Santa Vera Cruz

Today, an all-morning field trip for the Maryknoll language-learning community. It is the feast of Santa Vera Cruz, the Christian-indigenous celebration of the harvest and of fertility, of which I wrote last Wednesday. Tonight outside the church there will be a blessing of fuegos, the many little fires for each family mesa, upon which households make offerings of libations and figures of animals for continued prosperity of the land, the flocks, and the families themselves. This will be followed by coplas, songs for Pachamama, Sister Mother Earth. 

At quarter after eight, the students and teachers got on a bus to the parish of Santa Vera Cruz Tatala, arriving in time to wander around the impromptu open-air market that sprouted along the highway and the perimeter of the parish grounds. For sale: all sorts of baked goods, candles, dolls of infants, and most importantly, figurines of all kinds of livestock, including sows with little ones at every teat and cows crowned with tiaras, looking regal indeed. There were already a few fuegos burning on the parish grounds, some elderly women and men stoking their piles and adding dried dung from their cows, pigs, and rabbits. There will be many more makeshift pits on the grounds tonight. 

By and by we made our way to the church and attended the midmorning Mass concelebrated by several priests. The liturgy was conducted in Spanish and Quechua, with some fine guitar and percussion from the music ministers. The service concluded with some loud, rhythmic hymns of joy. Immediately after the Mass, our team got away to a gazebo for a quick snack of empanadas, pasteles, and jugo de durazno (peach juice). 

Then we returned to the grounds in front of the church and parish center. The people had erected a stage surrounded with flowers and images of abundant livestock as well as families with young children. At the center was a dais on which Christ, Señor de la Santa Vera Cruz, would be displayed for public veneration. A team of men removed this iconic image of Christ crucified from the church, and with the priests and faithful surrounding them, processed about 100 yards from the edge of the parish grounds to the platform. The procession paused every so often for a recitation of prayers, including an Our Father and Hail Mary every time. As the men carried the heavy cross, the crowd threw petals and—I kid you not—confetti over the crucifix. Confetti? I asked Profesora Vicky, why the confetti? She answered that it’s a crossover from indigenous customs. The people throw confetti on the ground to honor Pachamama and also the Blessed Virgin Mary, who has been equated with the goddesses of Andean folk religion. They are reverencing Christ in the same way because of his gift of fecundity to their fields and flocks and families in the form of Señor de la Santa Vera Cruz. Well, you learn something new every day. 

When Señor de la Santa Vera Cruz arrived at the platform, a mariachi band began to play as the crucifix was secured to the dais. We lingered a little longer, then made our way back to the bus and back to Maryknoll. 

One of our companions on the trip remarked how striking it is that the Christian and indigenous practices of faith coexist harmoniously here in Bolivia. We were mindful that the ancient Israelites struggled over issues of fidelity to the one God living and true as they settled the Promised Land, became prosperous, and accommodated their practices of faith to the Canaanite fertility cults. In the history we have received in Scripture, it is an either-or proposition: you’re with Yahweh or you’re with Baal, with all the consequences that follow from that choice. But Bolivians are more relaxed and do not experience the existential dilemma that troubled the Israelites, whose people never did integrate easily with those whose land they assumed or coexist peacefully with the neighbors over their (God-given) borders. 

What struck me was that while in the United States we pray for a greater respect for life, we do not make frequent or public petitions for an increase in life, for fecundity. The difference in emphasis seems minor but is in fact quite significant. I’ve heard petitions for a fruitful harvest; I’ve heard petitions for a generous rain to slake a drought-dried land; and I’ve seen blessings of food at Thanksgiving Masses. But I’ve never seen anything like this, such a thorough and intentional offering of thanks for gifts received from the land and from the womb, and a request for a continuation of the cycle of fertility. However it may look to other Christians, to these believers the celebration of Santa Vera Cruz is ultimately a thanksgiving for gifts received from the one God living and true, who condescends to accept, gladly, every expression of gratitude we can devise.