feasts and saints...

I took this photo last week during the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, the annual procession in front of the Hagatna cathedral-basilica.

All the villages in Guam have catholic feast days to honor their patron saints.

In this case, thousands of people show up outside the Hagatna cathedral (downstairs from where I work) and walk the statue of Santa Marian Kamalen, the patron saint of the island, around a circular route of a few city blocks, while singing songs and reciting rosaries (or something like that, my understanding of Catholic traditions is particularly lacking.)

It seems that the statue is a stand in for the Virgin Mary, and the fiesta marks the unofficial beginning of the Christmas season for Catholics (pretty much everyone).

Local legend says that the statue of the saint, which is this somewhat small wooden figure adorned with real human hair (it's donated, apparently), floated onto the shores of the island on the back of two candle-wielding crabs, sometime during the Spanish-forced conversion of the all the local inhabitants to Catholicism. This is, apparently, just one of several origin stories related to where the statue came from, according to the above very helpful link from my new favorite Guam history and culture encyclopedia, Guampedia.

In any case, the statue seems to originate from the Philippines, and could have sunk with a Spanish galleon off of the coast of Merizo, where it was supposedly found three hundred years ago.

Being somewhat fond of ritual, with my undoubtedly misguided proclivity for mystical thinking, I was intrigued by the event, and lingered along the edges of it for a little while listening.

As I bopped between crowds of families huddled under umbrellas in the half-rain of mid-afternoon, I found myself reminded of my life in New York, running around at protests between armies of puppet-wielding anarchists, liberal moms and dads pushing strollers, moaists in jaunty caps and those guys who always seem to wear the same orange anti-torture t-shirts.

Despite the somewhat different objectives, it seemed that at least on a surface level, the two kinds of events, one a gut-wrenching yell of opposition against forces too large to be embodied by a single person, the other a call and response of soft hymns repeated back in old tongues and newer ones to venerate the icons of a God too large to comprehend, were achieving a similar effect.

In New York, when I was still new to the whole protest scene, before I knew exactly what it was I was protesting or how exactly the aims of the demonstration would achieve the ideals I had set forth to realize, I rationalized my participation by realizing the greater good, generally, that can be achieved by putting people in a space together, to commuicate, share and organize.

I liked that protests made people walk -- and made businesses shut their doors, out of both lack of patronage and perhaps a healthy fear of rioting. I liked that I talked to people I would never have talked to before, and that streets and lampposts and garbage cans and corners, when used as vantage points and lounge chairs, took on a significance they lost when simply passed by the tsunami of daily traffic.

Even as other, more concrete motives drew me further into my work with grassroots media and activist organizations, I think it was that larger idea that motivated me to continue.

While listening to crowd sing Catholic songs on the streets together last week, I got that same feeling I got during the best moments of protest.

On island where so few people walk anywhere anymore, even the effort of making a trip of a few blocks on foot seems to be a revelation. And, instead of the sidewalk in front of the cathedral being filled with a handful of Japanese tourists undocking at scheduled times of the day, there were people gathered together, families, long lines of school girls in matching blue uniforms, current and former choir boys, some still clutching their own miniature saint replicas well into middle age, people with heads bowed, people repeating prayers or talking, people waiting impatiently in lines to march.

And instead of the silence of the humid empty air, I heard something older, something deeper -- a communal cry recalling a shared space beyond K-marts and car dealerships and empty streets.

Or, well, I think anyway. I'm new here.