Today I took a taxi-trufi eight miles out of town to Quillacollo so I could visit the sanctuary of Our Lady of Urkupiña. A first for today: I managed to travel from one city to another on my own in another country, using only Spanish to get me there and back again. And I didn’t get lost! One small step for a brother, one giant leap for … oh, never mind the hyperbole. I’m proud of myself. A prefiguration of the week to come, when I go solo to La Paz on Monday and return on Wednesday.
Around two in the afternoon I got to Plaza Bolívar, one of the main squares in Quillacollo, a city that is growing rapidly and which prides itself as being the city of the great valley. Quillacollo is also a province of the department of Cochabamba, and Tunari Peak, which I climbed over a month ago, lies within this province. If I had more time I would have lingered around the plaza and stopped in an heladería, but I wanted to get going to the sanctuary of the Virgin, which is a mile or so to the south.
First I stopped in the church of San Ildefonso, where there is a candle chapel and a shrine for the Virgin. I will not relate the architecture of the church this time, but know that it is built in the same Spanish baroque style of the colonial period as the Catedral de San Sebastián in Cochabamba and filled with statues and figures of all of the same saints I described in my tour of the cathedral, Templo Santo Domingo, and my spiritual home, Templo San Francisco. As I was peregrinating through the church, a marriage ceremony was getting started. There was a band of mariachi musicians; now I’ve heard Mendelssohn’s “Wedding March” mariachi style. There was a red carpet down the nave (for real), white thrones for the bride and groom, and a videographer always three feet or less in front of the groom and mother, the ring bearers, the bride and father, and so on. Weddings tend to make me sad, and I felt a wave of melancholy come over me. What is more, I had read recently in Los Tiempos that 7 out every 10 marriages in Bolivia end in divorce, and I was thinking this would be one of them. That’s a morbid thought, I thought, and I decided to leave.
I walked over a mile, maybe a mile and a half, south along Calle Martín Cardenas, an empty, dusty street, past open or closed dry goods stores and mechanic shops and industrial lots and sleeping dogs until I came to Rio Rocha, itself dry and running at a low depth. It has rained seldom lately. The dust was blowing everywhere. The dust was the most animated element as I walked down that lonely road, feeling like I had found the world’s end. I came to the hill called El Calvario where the apparition of the Virgin happened, and to the shrine that now stands there. There were almost no other visitors at the time I was there this afternoon—I counted three—which made it hard to imagine the hundreds of thousands of pilgrims who come to this hill every year around the solemnity of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary. I will be leaving Bolivia on Aug. 10, so I will be missing the momentum of Aug. 14-16, when the festival for Our Lady of Urkupiña reaches its peak. Anyhow, I much preferred it this way, making my pilgrimage in peace and quiet on a sunny and breezy Saturday afternoon, almost alone.
Two bridges cross the Rio Rocha and bring you to the foot of El Calvario, both a vehicular bridge and a pedestrian bridge. I walked over the pedestrian bridge. El Calvario is not a very high hill; in less than ten minutes I had walked up the terraced landscape. And I beheld a modest shrine chapel, with a stone sanctuary, a gable roof, and pillars of painted or glazed terra cotta, maybe, in the form of the palm trees of Bolivia. Behind and above the shrine is a stone wall encircling the area where the apparition is said to have happened. Several signs remind you not to enter that recess, which is landscaped within and contains statues of a herder girl and her sheep and the Virgin herself. Other signs tell you not to deposit rocks at the wall; apparently pilgrims take rocks from the hill, make a vow to the Virgin, then return the rocks a year later. Click here for more folklore about the festival. Anyway, I walked all around the perimeter of the recess, following the stone wall up and around to the plateau of the hill. Above the recreation of the apparition I found ash piles with dung patties and play money and paper ribbons and other burnt-out remains from many mesas. The k’oa and other Andean religious rituals still go on here. This hill is sacred, and not only for Christians. As you look from the heights of El Calvario north, you can see the much greater peaks of Cordillera Central, and you can understand why this is a holy hill. Oh, how you want just to stop, to drop everything and gaze. Stay long enough, and your soul will begin to see what the senses cannot apprehend.
Ah, but I was feeling pressed for time. So I wound my way around and down to the shrine, where I recited a rosary. I decided not to bring my beads, using my fingers instead to count each decade of Hail Marys while recounting the joyful mysteries (Annunciation, Visitation, Nativity, Presentation, Finding of Jesus in the Temple). I was also thinking of Jesus’ question to the Twelve after his Bread of Life discourse led many followers to leave him: “Do you also want to leave?” (John 6:67). Those of you who have been following the blog lately know I have been wrestling with God while clinging fiercely to Jesus. I have wanted to turn my back on God for being unclear with the signs and wonders I have seen, but I know that I cannot separate Jesus and God if I believe Jesus is the Messiah and the Christ who God has raised from death. So I was pleading in my prayer of the rosary not to leave, to stay with Jesus and to be reconciled to God. Where Mary fits into this is like this: she stayed with her son and she remained through all the mysteries of his unusual life. And in doing so she was reconciled to the mysterious, inscrutable ways of God in spite of the suffering she confronted. As I prayed I felt not so much the blessing of God’s presence but the blessing of absence, as God has given me room to ponder what has happened, what is going on, and what may come in my spiritual journey of faith.
One more anecdote before I conclude this long post. Several yards to the east of the shrine is a candle chapel, like the one at San Ildefonso. It is a quatrefoil with a fountain in the middle (it was dry, alas). Basically, you have a large stone table on which pilgrims leave their votive candles. There are several women and men selling candles of various colors and lengths at the foot of the hill. I stopped in the candle chapel just before I started my rosary. It was breezy, and I noticed that most of the taller candles had been extinguished, although the shorter ones were still burning. I saw two tall tapers, white with two purple bands like ribbons on each one. I took them and lit them and stood them in another place on the stone table, closer to the still-lit candles, away from the breeze. Then I went to say the rosary, which took a half hour or so. Before leaving El Calvario I returned to the candle chapel to check up on those candles. They were still burning, and they had fused together. The melting wax dripped down and solidified to hold the candlesticks in place. Somehow, I took that as a very good sign.
Down the hill and back up the empty, dusty road I went, alone but not separate.
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