Monday, January 04, 2010

No one left to keep the "sacred fire"

Read about the ancient people who kept the sacred fire going at Pecos, New Mexico, and then let it go out, and you will wonder why. But, then it strikes me I can find the same thing happening right now, right this minute at a site in Ohio, a modern, right now site. First, I will relate some of what I know about the site in Pecos, New Mexico. It is just north of Santa Fe, and I discovered it as I read about some soldiers of the Mexican War who spent a night there. In of those soldiers subsequently wrote about what he saw and heard of this place. He said that two types of people maintained the holy "fire" at an Indian church in Pecos many, many years ago. And, remember this was in 1846 that he wrote about it being many, many years ago. No matter, he went onto describe those two groups of people as being very fierce in their protection of the sacred fire they maintained there. One group was supposedly a race of 15-foot tall humans who, certainly, by their size would have scared away anyone who sought to extinguish their sacred fire. The other group, strange as it may sound, was a race of tiny humans, like two to three feet tall. They made up for their small size by being very aggressive and threatening to anyone who might think to extinguish the sacred fire as they watched it. There is no clear record, at least according to the soldiers, when the "sacred fire" went out, but it did, possibly as those two races died out and then the people who remained at Pecos gradually moved to other places or took up other beliefs. The result was the sacred fire went out, and it has never been lit since. Now to the modern example of the same thing, which also revolves around a "sacred fire." It is at Maria Stein, Ohio where since the 1840s an order of Catholic nuns have maintained a convent, church and then a collection of relics of more than 1,000 saints. They have maintained their vigil on the sacred relics in a special chapel built at the end of the 1800s. It is there today. But, alas, there are a few, very few nuns to maintain the "sacred fire" at the chapel that contains all those sacred relics because fewer women chose the holy life. More than that, the church which stands adjacent to the chapel of the sacred relics is big and beautiful, but because of the shortage of priest, there is only one mass a week there. That is at noon on Saturdays. That is for now, but given the continued decline in nuns and the number of priests, there must be a time coming, which like the sacred fire at Pecos, there will no longer be anyone to care for the sacred fire at Maria Stein. Then it will go out and the sacred relics? Well, they, no doubt will move to some other spot because there are other Catholic churches, some of which probably would receive and care for them. Then the sacred fire will no longer be at Maria Stein just like at Pecos.