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.

Notable Quote: In the Mirror of the Cross by St. Anthony of Padua

June 13^th was the feast day of St. Anthony of Padua, a Franciscan friar originally from Lisbon, Portugal, not Padua Italy.  But he made his way to Italy and ultimately died in Padua.  He was known for his preaching and even apparently out shined the Dominicans in one particular event.  His sermons are supposed to be so extraordinary that on that basis he was made a Doctor of the Church.

The devotional magazine, Magnificat, had this quote attributed to him on his feast day entry.  It really caught my attention.

“Christ who is your life is hanging before you, so that you may look at the cross as in a mirror.  There you will be able to know how mortal were your wounds, that no medicine other than the Blood of the Son of God could heal…Nowhere other than looking at himself in the mirror of the cross can man better understand how much he is worth.”

That is an astonishing insight.  When you are gazing on a crucifix, you are looking at yourself in a mirror at your suffering humanity.  Wow!

By the way, my father, who was not a religious man, had a particular liking to St. Anthony.  He is in the local lore of Italians, and they have brought that devotion here to the United States.  I always find it amazing that I see so many garden statues of St. Anthony in the New York City Italian-American neighborhoods.  Indeed, if you read his Wikipedia entry you will find that Italian-American neighborhoods across the country revere him.  I’m pretty sure that’s why “Anthony” is such a popular name among Italians.  I grew up thinking he was Italian only to find he was actually Portuguese.  I wonder how many Italians and Italian-Americans actually know that.  I don’t think my father did. 

St. Anthony is usually invoked as the patron saint of lost items.  Perhaps many of you have heard the prayerful appeal to St. Anthony when searching for a lost item: “Tony, Tony, look around.  Something’s lost and must be found!”  You can read about that at Aleteia.  

There is also a legend of St. Anthony holding the child Jesus, and that is why you see his images and statues holding a child.  You can read about that at Franciscan Media.  

Notable Quote: Have the Courage to Suffer by Antonin Scalia

I guess by now most of the American readers of my blog have heard that Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia passed away Saturday.  

I have to say I am a bit heartbroken over it.  Antonin Scalia was a personal hero of mine.  As an Italian-American and a conservative and a Catholic I was so proud of him.  It is my perception that until Scalia hit the national scene, Italian-Americans and Catholics were predominantly center-left on the political scale, which is to say moderate Democrats as far as political party affiliation goes.  And I would assess that over 90% of my family would consider themselves Democrats, even today. 

Now it is without question that it was the Democratic Party which left traditional values behind, which made a new generation look toward the political right for a fit.  As I matured and found my philosophic match, there was no question that I was a conservative.  I think it’s in my genetic makeup.  Antonin Scalia, with his pugnacious personality, his wit and charm, his intellectual brilliance, his devout Catholicism, his loud and larger than life energy—the very essence of Italian male extroversion—his dedication to family and tradition made him an icon for many, but specifically for those of us of Italian ethnicity.  Some of us have crazy uncles and some of us have brilliant uncles: Antonin Scalia was our brilliant uncle, and we could point to him to justify our political leanings.

There are many great Scalia quotes.  I love the one where he’s being interviewed by a writer for New York magazine, which is a publication somewhere left of Pravda, where the interviewer is shocked that Scalia actually believes in heaven and hell.  Scalia leans in to him and adds, “I even believe in the Devil.”  

But the quote of his I most embrace is this one on the courage to be a Christian:

“God assumed from the beginning that the wise of the world would view Christians as fools ... and he has not been disappointed…If I have brought any message today, it is this: Have the courage to have your wisdom regarded as stupidity…Be fools for Christ. And have the courage to suffer the contempt of the sophisticated world.”

            - Speech at Living the Catholic Faith conference, 2012

Antonin Scalia was an intellectual giant compared these petty, conventional “sophisticates.”  There are only a handful of people that I would love to hang out with in heaven, if I should be graced with getting there.  Antonin Scalia is one of them.  May eternal light shine upon him as he rests in peace.