Friday in the Octave of Easter, April 25, 2025
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Penitentes
Jesus said to his friends, “Come, have breakfast.”
And none of the disciples dared to ask him, “Who are you?”
because they realized it was the Lord.
Jesus came over and took the bread and gave it to them,
and in like manner the fish.
In Bangladesh, 9 out of 10 citizens practice Islam. But as the Cultural Atlas reports, Christianity is a “small but notable religious group.” During Holy Week a group of Catholic high school students practiced some traditional penitential practices as they observed the 14 Stations of the Cross.
These young men and women offered their community and the rest of us a chance to see another kind of rainy day crucifixion, although without John Wayne as the centurion’s one line.
The pictures in this article capture the spiritual power of Good Friday, for the participants and those watching. A few years ago I read The Five Wounds by Kirsten Valdez Quade, about a young man with an excruciating family life but who found redemption by book’s end through his involvement with New Mexican penitentes. I guess I’ve always been fascinated from a distance by extreme practices of spiritual ascetism. That might be true too of Richard Bradford, who published Red Sky at Morning in 1968:
The Penitentes were a sort of outlaw branch of the Catholics who took everything very seriously, especially Good Friday. They’d pick a member of the church to play Jesus every year. He’d carry a cross while his friends all whipped him with rawhide and cactus and then they’d crucify him. In recent years they just tied him to a cross and left him all day in the sun. A hundred years ago they did the job right, with nails.
 
Charles F. Lummis (1859-1928); Crucifixion of the Penitentes; 1888; Albumen silver print; Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas; P1976.18.13
Life in the desert, for monks who sought to escape civilization and for those who are born there as well, lends itself to extreme experiences. Perhaps that’s why I keep going back to visit Taos, New Mexico. Brad Karelius, longtime philosophy professor and pastor, returns over and over to his beloved desert and admires the penitentes and their practices. Willa Cather, another author fascinated by spirituality in the desert, has Mrs. Kit Carson speak of the penitentes in her 1927 novel Death Comes for the Archbishop, as she talks with the new bishop about a mutual acquaintance, Trinidad Lucero:
Did you hear what happened to him at Abiquiu last year, in Passion Week? He tried to be like the Savior, and had himself crucified. Oh, not with nails! He was tied upon a cross with ropes, to hang there all night; they do that sometimes at Abiquiu, it is a very old-fashioned place. But he is so heavy that after he had hung there a few hours, the cross fell over with him, and he was very much humiliated. Then he had himself tied to a post and said he would bear as many stripes as our Savior—six thousand, as was revealed to St. Bridget. But before they had given him a hundred, he fainted. They scourged him with cactus whips, and his back was so poisoned that he was sick up there for a long while.
When asked whether he should try to put a stop to the extravagances of the Penitential Brotherhood …
… she smiled and shook her head. “I often say to my husband, I hope you will not try to do that. It would only set the people against you. The old people have need of their old customs; and the young ones will go with the times.”
Most of us move in the “young ones” crowd, but because of this we shy away from extreme, outrageous but deeply moving ways of worship. I am content to watch from a distance via the National Catholic Reporter and a few novels, along with some esoteric history from New Mexico. Regardless however, my own worship depends on a not-exactly-passive acceptance of suffering, because our movement from the Fall in Eden to the Rescue on Golgotha requires death, perhaps not of my body but certainly of my pride and ego.
Willa Cather convinces me this is not just for the archbishop, but for every one of us that is born from the heart of God. To get back there, biting a bullet is just the beginning.
At least we can be sure of this: absolute and total surrender will arrive as our greatest gift on the deathbed. But I cannot help but hope that I might find it, somehow, sooner.
The stone which the builders rejected
has become the cornerstone.
By the LORD has this been done;
it is wonderful in our eyes.
This is the day the LORD has made;
let us be glad and rejoice in it.
 (Acts 4, Psalm 118, John 21)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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