Rafael Salmerón Pinar
From the years of my childhood I indelibly remember those nights of Viernes de Dolores, in which, leaning out of the door of my house in what was then General Mola street, and after an afternoon of impatient waiting, he let me be embraced by enthusiasm and I surrendered to emotion when, with the appearance of the first stars, the Armaos band began its traditional parade from the once-famous Hogar del Productor. It would not take long for the rest of the brotherhoods to be heard and seen on some corner, in an orderly ceremony of confusion that deafened the streets and squares of Cieza for a few hours, and made up the most genuine and ancestral preamble in the history of our Holy Week. .
Over the years that custom, which time had turned into an almost obligatory rite, gradually faded along with the echo of the drums and bugles that carried it out. And, although in those other years straddling the old and the new century they would try to rescue -with other spells, it is true- such an inveterate custom, that prodigious thunder, astonishment and illusion of children and adults, silenced who knows if forever.
She would not be left, however, orphaned and empty on the night of Ciezano's Passion Friday; While that bustle of bands was fading, the silent and serene Way of the Cross of Nuestro Padre Jesús de Medinaceli made its way, an austere and overwhelming procession that for four decades has signed each and every Friday of Ciezana Lent as a permanent advertising poster of the mysteries of the Passion, Death and Resurrection of Our Lord.
It was like this, following in the footsteps of Medinaceli on his pilgrimage through the streets of the town or going out to meet him as he passed through our homes, as we ciezanos were recounting that time of spiritual renewal, preparation and conversion to the Gospel, that time of Vespers that every year leads us inexorably before "the tree of the cross, where the salvation of the world was nailed".
It continues to be no other way in the present, so that over the years the Via Crucis of Medinaceli has given a singular and unmistakable stamp, typical if you will, to the Lenten liturgy of Ciez, whose epilogue is written in the immense the night of Friday of Dolores in front of the old convent of San Joaquín, because it is precisely in the Esquina del Convento, the same scenario in which the Courtesy puts an end to the Semana Mayor de Cieza every year, where the episode that opens the cancellation of it.
La Dolorosa, who since the end of the last century has starred from that same temple in one of the newly minted transfers of Holy Week in Ciez, patiently awaits the arrival of Jesús de Medinaceli to meet him and, before hundreds of expectant glances, shake him between his arms with that heart-wrenching embrace that he will never give him on the street of Bitterness and that instead heralds the merciful embrace with which he will receive his inert body when it is taken down from the cross.
This is how on the night of Friday Dolores Cieza takes, by overwhelming and fervent popular will, the license to upset the order of the story, so that, in the rhythm of the old Convent, the Lord, Jesus de Medinaceli, meets with his most loving mother, María, la Santísima Virgen de los Dolores, la Dolorosa; a fleeting moment that makes hearts flutter in the Plaza de la Esquina del Convento, because no one is unaware that with the meeting of Medinaceli and La Dolorosa Cieza, Lent closes so that Holy Week begins.
