Saints We Leave To the Future
The creature looms up behind the revellers, unnoticed, rising out of a stone tide - all his turbulent centuries roiling around him - ferocious. He is contained solidly in stone, conjured by a sculptor’s hands to rest here in the Miradouro Santa Catarina, keeping perpetual vigil, the great bearded head as mythic, as thunderous as that of Zeus, the furious eyes forever glaring out ocer the Tejo, the tiled roofs and the people of Lisbon, dancing on the eve of St. Anthony’s feast day.
There is no way to know where the myth of Adamastor began, like all myths. Like all myths, we see the enduring power of story; the ability of a human to step out of the mundane and into legend, into immortality. As the world warms and rivers recede, hidden histories are revealed, including what may come to be the tomb of Gilgamesh - myth again meeting the current century, ignorant as it is. I wonder at the feats that created legends over the course of human history - the accomplishments, many, mostly surely related to survival - that led to our ancestors becoming a pantheon of gods and protectors, ethereal wardens and arbiters. I think of the accomplishments of our own age and time - and how we are giving the world new legends - lives that in telling will become new gods - vain and frivolous to the point of blindness, or perhaps defenders of wave and forest to rival all that have come before.
Down the street from my apartment, another Miradoouro, that of Santo Amaro - another mythic figure. A legend. An Iberian thousands of years ago whose pilgrimages and acts of healing lead eventually to chapels like this one, built in 1549, still hung about inside with effigies of arms and legs, hearts, hands -petitions for better health, safe passage through a surgery or a crisis. There is no basis for Santa Amaro - not historically speaking - only the possibility of a man who lived here so long ago, and whose acts of service helped so many that in death his power to work miracles became freed of mortal confines, became eternal, like Adamastor; became as real as Our Lady, drawing, even now, petitioners with the candles and effigies and prayers.
There must surely be some healers among us, some extraordinary people whose efforts encompass all of us - who will become the gods and saints that we will leave to the future. I would like to think that Wangari Maathai or Mary Oliver will join the pantheon - goddesses or saints of eloquence and the Earth, in all its stunning and sustaining glory. I would like to think any of us who spoke love in an age of deceit will be there to guide the seekers of the world to come - my own petition, my own prayer for you, dear future: may you be guided by our wise and patient, by our dedicated and indefatigable, and forgive us the sins of our addiction to all that glitters and distracts, even as we were called to action.