A little storycito about La Posada, a ‘go away/ come closer’ ritual in dead winter where madwomen and madmen go out in the night in order to be rejected on purpose
Posada is done by many a Latino, in many different ways depending on where you live. It is the ritual we play out going door to door amongst our neighbors and friends, asking for shelter for the Holy Family who are being turned away from all the inns, and with Mary, at her time to give birth.
So we go door to door in the winter nights, singing and asking for shelter for the Holy ones. And by prearrangement we are turned away, often rudely, until at last, we reach the last stop… and hope beyond hope…
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This time of year, we become La posada, we become each of us, an inn, and posada is why so many sing loud and dance strong at this darkest time of the year. This is why the old prayers are chanted out loud during this time, the young people stumbling over the old phrases because they are still learning them. The old people pray louder then, covering the small mistakes of the young who are still learning.
This is why at this darkest time of year we sway with our rosaries in that little dance that overtakes our bodies as we pray the beads aloud. This is why we wear our mantillas to shutter out the distractions on all sides, making a little church right before our eyes… one wall of which is our own face, the other walls made up of the veil that literally stands between the worlds. The men pull their fedoras and campasino hats down low.
This is why we light our velas, vigil candles, willingly burning our fingers by purposely cupping the fire, ‘offering up’ and doing everything we can to protect the little flames from the cold wind that we know, that we have always known. The flame, whether of hearth or of heart, cannot in the dead of winter, be allowed to go out. Everyone has fire clan memory. Once lost long ago, yet this way of knowing about the preciousness of Light, remains in the blood forever.
This is why those in Posada, looking like a herd of giant black crows in dark overcoats, clump together in awkward processional from the church, accidentally stepping on each others’ heels as they stop/ start, stop/start, lurching forward with such perfect broken-hearted love inside … striving to create in themselves shelter for The Light immanent.
Many a soul’s silent litany goes something like this: They may have killed us long ago, but we are still alive. Completely alive. Thus, we make processions, thus we create Posadas, all in the dark… to show that we are still here, and that the Light will never, ever be unprotected again, that the Light is not ‘out there’ somewhere lost, but is being cradled and watched over by this ‘imperfectly perfect’ flock of human beings.
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In some Posadas, each night, different people are chosen to portray Maria y José, and sometimes a child is chosen each night to portray the coming Child, or else, a beautiful little muñeca, doll or doll-like marionette of the Christ Child, the exact size of a newborn baby, is carried, swaddled and held close by people of various ages.
When I lived in Albuquerque a thousand years ago, I remember in particular how a sweet staggering toddler carried the Cristocito with his mami and papi and abuelita waddling behind, crouching over the child to make sure the little Christ Child would not be accidentally dropped.
I also remember the old people in slouch hats, old ragged mantillas, woolen headscarves and woven sash-bandannas who walked with side to side swaying because of this bad hip or that crooked knee aching so…
and I remember an old one’s hands which were like end-sawn boards from his years of labor…Those old hands had touched and learned so much about life and death… and they now held the little Christ Child muñeca so tightly to his chest, as though he alone had sole responsibility for protecting Christ’s birth into the world—that if he didn’t carry and hold on tight to the radiant little child, the entire world would somehow remain dark forever.
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Thus, the traveling procession proceeds from house to house, and when I lived in Taos, for La Posada is in dead of winter, some dressed in burlap ‘biblical clothes’ they’d made and then wore their combat or flak jackets over, or their long black overcoats with the big celluloid buttons over housedresses that were patterned like wallpaper, their pea jackets or wool and cotton rebozos, shawls.
Singing, much singing, and crowding together on the side of the road, here and there stopping for old knees bending into a Pueblo semblance of shuffle dance. A drum. A flute. Voices. Cristocito. The eyes of so many tired, worn down people filled with hope in the candlelight.
At each of the nine houses, knock, knock, knock, and silencio til the door was opened and the people behind the door, often uncles and aunts, abuelos y abuelitas, the elders, the neighbors, would answer, take one look, and in some form of high dungeon, say, or snarl, or bellow, ‘No, no, go away’
Some pretended harshness, ‘No, no room here for the likes of you!’
Some answering sadly, “We’re full already. No vacancy. I have no room for you”
Some acted brittle and bitter: ‘No! Go away, don’t let me catch you here again.’
And on one memorable occasion, one of the grandfathers of the house who’d already had a bit too much drinking his Christmas cheer, accidentally disrupted Posada by yelling the opposite sentiment over the ‘No, sorry, No room here, we’re all booked up….’
