Faith Filled Friday: The Dancing of the Giglio

This requires a lot of context.  I’m going to try to give it briefly.  Start with the Italian city of Nola, a city that goes back to (328 BC) before the Romans conquered the Italian peninsula.  It’s a city in the Campagna region of Italy, the region from which I’m from.  Nola today I think would be considered a suburb of Naples. 

Fast forward to 410 AD, where the town of Nola selected a priest by the name of Paulinus to be their bishop.  Paulinus died in 431 AD.  Somewhere in between these years the Goths, a Barbarian tribe, invaded the Italian peninsula.  Men were taken as hostage and slaves.  Legend has it that a particular widow had her only son taken, and Bishop Paulinus offered himself as an exchange for that widow’s son.  It was accepted and for a number of years Paulinus was a slave working farms.  The legend has transformed the barbarian Goths into the “Turks,” probably during the Middle Ages when the Turks raided the Italian coast. 

As a slave Paulinus performed miracles for his masters, and the legend has it the Sultan took notice.  He asked about Paulinus’s background and learned he was a man of stature.  He offered Paulinus his freedom, and Paulinus got the release of all the captured men of Nola.  When he sailed back to Nola, the populace greeted him with swarms of lilies.  Lilies are called giglio in Italian, and so the Feast of the Giglio was started.

At some point the Feast of the Giglio incorporated a carrying a structure that symbolized the Giglio.  I don’t know the process in which this structure grew to be massive, but that is what happened.  It developed into a tradition.  Immigrants from Nola brought this tradition to the United States, and specifically to a region in Brooklyn, New York called Williamsburg.  The feast in Williamsburg has been going on since 1903!

One last thing to understand.  The feast day for St. Paulinus is June 22^nd.  The feast day of Our Lady of Mount Carmel is July 16^th.  Because feast celebrations run a couple of weeks long, the two feasts were merged.  The “Dancing of the Giglio” is performed as part of the Feast of Our Lady of Mt. Carmel, and the devotions that come out of this feast have a Carmelite association.

You can read about the history of the celebration in Williamsburg, here. 

Now this video is going to give you what the feast, the Italian-American tradition, and the Dancing of the Giglio entails.

So here are some raw facts of the Giglio tower.  It’s seventy feet high—that’s six or seven stories.  It weighs eight thousand pounds!  It takes 122 men to lift it, traverse it, and dance it. 

The pastor at our parish on Staten Island, Fr. Eugene of St. Rita Catholic Church, grew up in Williamsburg, and many times has referenced it in his homilies, especially in our celebrations of Our Lady of Mt. Carmel.  It never dawned on me the full extent of this tradition.  This mid-July, he arranged for a bus to take a number of us interested to the feast.  We went for the vigil of Our Lady of Mt. Carmel, the evening of July 15^th.  I believe this was the first night of the celebration.

First a few pictures.  Here is the Giglio before its initial coming out and dance.  You can see it is taller than the apartment buildings on the street.

Every year there are new decorations and holy images to the Giglio.  Here is some detail to this year’s construction.

Here is the initial coming out.  Enjoy the music!  It’s a mix of Italian and American.

 

Now over the course of the evening, they would slowly take the Giglio up the street in manageable spurts—remember the 122 lifters underneath are each carrying anywhere from 65 to 100 lbs—past Our Lady of Mt. Carmel Church, up another street, and then return for the night.  Here is another clip.

 

You can hear the captain calling out commands in his Neapolitan dialect. 

Here is a picture of the lifters trying to get into position.

And here is a clip of the lifters and a “dance” from their point of view.

 

Finally inside the Our Lady of Mt. Carmel Church.

A statue of St. Paulinus.

And on the side of the church, OLMC shrine.

Now you know how Italians get into their feasts.  Plus I didn’t even mention the food.  The zeppole were great!

 

St. Paulinus, Our Lady of Mt. Carmel, pray for us.

Matthew Monday: Our First Professional Basketball Game

I had never attended a pro basketball game in my life.  I was never really a fan.  I might watch a few minutes on TV but I never had any allegiance to a team.  Then you have a son who likes basketball, and for some reason he becomes a fan of the Brooklyn Nets.  So for the past couple of years we followed the Nets through the newspapers.  It doesn’t hurt that I grew up in Brooklyn.  It’s a thrill to have a home team I can root for.  I never considered the other New York teams home teams for me!  

So in the last few years the Nets made some big trades to get some star players and they competed for the division. Today their two big superstars Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving remain on the team and they have added some quality depth to help them out.  This year they started off losing, replaced their head coach, and then won something like 20 out of 21 games.  A super streak.  Unfortunately Kevin Durant got hurt recently and they have struggle to win as many as they lose with him out.  So they have fallen back a bit, but hopefully he’ll be returning soon.

We went last Sunday on January 15^th, and they were playing a below .500 team, the Oklahoma City Thunder.  Why did we pick that game?  Well, the prices of the big name teams were a lot more expensive, and so for a seat in my price range ($100/seat) we got better seats for the Thunder.  When we bought the tickets, we didn’t know Kevin Durant would be out.  That would have altered our choice, but what can you do?  Them’s the breaks.

The Barclay Center, the Nets’ arena, is in downtown Brooklyn, which has limited free street parking and very expensive pay parking.  So I gave Matthew the entire Brooklyn experience.  We drove into Brooklyn into my old neighborhood and took the subway to downtown to the arena.  I tried to take a picture of Matthew on the elevated subway platform, but he refused to cooperate.

I also took a picture of the Williamsburg Savings Bank Tower.  This was iconic for me growing up in Brooklyn.  For the longest time, this was the tallest building in Brooklyn.  According to Wikipedia it was the tallest from 1929 to 2009 and spans 41 floors.  Brooklyn has gotten a few skyscrapers since then, but we don’t have the same fetish for heights that they do in Manhattan.

 

The Barclay Center isn’t all that picturesque, but its short height does make for an interesting contrast with its surrounding environment.

Here’s the view from our seats.  It looked closer than the camera makes it seem.

 

The little snot finally let me take his picture inside.  He’s proudly wearing his Nets jersey.

One of the ushers took our picture.

So we got to go down to court level during warm ups.  I think this is Day'Ron Sharpe, a backup forward.  But I’m not entirely sure.  Here’s a photo and a video clip.

 

 

Here’s the one video clip we got of game play.  The red are the Thunder and white Brooklyn.

 

 

The score was close most of the game, but unfortunately Nets lost 112-102.  But it was still a lot of fun.