Spain 2025

First trip to Europe in seven years complete! Over eleven days, putting down anchors in Ansó in the far west Pyrenees, Zaragoza and Sant Cugat in the outskirts of Barcelona, we saw a lot. My already ambitious plan was to cross paths at least with legacies Roman and Islamic, romanesque and gothic, baroque and modernismo, but we got even more - starting with neolithic dolmens and ending with a still-growing sci-fi cathedral. And a plan for high mountains and plains grew to include several waves of Pyrenees, Montserrat and a short trip to seaside Sitges, too! 

What impressed itself on me also was that no spot (with the possible exception of the Castillo de Loarre) belonged to just one era. Why should it? Even as empires and their dominant religions change, most people stay, useful and powerful sites remain useful and powerful, and many building materials lend themselves to reuse. But of course the story is more complicated than this irenic description would suggest.

Take Zaragoza, which today celebrates its "four cultures" - Iberian, Roman, Muslim and Christian. These exquisite arches are part of the 11th century core of one of its marvels, the Aljaferia, highlight of the UNESCO World Heritage Mudejar Architecture of Aragon, reconstructed after half a millennium's absence. These "cultures," while doubtless at every point more cosmopolitan than cultural nationalists today can imagine, really name chronological eras, each of which coopts or effaces its predecessors in its story.

Zaragoza's lovely cathedral La Seo sits on the site of the city's main mosque, which in turn replaced the central temple of the Roman city of Caesaraugusta - which surely built on something yet older. Today's it's presented as an almost teleological sequence. The "mudejar" brickwork of part of the cathedral, constructed by Muslim artists who stayed (what the 19th century neologism mudejar means) when the Christian era began, makes it seem an almost friendly transition. But its prominent chapel for Saint James, patron saint of the Reconquista, is framed by huge 17th century statues of Moorish-looking prisoners writhing in chains. 

None of this is new, or should be surprising. What I needed to return to Europe to remember is that, for all the violence of historical conflict and usurpation, there is a sense of historical depth in which the older constellations remain in some obscure way present, whether acknowledged or not. Call it karma, or just history? To me the four huge towers at the corners of Zaragoza's enormous baroque Basilica de Nuestra Señora del Pilar (the towers constructed only in the last century or so) make it look mosque-like, though that was certainly nobody's intention. This would be a pleasing irony for a place which, as the site where Jesus' mother Mary is said to have appeared to the apostle James in 40 CE, has asserted Christianity's special claim to Spain from before there even was an Islam - or Christianity!

Reflecting on it now, this all seems interesting but unsurprising. I tell students stories all the time about the enduring effects of historical and cultural context and about the constructedness of historical narratives pretending to transcend this messiness. Surprising is the touristic naivete of which it made me aware. How could I have thought one could dip into distinct centuries in distinct places? Any old cathedral presents you with the cohabitation of many centuries at once! Yet it took me a while to get over irritation that each of the places we visited had been built and rebuilt multiple times, to accept and enjoy that there was never one authentic form for any of these significant places.

This holds even for the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, which is celebrated as the work of Antoni Gaudí but is less and more than that. Gaudí took over a project already underway (now the crypt) and developed a concept for the new edifice which went through several iterations during the decades he devoted to it. But he knew cathedrals take a long time, and that only part of it could be completed in his lifetime. (The current plan is to complete the work by next year, the centennial of Gaudí's death.) Would he have approved of the expressionist sculptures Josep Maria Subirachs - working with Gaudí's original sketches - carved for the Passion Gate in the 1990s? Or Joan Vila Grau's luminous tapestries of stained glass, even more recent? I'm pretty sure he'd be psyched that there's a 3-D printer in use in the workshop, helping make the remaining towers even more diaphanous.

I wonder what will happen once the construction finishes, fifty or one or two hundred years after that. As a living thing, Gaudí wouldn't want his cathedral to be preserved in amber, would he? The karmic residues of distant and half-forgotten pasts, encountered in the built environment all around, make the future here a more complicated and less foreign prospect than it seems in the ahistorical presentism of the "new" world.

Sacred grove

The Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, its nave completed since my first visit 22 years ago, conveys the excitement the first gothic cathedrals must have evoked when they were built: structures so tall and light-filled that the only analog was not other work of human hands but a forest. (I note with satisfaction also that Gaudí's treelike columns look pollarded!) If you resist the symmetry, the skylight-spangled ceiling's forest-like too!

Taste and see

Care for a caramel? These are souvenirs of the Basilica of Nuestra Señora del Pilar in Zaragoza, the wrappers depicting the signs left by the Virgin Mary on her miraculous visit to a discouraged Saint James here in AD 40 - before her own Assumption! The shape you see is a small statue of Mary holding the infant Jesus atop a stone pillar, the pillar wrapped in bronze and silver and, since the 16th century, adorned with a conical manto (mantle), the statue radiating a golden crown. (There's a little window on the far side of the radiant baroque chapel below where the 

devout can kneel and kiss a small patch of the pillar.) Medieval Catholics told how the power duo of Mary and James consecrated Spain as of special significance right from the start. Today Mary of the Pillar is also the patron saint of Hispanidad - the whole Spanish-speaking world. The end of the long square in front of her basilica has since 1991 boasted an enormous fountain like a melting glacier meant to represent Latin America from the Yucatan down, though its shape is discernible only from the air, and even then doesn't really make a lot of sense (except as an extreme representation of terra nullius!). It's a lot to suck on.

