Quantos Sao?

Before I spent Holy Week in the Azores seven years ago, what little I knew about the islands and their people was based on my husband's tales of having been stationed there as a lieutenant in the Portuguese Navy. I had my own later experience of the Azorean community in California, and its festival of the Holy Spirit.

That traditional celebration begins on Pentecost and continues for weeks. It includes special foods and religious processions that date back to the fourteenth century. Though it originated in Portugal, its observance has largely died out there. It continues today in the Azores, and in Azorean communities in the United States, Brazil, and Africa. So I knew there was something different about the islands, even before I set foot there.

Spending Holy Week in the Azores was a geographic happenstance. The islands seemed a convenient place for me and my husband (who was spending a sabbatical in Portugal) to meet for a much-needed reunion. I flew from the United States, arriving in a driving rain. When my plane landed in Sao Miguel, the largest island in an archipelago of nine volcanic outcrops in the northern Atlantic, it was like falling into a time warp.

Eight hundred miles west of Lisbon and at roughly the same latitude as Baltimore, each island has its own character. Sao Miguel is known for its verdant fields, dairy cows, and hydrangeas. Pico's bleak lava-rock landscape produces a fabulous wine. Terceira hosts an American Air Force base that may have figured in "rendition" flights. And Faial is where the Capelinhos volcano erupted in 1958, causing so much destruction the United States passed a special law to accommodate evacuees.

Travel from one island to the next is at the mercy of the weather. No boats or planes venture out when conditions are judged unsafe. So Azoreans take their Holy Week seriously, as befits their isolated, vulnerable, hard-scrabble lives. The churches are packed with worshipers of all ages (in contrast to the near-empty churches on the Portuguese mainland), and you're lucky if you can find a seat during the long services. Throughout the week, it is not uncommon to see black-clad figures, usually women, kneeling on the steps of the churches in the evening, after the buildings have closed for the night. The drama of Holy Week is visceral and shockingly present.

Sao Miguel has its own Holy Week tradition. Pilgrim bands, made up mostly of young men, circumambulate the island's hundred-mile periphery. They carry nothing with them, and rely entirely on local residents and churches for their food and lodging. With few modern facilities for grooming and hygiene, the pilgrims we met were bedraggled and pungent. Some had bandaged feet from their days of walking. They were usually accompanied by several older men, veterans of previous walks. During the journey, the pilgrims accept prayer requests from the island's villagers, which are then joined to the prayer of the group. By tradition, though, there is an exchange: The petitioner incurs a sacred duty to pray for the pilgrims in return. Thus the person requesting prayers must ask, "Quantos Sao?" ("How many of you are there?"), and is obligated to say one Hail Mary for each pilgrim.

That is how my husband and I found ourselves at a hotel on Sao Miguel "saying" rosary beads, our attention focused on the faces of the passing pilgrims whom we had asked to pray for a special intention. When we planned our trip, meeting in the Atlantic Ocean seemed like a delightful vacation fantasy. But by the time we got to the island, a serious family matter had turned into our chief concern. The harsh Azorean landscape and the heavy sadness of Holy Week seemed to match our mood.

Nothing in my previous experience of Holy Week had prepared me for the moving tableau of the pilgrim bands. My husband and I were stunned by the pilgrimage and by its power to encompass our personal grief. It seemed to draw us into a human exchange, sweeping us into the Mystical Body of Christ as we had never experienced it before. The disheveled young men who received our pleas seemed to carry them to heaven with their own, just as we carried their intentions. Somehow the sacred circle had expanded to include our own anxiety.

Seven years later, our Azores journey, from the Crucifixion to the Resurrection, is still with us. Holy Week has never been the same.

Jane E. Lytle-Vieira, a secular Carmelite, is a clinical social worker in private practice in Severna Park, Maryland.