My Favorite Video From Semana Santa, 2019

I’ve posted this before, (twice) and don’t mean to impose but no matter how many times I watch it, it never seems more plausible.

I captured it in late March, 2019, the first time I visited my son in Granada, when he had suffered a very serious leg fracture while rock climbing. I was in no way prepared for Semana Santa, it simply erupted all around when when I was merely going to the store. I stayed out for hours, shooting video and taking photos in a state of abject astonishment. I could not believe what I was seeing—I still have hundreds of photos and clips, but this one remains my favorite.

My son lived right next to La Catedral at the time, so I was able to shoot this from his balcony. It was apparently Palm Sunday.

Today I accepted the most life changing invitation of my life, to a living Church, a Russian Orthodox Church on the Upper East Side. It’s not Easter today, according to their calendar, and it is also not Palm Sunday.

I’m posting this, I guess, as a reminder that all around the world, people are still honoring their traditions, and we will not go quietly…into this:

The New Order of Barbarians—Dr. Richard Day.

Or this.

(Nobody is “harassing” trans gender children. But we too would like to be accepted as we are, and allowed to love who we love. Even if we aren’t trans, that is to say, singled out by Joe Biden for special treatment and admiration.)

This clip represents but a few moments of an entire week during which the entire city is flooded with these processions, thousands of people, these mysterious Catholic Spanish traditions that defy all of modernity’s reductionist attacks, they seem only to grow more committed, never petering out.

And even if you’re not at all interested in any of this as a religious expression, the music alone is so absolutely otherworldly, considering this world as “they” would like it to be.

I don’t know how to describe this music, nor what era or even century it came out of, what it means, or why I’ve never heard anything remotely like it.

What is it?

Spanish people are not astonished by it, it’s just their culture. But I am astonished by it.

This Cathedral finally became “mine” in the last weeks I was in Granada before I came back to New York (temporarily) in that I happened upon Eucharistic Adoration in a chapel in the back, only because Teresa (Pélerine) had worked so hard to explain what this was and what to look for.

Catholic, Muslim, Orthodox Jewish, doesn’t matter—I am always fascinated in the presence of religious mass expression, and growing weary of always apologizing for it (this fascination.)

Not to you.

I find it very beautiful. And imagine—not an iota of corporate advertising.

My son told me tonight that it rained all week. He knew I was sad to not be there for Semana Santa. “You picked a good year to miss it,” he said, trying to make me feel better. “It rained so hard some of the processions were canceled,” he said. That made me sad for the procession-ists. They must practice for weeks or months. But I had a life-changing Easter weekend, right here in New York.

I’m proud of us all, and excited about the days ahead.