Today there are no processions, it's a Sabbath day of rest for all involved in. For the Municipality it's business as usual, with the streets to tidy up, seating to be removed and roads to re-open. There are cruise ships in port and hundreds of thousands of visitors out and about wanting to go shopping and enjoy eating out.
For us it was a quiet day of recovery too, with just an Easter sermon to write and a paseo along the beach promenade. I had intended to go and witness the kindling and blessing of the Easter light at the Paschal Vigil, either in the Cathedral or the barrio church of San Gabriel, as nothing was planned for St George's. I was too tired however for a sortie at eleven o'clock at night, even if I only stayed for half an hour, so I prayed where I was instead.
It's been a vivid and often intense week of encounters and impressions left by seeing the many fine artistic depictions of Christ's Passion, and the crowds of local people watching them pass through their own barrios. Some of the trona subjects are unique, others are repeats, though never identical. Given the procession scheduling and one's own positioning in relation to their passage, there's little chronological order to the experience, certainly earlier in the week. This doesn't matter, however, any more than the sequencing of shots or even whole scenes in a movie, play or a novel matters, if the story is being told from different perspectives or includes flashbacks.
It helps to understand and be well acquainted with the whole story, to be able to see the week as a whole. Witnessing it all once or twice in a lifetime by a visitor with no background knowledge must be a puzzling experience. For those who witness these processions year in year out, with or without the support of the church's teaching, there's a element of familiarity and perhaps personal links to cofradia members, which may bring understanding, though not necessarily.
Knowing the whole story of the Passion and what leads up to it provides a frame of reference for recognising its visual representation, and in a rapidly secularising western Europe, including Spain, ignorance is growing, despite us living in the Information Age. There's still so much to be done to make the story of Jesus properly known to people in our era, so they can make their own informed judgement about who he is for us today.
It helps to understand and be well acquainted with the whole story, to be able to see the week as a whole. Witnessing it all once or twice in a lifetime by a visitor with no background knowledge must be a puzzling experience. For those who witness these processions year in year out, with or without the support of the church's teaching, there's a element of familiarity and perhaps personal links to cofradia members, which may bring understanding, though not necessarily.
Knowing the whole story of the Passion and what leads up to it provides a frame of reference for recognising its visual representation, and in a rapidly secularising western Europe, including Spain, ignorance is growing, despite us living in the Information Age. There's still so much to be done to make the story of Jesus properly known to people in our era, so they can make their own informed judgement about who he is for us today.
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