From the kitchen, he cried out, ‘Ah Mio Dio, Yes! Come in! Come on, come one and all, we got plenty of room, what the hell you talking about? Come. Come.’
‘No abuelo, we’re supposed to say No.’
‘Oh hell with no. Say yes! Say, Si, se peude. Say Yes, it can be done. Come in, we got plenty of room!
And our Posada group of dark crows, feathers lit by firelight all flew in formation away from that house, having to decline abuelo’s slightly tipsy invitation.
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We had to instead go back out into the dark to search for shelter for Cristocito…. to search until we felt how deeply important it was, and how in some measure how a desperate search it had been for the Holy Family. To remember what was most important to shelter. To unite us all with ancient Maria y José y Jesús in a palpable way, rather than to separate us into two categories: modern audience merely watching ancient stage play.
So, time and again, the people who vowed to protect The Light, knocked at doors, and sang the songs asking for shelter.
It is amazing what emotions, memories, thoughts and feelings come up for souls when their egos think they are, in one sense, only participating in a pageant. I see it occur at Pesamé also, the time when after Christ’s crucifixion and death, the statue of Maria is brought down from her alcove to the nave or altar rail, and prayerful people come to her on their knees to give her comfort and condolences.
Then too, you see men weep, and women tear up, and little children cry because they are in sometimes mysterious ways, moved by the loss of the Light of the World. The night between two days. The darkness without knowing for sure if the Light will be allowed to be born again, if the Light will make it through alive. We never know if it’s the story or the longing the story causes us to remember, that makes so many weep.
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And this element is in La Posada as well. A child answering the knock and saying in a sweet little voice, ‘No, no room for you here,’ can strike at any parent’s heart who is trying to let go of a beloved child, any parent who is estranged from his or her child, any parent or grandparent who has lost a child, any squadron member who has lost a bud, any person suffering from feeling shunned. And you can hear the tears in the dark then; the tears come through the singing voices in the wavering, in the loss of timing.
And if the door is answered by a bent over elder, one so frail who cheeps out in a little voice like a tin flute, ‘No, no one can stay here’… you can be sure that those of us who have lost our mothers and fathers, those of us who have no elders left, those of us who long so badly for a mother or father who is real and loving to us, those of us who know the evanescence of life and always want to say to the very old, ‘Don’t die, don’t die, don’t die…’ well, then the pilgrim song asking to please give us shelter, deteriorates into some serious howling and sobbing.
And it’s alright. We’re together. It’s all alright. We hold each other. We hold onto each other, we comfort each other, we hand Kleenex all around, hold candles for others while they dry their faces. Arms over shoulders now, arms around waists, a tribe of heart-wounded soldiers, we act as crutches and bandages for each other as we move to the next house, the next.
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….until finally the search is ended. Finally, we come to the last house, where at the very end of the long search, the compassionate people welcome in the weary travelers.
Sometimes different old women stand as midwives in the last house, and hurry to take Maria by the arms and help her to lie down as well as any nine-months-pregnant-and-in-labor woman can lie down on a straight back chair when she can no longer fold in the middle, and sprawls with legs straight out.
We laugh about this, and there are inevitably reminiscences then about ‘the time I was ten months pregnant and big as a house,” and how ‘her water broke, and I was so scared, I tried to put the house key in the ignition to get her to the hospital…’ and other stories of the birth of someone’s precious light in someone’s precious world.
In this last house there will be servietas, special snowy linens folded just for this moment, and cakes and sweets and often a piñata, and there will be much rejoicing that at last has come a place for the soul that is pregnant with New Life to rest, and for José the protector to be congratulated and refreshed, and that a place of honor, no matter how humble, has been prepared for The Child of Light to be born.
Again.
And we are changed. We have gone through a dark night and been whipped around by memory– ancestral and common and personal and momentous. We are not separate from Maria, we are not separate from José, we are not separate from the Cristocito.
We are together in all this. No one will be left stranded. We are the new innkeepers.
We know how to make room.
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May you always and forever
make room for The Light,
And especially dear brave soul,
may room always be made for your special
and precious Light here on earth.
Blessed Christmas to us all.
Happy Holidays
Excerpts from Untie The Strong Woman, on Holy Mother and The Wild Soul, by Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés ©2011, Sounds True Books, Louisville, Co
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image public domain wikimedia, Rennett Stowe