Sunday, January 14, 2007

Maggie London Petites

A CHILDHOOD MEMORY OF THE ARMED Fallacies

NOTE: BUT STILL NEED SOME PICTURES UP (I DO THE PICTURES), UP THE ENTRY AND PREFER TO READ
May you
The title of this blog has been created from a story that I started writing years ago, in asking me about my memories of childhood and youth, and how they work the mechanisms of memory and memory retrieval, so that the entry that follows is a story of it.
11
Last Friday I visited with a friend, Parish of the Immaculate Conception and the Assumption of Our Lady (the name of the temple). He was an old childhood memory and for years, ever since I moved to Barcelona, \u200b\u200bI wanted to visit to see if this was the church that my grandmother took me Bellmunt small. Tempted I remember putting in my hands a rosary beads, which he kept for me in a silver box embossed with a relief of Don Quixote and Sancho at the top, and with the promise that we would see the "Virgin asleep" . In my recollection, the Virgin was a very beautiful lady with a calm expression on his face, eyes closed and lying inside a glass case. He also had a vague memory of a baby Jesus, smiling, chubby, lying on his life-size manger.

We entered the church, peered the ship without any recollection awoke in me ... I walked down the aisle, and then I saw the figure of baby Jesus, just as I remembered, just to the left of the fence that separates the nave of the header. To his left was still assembled the crib and with it, a glass door giving access to other units: the chapel of the Most Holy, where at that time the priest officiated at the Mass, and a beautiful cloister with frescoes painted in the lunettes (and restored, as they appeared freshly painted.)
In the hallway that leads to the chapel, there were stalls that sells guides and pictures of saints. I attended an old lady and thought maybe it had been there long enough
-40 years, he said to give me the information I wanted. I questioned and he told me that the Virgin was asleep in a small chapel to the left of the entrance of the ship. So I went back and found, although the chapel was closed and could only be seen through a fence. That was "my Lady" ...

Then I went back to the stalls in search of more information. The Mass was over and the priest was at the door of the chapel, dismissing some parishioners. Into conversation with them, at first the pastor, an enthusiastic young man, tried to address me in a rudimentary Catalan, but felt more comfortable when he found he could move to the Castilian. I told them about my great-grandmother, and in my recollection, the Virgin was elsewhere at a lower height, it could go around, then he explained that the box with the Virgin is placed in the center of the nave of the church on the festival August 15, that was what I remembered, probably because my grandmother was visiting during the summer, because I lived in Madrid, I should have seen the infant Jesus during the Christmas holidays ... I also

told a curious anecdote

according to him, a miracle, connected to another of the figures of the church. The chapel is on the right of the head of the ship, you save an image of the Sacred Heart, for those not well placed in Catholic mythology, the Sacred Heart is a Christ with the heart on the center chest, and as iconography, always wears on his left hand. Well
it has two open arms slightly bent and palms facing up. They say that a worker restoring any damage, standing on a ladder that had the misfortune to fall, for not crash into the ground, and avoid further that it did so on a parishioner at that time was there praying, Christ opened his arms and held ... that is why we have open arms since.

The original church is Romanesque, XIII century, the cloister, Gothic, XIV - XV , formerly a nunnery that was in the old town (now in the Eixample) and was moved stone by stone to its current location from the street Jonqueres (this happened in 1869-1871). In the cloister still observe three sepulchral urns containing the remains of their former prioress.
The bell tower, Romanesque-Gothic was attached in 1879 and came from another church, San Miguel, also located in the medieval Barcelona. The temple was restored around 1942. In addition to the Sacred Heart and Our Lady asleep, the church keeps other small treasures: a picture of the Immaculate Conception in the interior of a Gothic temple located in the center of the altar, made by Enric Monjo (in 1942) and a Via Crucis painted by Joan Llimona (in 1925). Both the body such as the rosette are the original Gothic.

Although memory is sometimes tricky, and decorate or modify the memories, in this case I have found that a small childhood memory corresponded so remarkably faithful to real events. I've always been very disturbing to think that memories that seem so consistent, are actually quite false, built of scraps from various sources, mixed with bits of things that really told us mentally and we have illustrated, sewn together by threads that weave ourselves with the help of logic, allowing us to fill the gaps and establish some continuity and make sense of the story of our past ...
This is a topic that interests me greatly and I hope to talk later ...


One final note: I'm not superstitious, nor enlightened, even a believer, but have always fascinated me Matches (another subject on which I have the idea of \u200b\u200bwriting a post) Well, yesterday, while reading the newspaper (El Pais ), section BARCELONA SECRET MUSEUM, I always read and often cut out, I found nothing less than an article by Ignacio Vidal-Folch, entitled Sleeping Beauty , that just talking about the church and the image of the Virgin sleeping!