Novena Day 29: The Sorrowful Mysteries The End of the World As We Know It

Novena Day 29: The Sorrowful Mysteries

The End of the World As We Know It

I welcome Thanksgiving as a harvest festival and as family together time. In a little bit we will head to my brother’s with pies and squash and prepare for stories and laughter.  But I know for the indigenous peoples of this land this is no day of celebration.

By the time the Pilgrims landed in Plymouth (about fifteen minutes from where I grew up on the coast of Massachusetts) there were already 100 million dead in North and South America. One hundred million dead.

Columbus brought to the “new world” murder, slavery, rape, ecocide, plagues, torture, and genocide on a scale it is almost impossible to imagine. I remember first reading in college the accounts of the Jesuit priest Las Casas who accompanied him. “We killed the men, violated the women, slaughtered the babies, and made them all good Christians,” was repeated throughout the text…and from one place to another.

 I can remember feeling queasy and overwhelmed as I sat in the library. I had signed up for a history class, imagining I’d be a history major, called The Making of the Modern World. And yet, somehow, we never discussed how the modern world was built on a platform of incomprehensible violence.

Nor did we discuss the ecological devastation of conquerors who clubbed entire species into extinction for the sheer thrill of it. Or dammed rivers and disrupted fisheries, felled forests indiscriminately, whose rape and pillage was directed at the earth as well as the indigenous people.

For those people in the new world, the end of the world began in 1492.

Growing up near Plymouth, I knew a lot about the Pilgrims. Or thought I did anyway. As a child I learned that Squanto had welcomed the Europeans and helped them learn how to grow food and they enjoyed a meal together after a year of initial hardship.

 The Indians and the Europeans were friends and soon the Pilgrims were thriving in the colonies.

I did not know that most of Squanto’s people, and most of the indigenous people of Massachusetts, had been wiped out by smallpox, transmitted by European fishermen, in the preceding years before the Pilgrims arrived. Or that Squanto spoke English because he had been enslaved and transported to Europe, only to return and find his people vanished. 

What must have been his heartbreak? As a child I thought the first American peoples were the Pilgrims and they were welcomed by the Indians. No mention was made of the catastrophic destruction initiated a little over a hundred years earlier that continued unabated until the Mayflower’s arrival.  Nor was I told as a child of the ecological devastation, how plants and animals simply vanished in that time as the conquerors clubbed birds and animals to death for the sheer sport of it.

I know. It feels overwhelmingly awful. Can’t we just turn on the football game?

But the rosary gives us courage to bear witness to the truth. It takes us through the sorrows step by step, bead by bead, and we carry the cross with all of life, with all that is, and will be. I can feel joy on one side of me, the joy of a people who still knew how to live in collaboration with the land, and a mysterious glory on the other. And because of that I do not look away.

When I finish this nine days, people throughout the Americas will begin offering up their own novena to Our Lady Guadalupe. She appeared to Juan Diego a hundred years before the Pilgrims arrived. She is Tonantzen the Great Mother of the Aztecs and She is the Virgin Mary and She is the Woman Clothed in the Sun from Revelations. She arrives with a message and a hand extended in the midst of an inconceivably terrible genocide.

 An ongoing genocide. Where does the end of the world begin? Where does it end?

Today I am grateful for Our Lady’s presence in my life that allows me to live with the complexities of both joy and sorrow and with the courage to stand at the foot of the cross.

[PS: I know Our Lady is often offers guidance with which mysteries fall on what days. It did not escape my notice that today, Thanksgiving, we are praying the sorrowful mysteries.]

Contemporary art used to illustrate Los Casas book A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indes.