The newly plowed rows flicker by, looking like a fan from the car window; the miles of strawberry fields are carefully tented in white awnings, catching the strong California sun, like sails full of wind. There is a richness in the air, air full of fertilizer and chlorophyll, and the wealth of the ocean. The valley is like an oyster, framed in by low, eucalyptus-laden mountains, and the Pacific Ocean just over one side of the crown. In the middle, a pearl rises; not towering over the valley like a sentry, but planted in it, like the people and the plants who have grown here for so many years. The pinkish brightness of the stucco walls, the tiled roof and tower, the softly arched windows filled with small jewels of glass all present a still and majestic presence in the middle of the well-used land and hard-earned families of the farm valley, like Our Lady sitting at her distaff, the Mother of God in a small Galilean town.
As the Pearl-Church comes closer, it is apparent that there is a small estate, a conglomeration of monuments, school, small chapel, rectory, and houses of the dead all clustered around the skirt folds of the Mother-church. Rustic trucks, driven and used in their true capacities, patiently await their masters in the parking lot, like the horses outside in times long past.
The steps leading to the main church fan out like an apron, bleached and warm in the strong sun, afforded no shade among the fields; and the three sets of great doors are similarly bleached, and strong. Inside, the church is resplendent in her painting of Our Lady above the high altar; the Sacred Heart of Jesus statue, Our Lady of Fatima; windows of the saints given by groups and families, like “The Society of the Holy Ghost”. St. Philomena stands quietly in the back.
This church, this pearl of the valley, has not been wreckovated. The rows of pews still stand facing the altar in humility and not circled around (making the parishioners stare at each other during the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass). The focus still remains the priest and the altar- largely due to the efforts and resistance to changes by some of the parishioners.
They come, now, the parishioners. They enter quietly and reverently, for the most part, covering their foreheads in Holy Water. There are Portuguese families here, ergo the important place near the altar of Our Lady of Fatima, the Portuguese who came escaping poverty and religious persecution of early 20th century Portugal; there are the descendants of those who ran from the sand-winds of middle American depression in the 1930’s. If one has ever read John Steinbeck’s novels, one can grasp a little of the great suffering that these people faced in their forced immigration. They came here, to this valley and others like it along the Central Coast, and found some relief. Their grandchildren and great-grandchildren cling to this valley now, and to their memory, buried next to this church in the tombs.
Their faces are brown, and wrinkled, and they stand in the pews like sheep, next to the many Hispanic folk who’ve come, also escaping poverty in their home countries. The Hispanic, though, are really claiming what was settled here by their race first: the Indian who lived here, the Spanish priests who evangelized and built the missions, and the cowboys and field workers.
Sadly, though, because of the vernacular allowed in the Mass after the sixties, the division between Hispanic, Portuguese and eclectic Caucasian is deeper now, not less: it is lingual division, which cuts more cleanly because language is the mother of understanding. Sadly, now, many people come in to Mass, not knowing truly the reverence due to the Sacrifice: the wearing of jeans and casual clothes is less common here than in other Novus Ordo churches but still is an indication of the intrusion of secular culture. Sadly, it seems the Society of the Holy Ghost has disbanded; the altar rails are gone and the priests often make sermons that instill doubt into the minds of their flock.
This church, the Pearl of the Valley, bright as it appears, is under the clouds of Satanic battle. It is a good place, a Holy Place, and a sign of Christ for the hard-working, the strawberry picker and the flower-grower, for the immigrant stranger and the generational families. Therefore, like so many other Holy Places like it, it is under attack- a soft, sick, subtle attack, a cultural and dogmatic attack.
But the sky is blue; the children slide on the railings down the wide staircase in the sun; where are the bombs? Where are the clouds and the acid rain?
The wreckovaters came, bombing: and were stopped, by the grace of God. The ill-formed priests come and go, with their clouds of confused faith; some good priests have come, too. The acid-rain of a self-oriented and blasphemous culture rain all around; and the wet of it sometimes is brought into the very sanctuary of the church. The parishioners themselves have lost some of their edge, their understanding of the stakes involved in the keeping or losing of their faith. But they are there, most it seems, in good faith, at the mercy of their shepherds (as Our Lord said it would be). So it is the shepherds who stand on the knife edge in these times, and many of them were themselves lost in the wake of a modernist revolution, in the ambiguities of these times.
Yet, yet. The Strawberry-Picker Church lives on: in the eyes and folded hands of the old man in the front; the quiet man who suffers and prays at the drops of Christ’s blood left in the carpet on the floor; the choir that sings chant and the priest who looks around, looks for places to heal and bind up in his flock; in the children who are living to see the rotten fruits of the revolutionary times and perhaps, will look for Tradition as a refuge; in the silent witness of the dead in their tombs, so close to the place where people gather to talk after Mass, sharing their joys, sorrows, new babies and marriages. You see, the Strawberry-Picker Church has not left Tradition completely, even with the best efforts of the liturgical bombers and the modernists- she carries Tradition with her, she is built on the many lives of those who now lay asleep on their stone beds; she is built in part, on the history of the work, suffering and lives of those who have escaped to this valley by the ocean. She is besieged, but not dead, not invalid, not lost- I cannot think it, being there on a bright Sunday at Mass, with the sounds of Gregorian chant swirling gently out the open window, to join the fertile air outside.
