MARY MAGDALENE PRAY FOR US
YESTERDAY, THE MAGDALENE
Where I live, there was a church of refuge, reclining on the lap of the mountains and under the protection of Olympus. The heights of Mount Pascual. The hill of Santana and the alleys that connect Faedo to the main road.
At dusk, at high tide, the seagulls were singing the psalm "Phallax est gratia et vana est pulchritudo," and amid the murmur of the waves, I thought I heard this warning from Ecclesiastes, warning the ages that all things pass: beauty and ugliness, health and sickness, vainglory and anonymity.
The clouds outlined the beautiful hair of Mary Magdalene in the sky, and the dew of the Asturian afternoon shed tears of repentance at the feet of the Savior at that funeral banquet in the house of Lazarus.
Judas of the purse didn't think it was right to spill an alabaster jar because it was a lot of money: "We could have saved that money to give to the poor." And Christ said:
"You will always have the poor with you. You will not have me."
She, the public woman, was anointing the Lord for the tomb.
I have always been moved by this passage from the New Testament: Erat mulier peccatrix. There was a sinful woman, a pilungi.
But through her tears, she would become one of the holy women at the foot of the cross, the first to announce the resurrection to the apostles in the Upper Room, after approaching the empty tomb. She is not here.
─Resurrexit sicut dixit
She was perhaps one of the great saints, one of the greatest for the Latin Church, the most venerated in the Middle Ages. Patron of the Jacobean Way, invoked to cure syphilis and all kinds of illnesses caused by rough handling.
Altars were dedicated to her everywhere in Europe, and this sacred altar in a heavenly setting was one of them. A 12th-century asylum church, or perhaps earlier, to welcome lost travelers or sick people who came to the Luiñas lazaretto.
George Barrow, on his trip to Asturias, tells us that one had to cross from Rondiella to Magdalena by longboat, and here, next to the hermitage, the boatman who acted as sacristan and pontooner must have lived.
A few years ago, I, a sinner, used to go down to commend myself to the holy peccatrix and to hear mass in this village-style church, very small as Visigothic churches were, but which included a chestnut-wood gallery and a humble sacristy. It has now been execrated (there's no priest) and sold to the neighbor in the adjoining house. The mysterious gaze of a yew tree looms over the walls, guarding an orchard with fruit trees.
The names of Manolo Mariño and his son Santiago, Nélida, Mario the clog-maker, Benito the saddler at Reyayo, and his son Moisés, who just died in the Canary Islands, Fredu from the tavern at Artedo, come to mind. They are my dead friends.
I hope Mary Magdalene has made a place for them in the Kingdom. I think about these things when summer has reached its zenith, the days are getting shorter, and summer is on its last legs. We feel the approaching mists of winter, covering the valley with clouds and silence, and there will be no bathers walking along the estuary.
