We wanted to share the insight of our friend peligrina Andi. Let’s listen in as she amplifies for us the echoes of her experience of the ‘Soul of Spain’ over the last 25 years.
By Andi Deaville
Last weekend, I had a blast taking some friends from the US around Madrid, Avila, Valladolid. They are on a loose pilgrimage, visiting sites where God- inspired people had an extraordinary impact in times past.
‘You guys have such a grasp on Spain’s history and culture’, they remarked at one point.
For us, this has been vital. Understanding how things came to be as they are is a good antidote for quick-fix arrogance. As you listen, you begin to understand how basic spiritual words in English… God, faith, hope, love, prayer, mentoring… are often rendered unfit because they have completely different baggage attached to them here. This pushes you into a much more interesting and arduous quest to find words and ideas that resonates with people and create a longer conversation.
Some time ago, over dinner, someone from northern Europe asked our Spanish friend ‘what are your dreams?’ Our friend looked puzzled. ‘I don´t have any dreams,’ he said. He is an accomplished professional who avidly pursues his interests, but ‘dreams’ were not culturally relevant to him.
For example, the largest cross in Spain is over General Franco’s tomb. His 40-year dictatorship ended a century of democratic experimenting and revived the echo of 400 years of the Spanish Inquisition, during which religion was an arm of the state and belief was carefully prescribed and regulated from above. Torture, persecution, oppression, extortion, control… all in Christ’s name. The centuries of religious corruption have taken their toll. For many Spanish people today, the cross is little better than a swastika, ‘God’ was some kind of dictator, love is manipulation, prayer is for grandmas, hope is for simpletons, faith is for the saints and mentoring may betray your inability to think for yourself.
If you come to Spain to ‘make a difference for God’, you may find yourself in a very quiet corner unless you are willing to risk the journey with Christ into an alternate religious landscape. Learning the language is the beginning of the journey, but words are containers for meaning and meaning is conditioned by culture. Discovering what is in those containers will confront you with your own assumptions about life and faith.
YOUR TOOLKIT: Whatever our experience of race, if we have unresolved pain or color-blindness or other forms of denial, it will either have been transformed or it will be transmitted. I encourage you to take some time to journal about your sense of racial identity or lack thereof. Is there a part of Jon’s story you resonate with? What have your BIPOC experiences or relationships been like? How is that similar to or different from others you grew up with? What would you want to leave behind or see transformed from your past? What one thing is yours to do going forward?
