It Rained on Our Parade

Yesterday the Catholic church around the corner from me celebrated the last day of Corpus Cristi (the Body of Christ). As I mentioned before, each church celebrates this event at different times throughout the year. No one we asked could tell us the purpose of this celebration, seeing as how Good Friday, Easter and Pentecost are already over, but it has been a long-standing Catholic tradition in Latin countries. I should do some research on it. Anyway, the house where I live was one of the houses chosen this year to recieve the Body of Christ and the blessing of the priest. It is a great honor here and doesn't happen often. All day Friday, my Papa and some neighbors strung the yellow and white streamers over the top of our street and all day Saturday was spent turning the garage into a sanctuary with an altar. Early Sunday morning, all the neighbors lined the street with fresh pine needles, adorning this path with rose petals, daisy petals and eucalyptus branches. Several houses had this strong smelling insence burning all day, filling the neighborhood and our lungs with billowy smoke. I did not attend mass yesterday, opting to attend an evangelical charismatic church instead, but I did return home at noon to await the Corpus Cristi procession coming down our street. This procession is quite long and includes little children dressed up as angels, all of the altar boys, old faithful widows and people who have paid money to participate. The priest walks amid the procession under a canopy carrying the 'custodia' which holds the 'santisimo', or large-sized communion wafer which represents the literal Body of Christ. The priest's hands can't even touch this sancitfied object, so he wraps the bottom in a blessed white cloth. The priest holds the custodia before his face so that you can't see him, only the host. Anyway, the procession ended up coming down our street at around 1:30 pm. They walked in the middle of the pine needle path (intended to stir up the wonderful fragrances) and turned into our garage where the host was placed in a pocket in a sheet that hung and the priest prayed a blessing over the house. The entire street was packed with people singing and kneeling before the host. White and yellow tissue paper squares fell from my bedroom window as the second oldest daughter poured them over the priest's canopy. It rained on us as we worshipped the Lord together.