Beauty You Don't Deserve

When I was a teenager, I was lucky enough to go to Spain on a language immersion. I went in the late winter/early spring and while I was there, Semana Santa happened. Coming from an area where churches were buildings that I passed, and every now and then was dragged into, I had never been exposed to such a religious experience.

Semana Santa is the Holy Week that precedes Easter. Every night of Semana Santa there are processions which initially my teenage brain coded as parades, but parade is too chaotic of a term. Procession feels more somber. More serious. More accurate. The Semana Santa participants walk barefooted and carry heavy crosses or floats, performing physical penance for Christ. There are also the Nazarenos, which for an American teenager, was a little startling.

Google Nazarenos. They wear outfits much like the KKK. Although, depending on the Nazereno brotherhood, they have hoods of specific colors. Nazarenos walk in the Semana Santa processions, also as penance. Nazarenos have been around way longer than the KKK and while maybe the KKK stole their outfit design from the Nazarenos, as a teenager with a middling grasp on Spanish, showing up for a not-a-parade, and suddenly seeing a bunch of dudes gliding silently down the street in pointed mask hoods, well, you can imagine I was a little freaked out.

But I eventually sorta figured out what was going on. We went to procession after procession, and frankly, while I wasn't inclined to convert, I found Semana Santa very beautiful and moving.

One evening, I was standing on a narrow cobble street when a group of Nazarenos with red hoods, white gloves, and red candles, flowed past me. One of the Nazarenos stopped to adjust his hood. When he did, someone dropped a box of rose petals from a rooftop. The Nazareno put his white gloved hand to his mask eye holes, and I saw that red wax and dripped on his gloves and stained them red. And with his hand positioned just so, it looked like he was crying blood. With rose petals drifting gently through the air, the air pungent with incense, the sun well below the horizon, I cursed myself for not having a camera.

This was one of the most eerie, beautiful, haunting things I'd seen. Time slowed. My brain skipped, wishing, wishing, I had my camera, and then my brain did something cool. It made peace with the fact I couldn't capture the image and instead, it burned it into my memory banks. And now, over 20 years later, when I think on that moment, I can smell the incense. See the wax positioned just so, to look like tears of blood. The rose petals are suspended in my mind indefinitely. I can still see the black-haired girl on the rooftop, a cardboard box in her hands, tipped so the petals tumbled out. I only remember that Nazareno and I on the street, even though I know I was standing in a throng of people.

And recently, I was driving through the Utah desert when a monsoon swooped in. To my right, brilliant blue skies with puffy clouds. To my left, purple clouds so dark they were almost black, swaddled the crumbling desert cliffs. Rays of golden light light up the cliffs, making them brilliant against the storm. Lightning split the sky. I drove under a vibrant double rainbow for miles.

It was so, so, so beautiful I felt I was in an oil painting. I felt timeless, despite the random orange cones scattered across the blacktop. I felt I did not deserve to see such beauty. I tried to take a photo of it. It looks nothing like what I experienced.

And I thought back to that Nazareno, the Nazareno that in my memory, was only there for me to see. Had I a camera, the photo would have been terrible. How lucky I was in that moment to not have a camera. It was the most intentional memory I made in that liminal time.

And while I drove through that monsoon, I couldn't help but think how beautiful the wind, and the dirt, and the water, and the sky were. And how lucky I was to get to see it. My photo is crap, but my memory is not.