A Dream and a Resolution for the New Year

The week before Christmas I visited the Yucatan town of Merida, Mexico, and its surroundings. Inspired, I include here now, mostly in pictures, my dream for a new Church for a new year.

This is the cathedral in the main plaza in Merida regaled in Christmas light. Flowers, leaves, tendrils of growth, both dazzling and gentle colors, a feminine projection of what Church could be: the bearer of life and beauty and sacred nurturing presence even in the midst of great sorrow.

Here is the altar of the cathedral in Campeche, Mexico. Notice the feminine influence everywhere, in the heralding angels announcing birth and celebrating life and promise and possibility. Notice the central figure, Our Lady of Guadalupe, who made her loving, hope-filled presence known only to a humble peasant who, when he tried to relate her news to the bishop, found himself not believed and dismissed because, well, he was too lowly, he was too humble, to carry such a message. The legend says Mary sent him back to the bishop with roses wrapped in a cloth on which her face appeared. The bishop then believed but only because he saw proof; no one so reduced in his eyes could tell him anything. We know that story only too well.

Notice also the crucified Christ we are so used to seeing behind altars is reduced in size and high above the other figures. We need that presence and accompaniment through suffering and that touchstone to its meaning in our lives, but mostly, and more importantly as the fully adorned altar seems to say, we need to be more enthralled by life itself ever renewed, ever renewing.

In that same Church in Campeche was a life-sized crèche with all the predictable figures, including the empty manger waiting for the Star attraction to be placed there. Shepherds tended sheep in a pen on one side of the scene and the yard pictured above balanced the two displays. My heart leapt with joy to see the woman and the animals as part of a scene usually allowing Mary as the only feminine presence. She is the woman at the well; she is Mary and Martha and Mary Magdalene. She is nurturer, life-giver, life-affirmer. She is us. And she is beautifully, blessedly included, fitting in and accenting all the Marys above and surrounding her.  

This final image is of the interior of the Merida Cathedral you saw as the first picture in this piece. It is Christmas evening Mass. This last picture seemed to me a metaphor for our Church today, lofty, but mostly empty. Even on Christmas, there are few attendees. The blue lighting is gorgeous and calming but somehow melancholy, too. The sorrowful, suffering Christ is once again in the forefront, perhaps appropriate for the sorrowful, suffering world in which we live, but it is Christmas. There are other possibilities inherent in its messages and, still and always, an abundance of hope.

And so my resolution for this new year: To be aware of the depth of the world’s sorrow, to engage in any way in whatever resources, including those of the Church, which mitigate it, and, at the same time, participate practically, reasonably, rigorously, and relentlessly in all the renewals – scientific, secular, sacred, aesthetic – that sustain and transform us all.

I had left Merida the day before Christmas, and so I received this last picture from someone who was still there the next day. I know if I had also been there, I would have looked, admired and relished the beauty of this interior, and then I would have run back outside to revel in what something fresh and creative, extravagant, and quite wonderful looked like projected onto our Church – and, in this new year, perhaps invited inside.