QUARANTINE BLOG # 159

Ponce de Leon, the first governor of Puerto Rico, so the story goes, went to Florida searching for the Fountain of Youth.  He did, in 1513, discover a land which he named La Florida, Spanish for “the flowered one.”  In the accounts of his extensive preparation there is no mention of the existence or interest in a fountain of youth.

Instead of quixotic hunt for a mythical fountain, Juan Ponce de Leon’s should be given his proper place in history as the European who discovered the Gulf Stream which became the oceanic highway from America to Europe.

Let’s put the mystery of the Fountain of Youth, behind us and look visit some of the sights of San Juan that will make us feel young.

This “Guardian of the Spanish Main” is a walled city built to protect Spain’s emerging interests in the New World.  The average height is 42 feet.  It is 18 feet wide at the top and 40 feet at the bottom, thick enough to stop a cannon ball.

The city once had six heavy wooden doors that were closed at sundown to cut off access.  San Juan Gate is the last one of the six to survive.

Returning naval officers would march through that gate and report to the governor’s office.  They would first stop at San Juan Cathedral, built in the 1520s, and give thanks to God for a safe voyage.

At Old San Juan’s northwest point, sits Castillo de San Felipe del Morro.  Its sole purpose was to protect both the bay and the city itself from enemy attack.

In 1599 Spain sent orders to wall in the whole city.  Castillo de San Cristóbal covered about 27 acres of land, basically the whole city.

“La Garita Del Diablo” – the Devil’s Guard Post – is the most solitary sentry post on the wall; tradition says it is haunted.  One morning guards went to relief a soldier named Sánchez, and all they found was his rifle, his cartridge belt and his uniform.  The soldiers said a demon had taken him.

But the truth. Sánchez had a girlfriend named Diana.  One night he sent her a message of rendezvous.  The following night, they met on the beach.  Sanchez changed out of his uniform and into the civilian clothes Diana had brought him.  They fled towards El Yunque mountain, build a home and lived happily ever after.

Or so the story goes.

One more song.

Life in Puerto Rico could be harsh, but those who left, as illustrated in songs like Noel Estrada’s poignant ballad, “In My Old San Juan” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jFgZfQaJDpk felt a deep ache of nostalgia. “One afternoon I departed for a foreign nation. That is how destiny would have it. But my heart remained by the sea in my Old San Juan.”

When you watch the video I made, see how many people you can identify.  Correct answers are at the end.

Next Saturday we will sail to “Sweet Saint Martin’s Land.”

**   At one point in his book The Gospel According to Peanuts, Robert L. Short writes about the separation of the Church and the arts, specificially about people who say that art is what it is and a spiritual meaning should not be forced into the piece, and those who say the expression of faith should not be limited to a sacred building one day a week.

Such a “faith” is so little that it cannot conceive of itself except as existing in some tiny, closed compartment.  It is a “faith” that does not have relevance to all of life, and hence is no faith at all, but only a small hole large enough at best for the head of a human ostrich.

 “By faith we understand that the worlds were prepared by the word of God, so that what is seen was made from things that are not visible” (Hebrews 11:3 NRSV).  If the Church fails to use the divine imagination given to it, to see the unseen, to see “sermons in stones and good in everything,” to see “that all that passes to corruption is a parable,” as Karl Barth has put it, it will constantly be embarrassed by a world capable of far more imagination than the Church itself.

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