By Donald Schell
Mundaka, Spain, St. John’s Church, Sunday June 22, 2009
I usually dislike having liturgy texts and hymns projected on a wall, but projected words in that Sunday’s bilingual Spanish and Basque mass felt simply welcoming. My wife and I can follow liturgy in Spanish reasonably well, but when the old priest was praying in Basque, projecting the Spanish translation of his words on the church’s old plaster wall felt like godsend. Ditto for Basque hymns – not knowing what we ‘meant,’ we (and the Spanish speakers present) welcomed the chance that phonetically easy Basque offered us to join the singing.
Mundaka is Basque-speaking village on Spain’s north coast, 1800 people off-season and something like 10,000 on-season. The village hugs a steep mountainous coast eleven kilometers downriver from Guernica. We were just a week ahead of the main influx of visitors, but the first wave was there, Spaniards fleeing Madrid and central Spain’s brutal heat. Summer in Mundaka offers pleasant sunshine, predictably cool weather and the pleasures of swimming or surfing the ocean’s big waves or walking and kayaking the estuary’s peaceful tidal flats. In the fall when ‘the wave’ is big, Mundaka is an international surfing destination. La Iglesia de Santa Maria sits on a bluff looking out over the estuary to the east and the wave and the Bay is Biscay to the north.
In Spain “Basque-speaking” actually means bi-lingual, so the parish regulars, though fluent in both Spanish and Basque have a strong political and cultural preference for a Basque liturgy, and those devout enough to attend weekday mass get exactly that – an entirely Basque language liturgy. A family member who’d visited ahead of us reported on the weekday Basque liturgy, and knowing Mundaka’s fierce Basque separatist sympathies, we’d prepared ourselves for a wholly Basque liturgy for Sunday too. When we heard enough Spanish for us and the other visitors to enjoy (and mostly understand) the liturgy we knew someone there – probably priest and parish council together – valued welcome above their personal preference.
Were there ETA members present? Is ETA in Mundaka? Experts estimate that ETA has no more than 200 members total in its autonomous terrorist cells. They’re spread across the Basque country and some in other parts of Spain. Mundaka proudly and unequivocally identifies itself as Basque nationalist. The legal Basque independence party has its office on the town square. Mundaka predictably encourages and supports any gesture in support of Basque autonomy. And ETA is both nowhere and everywhere in Basque country. It’s not possible to say whether anyone in the village or attending that church is secretly part of ETA or not. But any Mundaka villager would know or be related to one or more Basque political prisoners.
And who were the out-of-town visitors? The largest number of us were Spanish, Mundaka’s neighbors in one sense, but also symbols of another culture’s dominance and living reminder of bitter history under Franco’s dictatorship. A handful of French people and us two Americans completed the picture. Spanish was the language we shared, so the bilingual mass and the projected words were gestures of inclusion to us who brought the congregation Gospel diversity that Sunday.
The readings were in Basque (texts projected in Spanish), the psalm and the Gospel were in Spanish. The priest delivered his heartfelt sermon half in Spanish, half in Basque, his aura of warm wisdom and kindness, included everyone in the whole sermon, even though half of us could only understand half of what he was preaching. The priest’s own graceful, forgiving good humor and made it very clear that he was speaking Jesus’ healing, forgiving love.
An hour away in Bilbao and just two days before this mass, ETA had killed Eduardo Puelles Garcia, a Basque police officer and twenty-year veteran anti-terrorism investigator. The day before, Saturday, urban Bilbao had turned out in massive peace witness. But in Mundaka, bars shut off the sound on Spanish TV news broadcasts, and people simply turned their backs on the silenced news images. At the mass, the prayers of the faithful broke that deliberate silence. A lay minister prayed them in Spanish, ensuring that the whole congregation would hear and understand her simple prayers
– for all the victims of ETA,
– for all who mourned their deaths, and
– for peace.
Though the region’s struggle for peace and reconciliation would continue, the prayers spoke the Gospel’s unreserved embrace of Basque and Spaniard, of people living into loss, of victims of human violence, and of the healing that comes when we leave our killing certainties behind to live into God’s forgiveness. I listened hard for any uneasy shifting, for coughs, or for other signs of defensiveness or protest from the congregation, but I heard none. Whatever our politics, this mixed congregation could pray together for peace, for a widow and her two sons, for a slain public servant and for all who were grieving. It came at the end of the prayers and then we paused in a short silence before the concluding collect, willingly lingering in a stillness that honored all our sadness and tragic human loss, and then we waited on the Spirit to bless our hope for peace.
The Rev. Donald Schell, founder of St. Gregory of Nyssa Church in San Francisco, is President of All Saints Company.