday procession from the seventeenth century up until the nineteenth century.
It took over fifteen years for the new Holy Thursday procession to develop a permanent format, finally taking a fixed form in 1956, the first year in which the image of the Most Holy Christ of the Agony was carried on this occasion. Unlike other Spanish processional sculptures that are conventionally borne in an upright position upon huge and lavish floats called pasos, the Most Holy Christ of the Agony is carried in a horizontal position directly upon the shoulders of the lay brothers of the confraternity.
The two and a half-hour procession with this sacred image begins by departing from the confraternity home church of Our Father Jesus the Nazarene at 11:00 p.m. As the title “Pilgrimage of Silence” implies, the confraternity makes its way through the streets of Valladolid without uttering a word, albeit not without some simple religious music sung by a vocal trio from their church. There are multiple stations along the route that at length brings the procession into the great cathedral of Valladolid.
It is here that the most dramatic moment of the procession unfolds. As the confraternity enters the huge Gothic church, Psalm 51, the Miserere is intoned. The procession heads for the chapel of St. Joseph, where the Blessed Sacrament has been reserved for the night in a magnificent repository. The brothers carrying the crucifix now set it down upon the floor to begin their “station of penitence” before the Blessed Sacrament. All the members of the confraternity totally prostrate themselves upon the floor, face down, around the Most Holy Christ of the Agony.
After an interval of silent adoration, they rise to a kneeling posture, with their arms outstretched in the form of a cross, continuing their quiet worship. After completing this station of penance, the confraternity exits the cathedral and follows a return route to their home church, where the procession concludes around 1:30 a.m.
It has been said by scholars who have studied Spanish Holy Week processional sculptures that these images were purposefully designed to bring the spectator into a very real and emotionally charged interaction with the holy personages these images depict. Many photographers have vividly captured how during the Holy Week processions the distinction between art and life seems to vanish amid the mystical glow of countless wax tapers and lanterns and the “real time” setting of the actual hours when the events of the Passion originally transpired nearly two thousand year ago.
There is one such photo in a recent book about Holy Week in Valladolid that powerfully captures the moment of the above-described “station of penitence” of the Holy Thursday “Pilgrimage of Silence” procession. In this snapshot image, the vast floor of the cathedral is covered with the members of the confraternity totally prostrate in their purple robes. At the center is the Most Holy Christ of the Agony crucifix, resting in their midst. The haggard face of our Lord seems as if He is gazing upon the worshippers surrounding Him and receiving comfort from their love and faith. Their silent act of adoration is their reply to His cry from the cross, “I thirst!” (photo in Jose Luis Alonso Ponga, Semana Santa Valladolid, Milan, Editrice L’Immagine, n.d., p. 24).
Ineffable Religious Sorrows
In his book about the customs of Lent and Holy Week in his native city of Murcia entitled Pasionaria Murciana, the Spanish writer, historian, and lawyer Pedro Diaz Cassou (1843-1902) recounts one particular evening from his childhood on one of the Fridays of Lent when as he and his mother were sitting alone in a room of their home, he heard a group of street singers, all of whom were blind, begin to sing outside their window one of the traditional songs about the Passion of Christ.
Pedro had been busy with his schoolbooks, and his deeply devout mother had been busy with her prayers. Pedro exclaimed to his mother, “Mama! The Passion!” Instantly the two of them put aside what they had been doing to go to the window:
“And we in the dark, like the blind and the street, listened to those not very select voices, nor well accompanied by a guitar and a bandurria, singing His [Christ’s] sad song. In the dark and the silence, those notes and voices came up to us and spoke to our souls, awakening and making to vibrate in unison those unknown heartstrings that produce our most delicate sensations.
“The modulation and air of that simple song, which is prolonged like a moan; the languid creep of the same notes, always the same, as is the same for nineteen centuries the event that they lament and the lament with which they mourn him; those assonances and consonances, which are repeated as if pain were imposed on art and made it forget its rules; the silence disturbed only by those voices, the darkness of the room and the streets, the solitude of our silent house, the predisposition of our spirits; all this came to produce in that lady and that boy, in my mother and in me, a circumstance full of melancholic sweetness and ineffable religious sorrows.
“Without moving or speaking, listening and dreaming, lost to the outside world and engulfed inside, we remained together at that window, while that song lasted.” When the blind men had finished their song, they moved on to another place down the street to begin their song again. When at last they could no longer be heard, Pedro and his mother rose from their introspective reverie, with Pedro returning to his school work and his mother returning to her prayers. Taking his hand, she said to him, “How much sadness in that song! But the truth is, my son, that all sadness is little when one sings of the Passion and death of the Lord” (Pedro Diaz Cassou, Pasionaria Murciana: La Cuaresma y Semana Santa en Murcia, Madrid, Fortanet, 1897, pp. 69-71).
May all of us find the silence and stillness we need to enter fully into the contemplation of what Christ suffered for us this Holy Week, and always.