If Americans are obsessed with sports and the French with all things fashionable, then the Sicilians are obsessed with the dead. Just down the road from the camp where we stayed and worked this summer, there was a large cimitero (cemetary). I’ve been to cemetaries in the United States. Rarely, unless a funeral is in progress, are there many visitors. Not so at a Sicilian cemetary. This cemetary had a constant stream of visitors. And on the weekends, you would be hard pressed to find a parking place, though parking was plentiful. Widows dressed in black stood out to me. I asked our missionary Vincenzo what the length of time was that these women wore black. Sometimes for a year. Often for many years. Every day spent in a constant memorial of death. Everywhere, women dressed in black.
And in Sicily, you don’t just bury your loved one in the ground. That is only for the poorest of the poor to do. No. Every family has a family crypt. And families will do without, and scrimp, and save, in order to have the best crypt that they can possibly afford. And these crypts are not like your average American crypts either. They really try to outdo the Joneses. You need to spend at least 50,000 Euros to get a respectable crypt. The exchange rate of USD to Euros was just about 1.4:1 when we were there. In USD, a respectable crypt would cost you right around $70,000. That’s not even for a really nice crypt. That is just for one that you don’t have to be completely embarrassed about. Before I left I put this picture in a post:
I had initially believed it to be a view of the city, Ispica, from our campground. Now that I am home, I recognize it as a view of the cemetary taken from the road from Ispica down to the campground! It looks very much like a city with a cathedral, but it isn’t. Each of those buildings is a crypt! I was so fascinated by this cemetary. And each town had a similar one. The road signs even included signs pointing down the road you’d take to get to the “cimitero”.
Though all very different, each of the crypts had things in common. You could enter them as they were chapels. There was an eternal light on inside and pictures of the loved ones that were entombed there. There was an altar, a place to pray. Some had large quantities of fresh flowers, others had permanent plastic or silk flowers. Very few of these crypts looked like no one had visited in some time. I had to resist the urge to enter the ones that were unlocked.
Between the poorest famlies and those families who could afford crypts were the families who could only afford a place in these large banks of community crypts. Each of these crypts also had a picture, two vases for flowers and an eternally burning light.
Not speaking Italian, I initially wasn’t sure what all these papers plastered up all over the place were significant of. After learning a little Italian, and having my overgrown curiosity get the better of me, I finally set out to find out what they were.
They are paper memorials to the dead. Placed by the family of the loved one for years and years to come after their death. They could be found everywhere, even pasted to the fronts of people’s homes.
I am not sure why the Sicilians are so preoccupied with their dead. I have a theory, but had no method with which to test the theory. Sicily is a mostly catholic nation. The type of catholicism practiced there is quite different from the catholicism practiced elsewhere. It more resembles polytheistic religions when it comes to the number of individuals that are on the receiving end of worship. The worship of saints is pervasive. In most of the cathedrals I visited, in the most prominent spot hanging over the altar was not Jesus, as you would expect…there were statues of Mary, as though she was the most important element of their worship. Nearly every weekend there were festivals celebrating Mary of This and Mary of That. There were statues of many and varied saints in every town. People were often seen to stop by and pray to these saints. Sicilians, it seems, have lost their belief in Jesus. Perhaps having a cultural memory of the truth of Jesus plays out in their anxiety over having lost that truth and now, not having the hope of Jesus, are left with the fear of eternal loss. They fear that their loved ones are not going to heaven, but they don’t know why their fear is so great. They have ancient memory of having known the truth, but they no longer do. They try to remember and pray their loved ones into heaven instead of being able rest assured in the knowledge of the saving grace of Jesus Christ. It’s worse to have known the truth and lost it than it is to never have known the truth (2 Peter 2:20-22). And, if they are so anxious over the fate of their loved ones, how much more so are they anxious over what their own fate will be when they, too, die?
The small church that we went to work with was the only evangelical christian church in the three towns in the area. The only evangelical church for a population of nearly 100,000 people.
Sicily is a very beautiful, and very sad place with the dead present everywhere. The island where the early Chrisitan Church once flourished, and where the Apostle Paul once walked and taught, has forgotten Jesus.
Pray for Sicily.
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