El Rio Debajo del Rio

My grandmother, Katerin, used to talk back to the priest on TV. She had an entire litany: Don’t tell me to be like Blessed Mother if you don’t really mean it all the way down to your bones, Father. Blessed Mother didn’t let anyone tell her what to do, except God. So, unless you’re God, don’t be trying to tell us what to do all the time. I just got a big phone call from heaven: God says there’s a big difference between really being God, and just thinking you are.”

They tried to stop her at the border
No visa for her kind, you know...
undocumented, some were certain.
Border guards, La migra, didn’t like the looks of
her. No one cared that
her many, many relatives were waiting for her
back home in Santa Fe USA, and
in surrounding little villages with names like
La Cienega, over near Chupadero, and Española.

In our immigrant family, there were many Stations of the Cross, depending on resonant circumstances -- fleeing from war, or surviving travails post-war, finding their ways through the refugee camps, making their way into a culture not at war, but with daily opprobrium toward immigrants.

Mother Africa: for hundreds of years she's groaned under humans who have harmed her by looting her treasures, setting enmity between peoples, and by forcing stones atop her greatest minds and hearts so they could not grow into giants.

But, also I sense from knowing many souls who were born into the earth there, that in Mother Africa is rooted the mysterious Heart of the World, a Heart of Humanity that ever beats strong no matter what, and that is oddly ever vulnerable ... yet ever invincible ... ever wounded ... yet ever covered with flowers of acacia ... the honey of which flows like deep amber sweetwater.

A story is not something we tell. A story is a living being that shows up in answer to our questions about the mysteries of life ... Often enough, a story comes forward on its own, having traveled a long distance to be with us, often hoping to remember us back into some layer of the mysterium, the parts that most nourish our souls ... and the souls of others.
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In my Latino heritage, the following story is one spun together during a time with La señora Maria Elena, a member of my spirit family -- she, a muñecadora, a marionette maker, who lived in a fronterizo, border village near Nogales long ago.

When I was a child, after we got a new priest at the immigrant Hungarian church, my grandmother Katerin started making the ashes for Ash Wednesday by herself. She said the new priest was impatient, and didn't burn the ashes well enough at high enough flame so his ashes only made a faint mark on foreheads on Ash Wednesday.

That's how I learned to walk around happily with my grandmother's homemade palm frond ashes making a dark black cross on my forehead... sort of like a miner's headlight beaming to the world...

right there on the forehead, all of us on that high holy day signaling each other, 'Yes we are together on a pilgrimage of remembering... remembering life's median which is not cruelty, nor ignorance, but wisdom. Shed everything that is not wisdom. Shed everything that is not well needed.

The other side of the family too, during La cuaresma, Lent, would tell whomever asked, that Cuaresma was a time of penitence for life wrongly lived, a time of fasting to mortify the body, and a time of doing good... that last part, actually should come first, but too often it was not emphasized and seemed an almost "nice but not necessary."

Watching and attempting to understand all the Vatican's decisions over all these years, is like reading a Gothic novel with every third page torn out.

Old family people spoke sadly and in whispers about the tale of the Erl King ... he who hides in dark thickets, seeks out the vulnerable, childlike heart. The Erl King twists the child-heart into a blinded thing, addling the innocent mind, vampirizing the child's dancing spirit...

Since time out of mind,
dark forces rise up to kill
The Light of the World.

Part One, The Spirit that will not die:

We Latinos are of an ancient culture which barely survived the bloody holocaust unleashed by Conquistadores. We know by heart this fact of the murderous dark being ever against the transforming light.