Alpine delight

Flower meadows beneath the high peaks of the Pyrenees take me back to summer hikes in the Alps as a child. Even found one ripe raspberry!

Beyond words

Vertiginous experience: a neolithic dolmen at Aguas Tuertas

Folk ways

I love when things line up in unplanned ways. Two great alignments today, which started in the museum of traditional costumes of Ansó, the village in the Pirineo Aragonés where we're staying. The dress for special occasions was the most interesting (the pic above shows stages from children's baptism - the one suspended in the air - through first communion, gender undifferentiated still at confirmation) but I was glad we paid attention also to work clothes, amazed at the stiff leather mocassins the men tied around thick woolen socks to work the fields, forests and pastures, and the spindles women used working wool. 

One alignment came at dinner, when our local wine - a Pyrennean kind called Somantana - turned out to be named after those very worker's shoes. Vintner Otto Bestué chose this name for one of his better wines, the label explains, because the workers in the vineyards his family has worked since the 17th century used to shake their sandals at the end of a work day to get the soil off. To them perhaps dirt but to him every grain of this land is precious! (The wine was delicious.)

The other alignment was more unexpected. At San Juan de la Peña, an ancient monastery built into a huge cliff of fist-sized conglomerate stone, we marveled at the (reconstructed) free-standing 12th century cloister. When the monks left this monastery for a big new one on the top of the hill after a fire in the 17th century, locals made off with many of the stones of the old monastery but not the capitals, which survive.

Among the motifs, a scene of Adam and Eve after the fall, Adam tilling the soil with two oxen and Eve making wool yarn with a spindle!

Fire and ice

A great discovery: cafe con hielo (or in Catalan: cafè amb gel)

Road trip

We've made our way from the Barcelona outskirts to the Pyrenees!

Popping a wheelie

My MUJI wheeled suitcase is going on holiday! After an unexpected five continuous weeks holding the fort for me (in Del Mar, Santa Barbara, Del Mar again and then at CCD) we're going to Spain!

Intensive

I wasn't able to solve the mystery of the Paul of the Cross stained glass windows - the manager told me they had been brought over at some point from some other Passionist campus, he thought maybe in New Jersey but wasn't sure. (I guess nobody else has ever asked.) But I do have a pretty good idea of what CCD (the College for Congregational Development) is, now that I've completed the first half of its curriculum! 

We're Episcopalians, but over the course of five intense days I encountered a little of the self-mortification celebrated by Catholics in images like this scourge named AMOR, from one of the mystery windows. This was in part because this intensive really was intense - a schedule from 7:30 to 7:30 each day, with little in the way of breaks. Moving back and forth between plenary and group settings hurrying through complex material, peppered with many moments of "talk to two people near you about X (always something personal) for three minutes," we were all overwhelmed. 

But some of us were more overwhelmed than others, or overwhelmed in different ways: this was in fact one of the things we learned. Each of us had to take two "typology" tests, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) and the Intercultural Conflict Style Inventory (ICS). While presented with caveats ("this is just one typology," "each of us is all the things, some just take more effort"), we were encouraged publicly to identify with the indicated type - and so all our subsequent interactions were inflected by awareness of the dynamics of differences in orientation. 

For what it's worth, these tests suggested I'm sort of an "introvert" and a little less gung-ho about "direct" and "emotionally expressive" speech than many other participants.

For some with similar sensibilities, the garrulous form of this intensive was bruising. Constant talking with many interlocutors is draining rather than energizing, and loads of new information without quiet time for processing overwhelming. Some of my fellow participants were clearly suffering. 

My overwhelm peaked on Wednesday after an initially giddy pleasure at just how much was going on. I felt I was at capacity, wasn't taking much more in, and then a poorly designed group activity for which I was the designated facilitator - its already too-short time cut further by the preceding plenary's going overtime - really stressed me out (though my groupmates said they didn't notice!). Thursday was better, in part because the organizers, having learned in a feedback session that not everyone enjoyed the speed-dating tempo, ventilated the agenda a little. (There was even ten minutes set aside for quietly writing down your thoughts!) And today was just coasting... whee!

Having made it through, I am grateful at all we endeavored and grateful to have learned in practice what I've long known in theory: that there are many learning styles. The overwhelm contributed to the sense of achievement at the end, and learning why I was particularly exhausted by it useful self-knowledge... along with the recognition that others were thrilling to what we found tiring. I'll be more attentive to these issues in my teaching - as well, surely, as interactions at church.

As for the content - what did we (start to) learn? The joys and stresses and overwhelm were all part of it. How do organizations - in this case churches - remain "faithful, healthy and effective" in often overwhelming conditions? 

