Fwd: GOCAMINO Digest - 25 Jul 2003 to 27 Jul 2003 (#2003-192)

[Donald Schell]

Rosina,

Thanks for gathering so much of what is reported about St. James, and
may I offer a brief response to this part -

 >. . .July 25th as the day when the Apostle James, the elder, was
beheaded.
 >If this is the significance of the date it would seem paradoxical to
call it a "feast" day.

In the beginning, saints on church calendars were most often martyrs,
and the local community (who had known them) would gather at the
saint's grave on the anniversary of the martyrdom to celebrate a
Eucharist with the grave (outdoors or in the catacombs) as an altar.
Though the word is an anachronism, these celebrations often included a
picnic, a celebratory shared meal that continued the martyr's mass.
 From that beginning most saints on church calendars (Roman Catholic,
Eastern Orthodox, and Anglican) are commemorated on the day of the
saint's death (whether a martyr or not).  The ancient celebrations were
sometimes referred to as 'birthday' celebrations with the implication
that a martyr's death was a birth into glory and the embrace of God and
all the saints.

Of course there are exceptions.  Christmas (which is not as old a
celebration as Good Friday/Easter) sets a pattern.  The birth of John
the Baptist is an ancient commemoration, probably patterned on the
innovation of celebrating Christmas.  Interest recent scholarship has
identified March 25th (the feast of the Annunciation) as also older
than Christmas and finds the preachers and all fixing on that date for
the Gabriel coming to Mary with his 'Hail Mary,' and her 'Be it unto me
according to your word,' because March 25th was (as they calculated it)
the date of Good Friday in 33 a.d.  So even there, the primary
sensibility was the work of God in a holy dying.  The date of Christmas
by that scholarship gets fixed nine months later which explains why it
actually doesn't fall on the Winter solstice.

One other common exception is a saint's day the commemorates the
transfer of relics to a new shrine.  Again, this makes sense as a local
celebration.  I don't know if the story of the re-finding of James's
bones, burying them suitably and beginning the Cathedral to mark the
place is attached to another Santiago celebration besides July 25th.

Over time what grows out of the (mas or menos) 'picnic' part of the
martyr's commemoration is a feast as big, complex, and often raucous as
fits the local tastes.  The original feasts may have been solemn
Eucharistic celebrations on the martyr's tomb.  But other customs and
less solemn versions of feasting have grown up with local
commemorations of almost all the popular saints.  San Fermin in
Pamplona and its neighboring towns would be a superb example.

Probably many of us have stories of passing through or around Pamplona
close to San Fermin.  In 1998 my daughter Maria and I walked through
Pamplona at 5 a.m., knowing we'd have to walk from Arres to Puenta La
Reyna because the albergues in and around Pamplona were closed.  Too
many San Fermin revelers over the years had tried to pass themselves
off as pilgrims.  At 5 a.m. the streets of the old city of Pamplona
were packed almost solid with young people dressed in white with red
sashes and kerchiefs.  With our packs and dingy earth-colored pilgrim
attire, Maria and I were a magnet of attention.  We got a lot of
friendly (and some not so friendly) calls, catcalls, and hoots.  A
couple of ungenerous     kids, already drunk in preparation for running
the bulls tried to trip us.  In the crush someone unzipped the pocket
on my pack where our first aid kit was crammed in so tightly that it
didn't come out.  Maria (who had lived in Spain) pointed out to me that
the courteous and hospitable locals had long since gone to bed and that
the crowd jostling us was a peppering of rowdiest young Spaniards and
large numbers of other European and American youth, all trying to get
themselves drunk enough to find 'courage' for running the bulls in a
couple of hours.  We just made it through Pamplona before the streets
were barricaded for the bull running that day.  Peregrinos who left
Arre twenty minutes or half an hour after us had to go around the city.

I don't know if Hemingway's popularizing of Fermin's feast and the
running of the bulls makes this clear, but the red sashes and scarves
commemorate the blood of an early Christian martyr who, the story goes,
was sentenced by the Romans to be dragged to death behind a bull.  We
could multiply stories of celebratory customs on these martyrs' feast
days that echo in some odd way that way the martyr died.

love,
donald