The Guadalupe Advent altar frontal at St Cuthbert's, Oakland, CaliforniaI haven't gotten to the next banner yet.
In spite of my Northern European genetic make-up (Swedish and German, no less: tall, blue eyes and all), I keep protesting being born "white." I believe transgendered people who say their inner self does not match their outer plumbing. My cultural resonance is not with Scandinavia or Germany. Tengo alma latina en cuerpo sueco. (I have a Latin soul in a Swedish body. Or, at the very least, Mediterranean. Yes. Sunshine, olive oil, herbes de Provence....)
So keep your lutfisk; your lingonberries are lovely but I can live without them. Bring on the corn tortillas and chiles. And forget the repressed Lutheran second half of Fanny och Alexander. It's time to party for Our Lady, La Morenita, La Virgencita, the Queen of Mexico and Empress of the Americas!
San Juan Diego, ruega por nosotros.
[Mary Sue and I were both stoked to see Jane R's photo of Guadalupe in Leuven.]
--the BB
4 comments:
You know, this post wouldn't make me crack up half as much as it does if I wasn't right now on my way to work at IKEA...
Well, someone has to support the Swedes through those long winters. Great juxtaposition. LOL.
Calvinist. The 1686/1687 State Church was Calvinist.
A hostile take-over by the Calvinist Kings.
Absolutism is the political application of Calvinism.
The Church of Sweden still is more 1st Millennium than Lutheran.
The Parish owns the church, the buildings and the land, the Vestry hires the priest.
We never had the 11th to 12th century innovations of Rome; mandatory celibacy, "canonical" testament, and so on...
Tack så mycket, Göran. Nice to hear from the ancestral territory (no matter how little I relate to it).
Dear, dear, Calvinist Kings. Scary thought. Although Calvin is far better than his successors and was at least a decent patristic scholar, from what I remember, I had enough Calvinism from my Swedish Baptist and Missouri Baptist family to last several lifetimes. You will have noticed that the four elements that go into the title of this blog do not include either calvinist or roman, though I acknowledge my roots in Western Catholicism.
It is a good thing to be essentially beyond the reach of the Roman Curia, but that's my personal bias.
You have an interesting blog; I will have to look again when it is not so late here and I am less tired (well at least the Englihs postings. I even had to look up how to spell "thanks so much.")
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