Piñata Spirituality: A Reflection on The Evangelical Mobility of the Spiritual Classics

I remember as a young child taking a stick and dancing around a traditional Mexican piñata of seven brightly colored cones with wavy strands of crepe paper. With a jerk the candy-filled star flew up into the air as a bandana was tied around my face to cover my eyes and my primos y primas (cousins) and friends began to yell, “¡Dale!, ¡dale!, ¡dale! más arriba; más abajo; más fuerte; ¡dale!”¹

I don’t remember breaking the piñata, I suspect an older and stronger primo, busted it open. I do remember scrambling around with my primas y primos collecting sweet Mexican goodness off the ground. That is the secret of a good piñata, the candy, graces showering down upon the earth for the joy of all God’s children.

I begin my article on the evangelical mobility of the Christian spiritual classics, with a star shaped piñata for a specific reason. It will serve as the model of evangelical and spiritual mobility I am considering in this essay. Mobility, which is migration from one place to another, as well as the ability to move and adapt easily and quickly, occurs and has occurred in Christianity to such an extent that Christians often forget or ignore the cultural origins and contexts of certain spiritual classics. Of course this spiritual and religious immigration is not always that easy or quick. Often it takes years for spiritual writings, art, music, and so on to become classics, and, when they do, they often times lose their connection to their original contexts and perhaps even lose some of their spiritual gusto as a result. Did you know Santa Teresa de Avila (Teresona to her amigo/as) and Ignazio de Loyola (Nachito) are from Spain, therefore Hispanic saints?

Contextually, Piñatas are immediately associated with Hispanic customs and traditions, specifically Mexican! So why do Christians ignore the Spanish roots of Modern mysticism as if Pedro de Alcantara (not Peter), Francisco de Osuna, Teresa de Avila, Juan (not John) de la Cruz y muchos otr@s grew up in a Christian vacuum where cultural nuances, customs, traditions and beliefs had nothing to offer our spiritual masters, or even contemporary theologians and spiritual writers? If they continue to inspire and move contemporary audiences around the world, it is because their form of Spanish spirituality and mysticism

Piñata.

Courtesy José Lira

had and has “religious mobility,” which, although rooted in a cultural and historical cotidiano² and context, transcends this to speak to contemporary cultures and peoples.

The question of “religious mobility,”³ is not just a question for social and religious studies. It is so much more than changing from one religion to another or from one form of Christianity to another. Religious seekers today are finding that the Christian spiritual classics⁴ of the past have an evangelical and spiritual mobility that makes them inviting to contemporary believers. Moreover, when these classics are contextualized in their cultural and religious world, they tend to regain much of their oomph, making them especially enticing and challenging to contemporary participants.

I choose to use “participant” rather than readers of the spiritual classics, because as we know, the spiritual classics of Christianity are not always the written works like poetry, prayers or spiritual treatises of great spiritual writers. Very often, they are the devotional practices, art and music of popular Catholicism that require active participation. These spiritual classics are the product of a sacramental or symbol producing Christian mindset because as doctoral student at the Gregorian University, Marcello Schiano states, everything “that concerns the spiritual life of an individual finds symbolic expression in a spontaneous way. Symbol is not limited to a single expressive function, but extends the ordinary appearance of things according to a spiritual path; it allows us through visible means to touch the invisible.”⁵ These symbols are participative events like the breaking of a piñata, which entices participants with the promise of graces and...