At right is the only of many flow-chart diagrams explicitly about religion. The rest were about how to build and maintain trust, how to gather data, how to manage and direct change, how to resolve conflict, etc. This curriculum, evidently new to all of us (laity and clergy, and not a few members of diocesan staffs, including three bishops!), strikes me as the sort of thing taught in business and management schools. The learning was through case study discussions, "learning through practice." But nothing was just theoretical. All of us were in this congregational-organization development space already, whether we knew it or not... and by the end of it, we all knew it.

The program winds up with a week next summer, but in the meantime the teams from various congregations are tasked with implementing a small-scale "intervention" employing one of the models we got to know. At the same time, conversations have started across congregations, and between congregational and diocesan communities, and will deepen in the shared language of CCD. I'm happy to be part of it. My tenure as warden at Holy Apostles ends in January; perhaps I'll find a place in some of the diocesan initiatives. All "types" got something to give!

The walls speak

This iteration of the College for Congregational Development is taking place in Thomas Berry Place, a retreat center on the campus of the Passionists in Jamaica, Queens. The place was renovated and named for the ecological mystic Berry in 2022, but the building is older, dating to the 1950s. A mural in the dining hall ambitiously represents the four sources of Berry's inspiration - indigenous knowledge, women, ancient traditions and science - but artistically it is less interesting than stained glass windows in the main hall where our plenary sessions take place. In deep colors glowing against brooding black when backlit by the light of the afternoon sun, their figures are bursting out of their frames into the brighter margins of distressed panes on either side, where various other symbols float (including a little demon impaled on a sword). Is the central figure Saint Paul of the Cross (1694-1775), founder of the Passionist Order? I'm hoping someone can tell me more about them.

The man who wasn't there

As the College for Congregational Development moved into its first full day, one of the trainers for the team I'm on was called away. The rector at Christ Church San Marcos in Tarrytown, he learned that an ICE operation was taking place in front of his church, a sanctuary church.

For the rest of the day, all our thoughts were with him and his community - and all our communities in this time of peril.

He was able to rejoin us at the retreat center in Queens by the time of Evening Prayer. He assured us that everyone in his community was safe and accounted for, but deeply shaken. And all is not well. 

What happened, according to a local news source:  

un­masked agents hand­cuffed an oth­er­wise uniden­ti­fied male—pos­si­bly some­one seek­ing refuge at the church. “We were ad­vised,” wrote [Tarrytown Police John] Chief Bar­balet, that they did not have a ju­dicial war­rant. Who the in­di­vid­ual was, what his le­gal sta­tus was and where he was taken are all ques­tions left unan­swered, pend­ing a re­sponse from ICE’s me­dia in­for­ma­tion of­fice in Wash­ing­ton.  

Who is that man, "possibly seeking refuge in the church," snatched from the street in broad daylight? Where is he now? How can we go on without knowing? Our hearts are breaking. This is life in America today.

CD + OD

Next adventure! As part of a team from my church, I'm spending the next week at the Thomas Berry retreat center in Queens as a student in the intensive College for Congregational Development. (We all committed to going back for another week next summer.) A project of the Episcopal Church, CCD brings together the fields of congregational and organization development. I'll tell you more about both of them when I have a better grasp. For starters the 40 or so of us (mostly from the Diocese of New York, which is sponsoring this cycle) populated this iceberg with visible and invisible challenges to the vitality and sustainability of congregations "of all sizes, locations and conditions." Organization development, we were promised, will bring the hidden factors "above the water line." Icebergs beware!

SAN --> JFK

無人

As my California sojourn winds down, had a chance to visit the Huntington again today. In the exhibition hall of their lovely Suzhou-inspired Chinese garden, painter 王滿晟 Wang Mansheng has created an immersive set of landscapes to explore, ink on silk so fine you can see each from both sides. There are no human forms or structures in the 

paintings of "無人 Without Us"; instead we encounter the effect of human intervention in the shapes of other viewers - and the way the silks gently saw as human bodies move the air. It's a transporting experience. But Wang's imagining a "pristine" nature before and, potentially, after humanity seems as much American as Chinese.

Trajectories

Crest Canyon crossings

SDBG

Plants at play at San Diego Botanical Garden

16:9

How have I come this far without realizing I could easily change the image aspect of photos taken on my iPhone? Thanks, sis!

Extension

Consolation of the sea

Bicameral mayday

When the omnibus reconciliation bill that has somehow taken the place of a properly announced and debated budget (how did they manage to break that norm too?!) was passed by the House, I felt the end of American democracy was near. In the meantime the Senate parliamentarian has, I think, stripped away the effort to kneecap the judiciary, but the reckless Supreme Court majority has since filled in the gap. Republican Senators in smoke-filled rooms have only made the bill even more regressive on care of the needy, fossil fuels, the terrorization of immigrants and the redistribution of wealth - not to mention national debt. And what gave me the worst chills remains, and the President's decision to celebrate the day at Florida's own future CECOT confirms the reality of the threat: they're building concentration camps. And we pay.