With the Labor Day holiday, we had the day off and took a short driving trip to a couple of the California missions nearby that, I hate to admit, native Californians that we are, we’d never seen before. I guess, like a lot of other people, we think ‘culture’ is something the emanates from elsewhere, and couldn’t possibly be in our own back yard.
As well, it occurred to us that the California missions are not as frequently visited generally as they once were, since the notion of a foreign religious zealot coming to proselytize and alter the native traditions of an indigenous people is, in the 21st century, about as far away from anyone’s idea of political correctness as it is possible to get. I won’t even try to discuss how anachronistic this point of view is, other than to say that, from the time of the discovery of the new world until only the last 50 years or so, colonialism thrived. Further, what I can gather about the historical figure of Fra Junipero Serra, the founder of the chain of missions in California, makes him seem about as far away from a self-aggrandizing colonial opportunist as it would be possible to be. His motivation was one of honestly felt religious conviction that lead him, at age 56, begin work that finished only with his death, from snakebite, at age 70.
We visited Mission San Antonio de Padua, founded in 1771, and certainly among the earliest survivals of California’s built environment. Cleverly built, too, using simple, locally produced materials- adobe mud bricks, and beams made from locally felled redwood trees- to produce magnificent, trabeated structures. the mission church would certainly inspire an attitude of devotion, with its dim interior, soaring ceiling, and focus on the decoration of the alter- certainly a wonderful setting for the panoply of religion. Environmental impact? There is none, really, as the building was constructed simply of ample local materials and, once derelict, the structure will decompose naturally and eventually be one with the elements from which it arose.
The artwork within the chapel at San Antonio, although ostensibly what one would expect within a Roman Catholic place of worship, bears, it seems to be, greater examination than it, or any of the other mission churches, have received. One wonders to what extent the iconography contained within the illustrations of the stations of the cross were changed slightly to give them resonance with the native worshippers. Certainly, a number of paintings survive from the founding of the missions, and I would venture to say that it would not have been automatic for these neophytes to achieve an attitude of devotion by looking at precisely the same imagery as would have been considered inspirational by a late 18th century European Spaniard.
We also tried to visit the nearby Mission San Miguel Arcangel, sadly closed due to earthquake damage, the Achilles heal of most masonry structures, suffered in 2003. Still, a run of over 200 years isn’t bad for a simply constructed building. Even so, the damage is being repaired and I would encourage my readers to send a donation for the conservation of this precious building to
Friends of Mission San Miguel
PO Box 69
San Miguel, California 93451