THE OLDEST SAINT IN SAN VICENTE DE CHUCURÍ
- Ana Mena Lobo
- Dec 17, 2022
- 3 min read
About forty minutes by car, in the rural area of San Vicente, I came across this wonderful, hidden, and interesting story: a saint over a hundred years old who marked the history of the town and, above all, that of the Serrano family.
'La Pita', this is the name of the farm where we were received by an old house, one of those with beaten-down walls, with an Andean air, cozy and full of stories. Seeing the white colors of the walls and the red paint for the details, the wide hallways full of family photos, I couldn't help but relate what I saw to the Buendía house, in One Hundred Years of Solitude.
I was getting lost among so many beautiful and interesting things, and suddenly a natural altar with a statue caught my eye. What is an altar of a saint doing at the entrance of an old farm? Don Alejandro Serrano told me:
"My paternal grandfather brought that, he must be about a hundred years old; let's see, if we recently celebrated my dad's centenary and when that the saint is already here... yes, about a hundred years or more, he must be" .
They say that faith moves mountains and I believe that in this case, it moved everything possible for that saint to reach Chucurí. From the one brought from abroad, then the arrival in Barranquilla, from Barranquilla to Barranca (at that time by river transport) and from Barranca to San Vicente by mule. Such an effort should be compensated:
"And on the first of January, the old man (Don Alejandro refers to his grandfather) celebrated a party for him. He gave a cow to the llanera, there was a procession and then all the people participated, they threw a lot of gunpowder... it was like a bazaar".
After years of celebration and, when a good part of the town already knew the benefits of the Holy Lord of Good Hope, the grandfather died. Don Alejandro remembers some verses that his father recited to him about the death of his grandfather:
"This first of January everything has changed for us, the whole town already knows, that the old man died on us".
And as they say out there - and in this case literally - 'the Saint began to suffer'. Even the church of Santa Cruz de Girón ended up with the statue, well, Don Alejandro's grandmother, according to what she told me, if one thing was clear to her, was that wherever she was, the saint must be.
Time passed and the parish priest of the time got tired of having the statue filed away and one day, when the family hardly remembered the saint, the grandmother said to Don Alejandro's father: And why don't you take the Saint from Good Hope for Pita?
The statue of that Jesus who is also called 'Lord of Justice' has been on the farm for nearly forty years. Some distant members of the family come exclusively to bring papers, to thank for some miracle or to ask for one; Don Alejandro, for his part, affirms that "in the blacksmith's house, a wooden hoe" and it is already proven that they got used to that extra face in his house.
What is certain is that that saint, that statue, or that faith (whatever you prefer to call it) went through the history of the town, as it was able to make people pray on the first of January; and also, she went through the history of the family, Victoria-one of Don Alejandro's granddaughters-confirms it to me, she also knows the story of the grandfather, the party, the prayers, the verse and the Lord of Good Hope .
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