A Religious Ritual With the Startling Look of Real Life

My earliest memory of the Stations of the Cross is of being in second or third grade and being herded into church, in line, by Sister Ambrose, under the stern eye of the principal, Sister Isabella. Woe to the girl who turned to whisper, to the boy who laughed or nudged a friend.

During these weekly services, a priest and altar boys walked in procession around the church, stopping at 14 icons that formed a kind of storyboard of Christ’s journey to Crucifixion. We recited prayers at each stop and then sang verses from the Stabat Mater.

The slow hypnotic ritual of kneel and pray, stand and sing, 14 times around the church, underscored the penitential season of Lent, a time of private, meditative prayer and reflection on sin and redemption. This is my Catholicism, a religion pure and spare in its ritual and ceremony. So I read with interest but a measure of detachment in The Times about how the emotional style of immigrant Latinos is bringing a “new wave of change” to the Los Angeles archdiocese.

This is a story about a loss of detachment.

I recently started teaching sixth-grade religious education classes at my church, St. John Eudes in Chatsworth. Two weeks ago, our curriculum was on the stations. The children illustrated each of the 14 stations and talked about how Jesus was taunted and humiliated and how he suffered before he died.

As we were leaving after class, Frankie, one of the first kids out, ran back in to announce a disturbance. Glancing out at the dark parking lot, I saw a film-at-11 preview: a bunch of young men with shaved heads and baggy clothing, standing in groups and shouting at one another. Two cars were pulled up at angles, the headlights throwing shadows that punctuated their gestures and threats. My fellow teacher, Kathy, and I looked at each other. How many times had we heard of innocent bystanders taking bullets meant for gangbangers?

We rounded up the kids and herded them into the school library. Jim, head of the middle school program, went to check the commotion. Then, as I watched from across the parking lot, one of the men in the group came over to us. “Somebody overheard that you think we’re a gang thing over here,” he said. “I just wanted to let you know that we’re the Spanish prayer group, making the Stations of the Cross.

“It’s OK,” he continued. “I understand how you’d think. . . . Some of our members used to be in gangs.”

They were indeed a rowdy, messy crowd, but not the kind we thought. They were reenacting the stations, creating the noise and commotion that Jesus probably faced as he walked the road to Calvary. Later, Sister Guadalupe, who is in charge of the church’s Spanish ministry, said the young people doing the living stations “really get into the suffering of Jesus,” that it makes Lent relevant to them. Not exactly something Sister Ambrose was aiming for way back when.

But it must have worked for Mario Elias, one of those practicing in the parking lot for Good Friday. Elias, 28, credits the Spanish youth group with helping turn his life around. He had been involved with drugs and gangs from the age of 12. Then, “about five years ago, I got tired of all that stuff. There’s so much craziness out there. You see friends dying. . . . Something clicked. I didn’t want to end up like that. That focused me.”

He started going to the Spanish youth group--”it was a struggle in the beginning”--and soon he was volunteering to help other young people. He now works at Target and volunteers with the youth group nights and weekends.

The group often stages pageants, both religious ones like the stations and sometimes simple morality plays about gangs. And they’re often mistaken for the real thing, Elias said, “especially the scene where we’re pushing Jesus.” But that’s OK, too. “I like it ‘cause then we can talk to people, tell them about what we’re doing, and you know, give a little esperanza, a little hope.”

To these devout Catholics, the stations are alive with the night in the city, smelling not of incense but of night jasmine, lit not by candles but by headlights, accompanied not by a medieval hymn but by a Camaro hum.

Is their way better, or just different? Is it the kiss of death to the church I grew up in? Or is it a breath of life?