LutheranChik's amazing post about Holy Innocents (observed December 28th) reminded me of the large impact of that story in my life.
When I was six, my family went to Brownsville, Mexico (on the Mexico/US border). My dad had taken a job contracting repairs to a fire-damaged hotel there. I'm not sure why he did this - we lived in Houston, 350 miles away, and of course we had to drive there. He got a free hotel room for doing the work, and I guess my parents thought it was a way for us to get to go to Mexico.
So we all went for, maybe a week? By all I mean my parents, one of my brothers (approx. 14 then), two of my sisters (approx. 4 and 13), and me. The room had 2 double beds - my parents had one and the 4 kids were in the other, just like the grandparents in Charlie & the Chocolate Factory. (Unfortunately, we didn't get along as sweetly as Grandpa George, Grandma Georgina, Grandpa Joe and Grandma Josephine did. There was a lot of kicking and complaining and finally a roll-away was obtained for my brother.)
While my dad worked, my mom would load us kids into the big green station wagon and drive across the border into Mexico (!) This was not a good idea, given that she couldn't read Spanish and was always going the wrong way on one-way streets, but somehow we all survived.
One day, in one of the artisan/souvenir shops, we were all wandering around independently (with our hands behind our backs, as we had learned to do in many antique shops over the years), and I came face-to-face with a triptych of the Massacre of the Holy Innocents, about 12" x 12".
Of course I was raised in the Episcopal Church in the US, and I had never, ever seen anything like this (it was 1971 and there wasn't so much on TV then!). I had also never heard of the Massacre of the Holy Innocents. They didn't tell us that story in Sunday School at my church.
I must have stood there for two or three full minutes gazing at this terrifying, horrible thing. I had no idea what it was, what it meant, why these people were killing the little naked children and making their mothers cry so terribly. I was sick at my stomach.
Finally I realized that my mother was calling me, and had been for some time. I scurried over to her and we paid and left. I somehow had the idea that I had been looking at something bad and dirty (that was true!) that I wasn't supposed to (like somebody's brother's Playboy magazine). I didn't tell my mom.
I thought about it a lot over the years. In some sense, it shaped my early ideas about Mexicans and Mexico. As I got older and had Catholic friends and attended youth group with them, and sometimes CCD (like prison on Sunday nights), it also informed my ideas about Catholicism. (By that time I had realized what it was and that it was a Mexican/Catholic-type thing.)
I now work in international education and have had several opportunities in various countries to visit shrines, tombs, altars, etc. where there are relics, graphic depictions of torture, etc. in churches and religious settings. (Sometime I'll write about seeing the head of St. Catherine of Siena with a group of Texas Aggies). I don't understand it, but I can appreciate that it means something powerful to other people to have visual representations of such things in their worship, in their homes.
Seeing that triptych caused the death of some of my innocence (whether it was holy or not.) And kids today get to be much less innocent for a much shorter period of time than I did.
