La Concepcion de Maria!
*Who causes so much joy? Mary's Concepcion!
(This sounds a lot catchier in Spanish)
Purisima Swag
Purisima is a holiday that is unique to Nicaragua, a 9 day celebration of
Mary the mother of God. It's a time of great joy but also a time to ask Mary,
who I think is the official patron saint of Nicaragua, to pray on their behalf. I should be clear on this- Catholics around
the world celebrate the Feast of the Immaculate Concepcion of Mary as a
"Holy Day of Obligation"- meaning you have to go to church even if
it's not Sunday, but to my knowledge, Nicaragua is the only country that goes
quite so all out. Purisima is sort of a cross between St. Nicholas Day and
Christmas and Halloween with a giant serving of Mary on top. I will explain
what I mean by this shortly.
At least the way it's celebrated in my town, Purisma festivities start 9
days before December 8th, the actual feast day (a novena of masses). The
celebrations start with 4 am fireworks and bell ringing, followed by 5 am mass.
After mass, the parishoners process through the streets with a statue of Mary
to a different sector of the town every day. The people living on that street
are responsible for providing breakfast foods, such as nacatamales or bread and
coffee to the adults, while the kids run to one house to get goodie bags filled
with sweets, oranges, sugar cane and chicha, a bubble gum pink sweetened
corn drink. It's a quite a chaotic, but entirely joyous melee.
The same thing goes on in the afternoons- there's another small procession and
prayer session followed by more treat giving (this is why I made Halloween
comparisons). It's so beautiful to see neighbors working together and chipping
in to provide those with even fewer economic means with holiday treats. And the
scale in which all this is done is quite impressive. The other day, I watched a
member of my extended host family as she cooked a gigantic, and I mean
enormous, vat of chicha over a fire. It probably yielded at least a
hundred baggies! Another cultural thing: most refrescos, fruit juices,
are served in small plastic bags. To drink them, you rip off one corner and
squeeze the contents upwards into your mouth.
While Purisima is a time of festivity for many in Nicaragua, it's also
turning into a time of great tension as Nicaragua's religious demographics
change. For example, there are giant Purisima altars all along one of the main
streets in Managua. Evangelical groups have turned out to protest these
installations, on the charge that the statues of Mary are "idolatry"
which is against the Bible's teachings.
Rio San Juan, which only had one Catholic priest for a vast region of the
country during the war years, experienced a big growth of evangelical churches
that has carried over to the present day. I was chatting with the local priest
the other morning, and he told me that in most of the communities he ministers
to there is peaceful coexistence, a mutual respect despite the distrust between
the different Christian sects. However, one of the communities has a much
smaller Catholic presence, and their Purisima procession was booed at and hit
with small stones.
It makes me sad to hear such stories given how similar on a fundamental
level all the Christian religions are: they hold the same book to be the basis
of their religion for crying out loud! They have the same figures and tell most
of the same stories. They call God by the same name! If you can't get along
with that much in common, is there any hope for the so- called civilizational
clashes?** I have an especially hard time fathoming this kind of tension, given
that I take a super universalist view to religion (same being up there, many
different paths) and having grown up on the East Coast of the US, where
religion is a private affair, but where there is generally a lot of respect and
collaboration between different religious groups at the local level. The guess
the most I can hope for is that sharing this perspective could somehow be
constructive.
** I think Sam Huntington's clash of civilizations thesis is complete crap,
but I needed a pop social science term here...
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