That is what I will call a reminder that I received about the fact that I had not written in this blog since mid-August. Coincidentally, I had been thinking about the "The Journal" over the weekend and the need to sit down and just write my thoughts. They begin to flow easily if one simply begins...
Reading some of the earlier August entries about our travels reconnected me to the Missions Sue and I had seen on our road trips. There are radically divergent views about the nature of the missions and the impact the Spanish efforts to convert the native populations had on that population. The dark view is that the Mission system was akin to a Gulag, or concentration camps for enslaved Indians, who were forcibly made to stay on the Mission property to slave away in the fields, the bakeries and in the construction gangs. The opposing view is the romantic "Old California" lifestyle as depicted in movies, books and television.....think "Zorro".
I don't know the reality, but I think it is somewhere between the two extremes. One mustn't forget that the drive to save souls was mandated by the Spanish Court. Forceable religious conversion was all too common in the world back then......in Spain, in Europe, in the spread of Islam...as was religious persecution. The Europeans saw the native population as savages and heathens....to be saved from the darkness of their ways.
Anyway, we traveled to Santa Barbara over the weekend to see an art show featuring impressionist paintings from the Armand Hammer Museum in Westwood, L.A. It was an excellent show. We walked the shops on State Street afterward. The city is a charming place and State Street is lined with unique shops and eateries. Earlier in the year we had searched out an Irish bar on the beach end of State looking for an Irish coffee. I wrote about that in the blog...if you remember.
On Sunday morning we arose early and went to the 7:30 mass at the Mission. The mass was celebrated with great formality in a beautifully restored interior. While walking the grounds after the mass we happened upon a plot of land newly planted in olive trees....all young. The stations of the cross had been set up on paths running through the grove. Spotted around the grounds were still-flowering golden poppies. I picked a few blooms and tucked them away in a book when we returned to the car.
All the missions have been restored to their present state. Many were virtually nothing more than eroded adobe walls just a few feet high. I believe the main drive to restore the missions began in the 1920's when
a great love affair with the beauty, climate and history of California began....and the romantic view of the Missions' place in California's past took root. Buried in the cemetary behind the Carmel Mission is a man who devoted almost his entire adult life to the restoration of that Mission. One can see his advance in age documented in the many photographs of the restoration efforts he led for decades. His grave is marked with a simple granite headstone no more than two feet high. I was touched deeply. His body ended up resting
just feet from the stone walls he had helped to restore. There were poppies growing nearby. I would like poppies on my grave.
I must find that book. Where is it
SRH
I promise to write more often for those who care.
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