Dinner will be at 7:30 because of the . . .

We could not quite make out the reason, spoken in Spanish. We surmised another party was in store, but in this town of San Juan de Ortega, the population counts just twenty persons, so any party was not bound to keep us up too late.

However, the reason for a late dinner turned out to be much more significant: no party, rather a twice-a-year phenomenon engineered by the hand of Juan of Ortega himself, an architect and friend of pilgrims on their way to Santiago.

His bones lie in a stone coffin in the town church he designed. Yes, real bones, fairly well authenticated as the true remains of San Juan de Ortega himself.

In the eleventh century, few among the population of Northern Spain could read, so the church created pictures for their churches. In designing the church building in this town that would eventually bear his name, Juan took his knowledge of astronomy and architecture to create a building that channels sunlight into a spotlight. It would bring attention to reliefs and sculptures in the church that told the story of Christ, starting with Elizabeth and the Annunciation.

Clever Juan the architect, placed a window in the stone church walls. Twice a year, once each equinox, the sun positions light through a window, fall and spring, like a piercing arrow. On these days, the beam of light directly highlights each relief or sculpture on the church wall telling the story of Christ as the window’s spotlight passes left to right across the front of the church.

One highlighted story transitions to another for about twenty minutes. Unfortunately, this show was forgotten for centuries, only to be rediscovered in 1974.

We had no anticipation of the event before arriving in this tiny place, but the town’s hosts were so proud that they wanted us to see the performance of the sun and San Juan’s ingenuity. That’s why they delayed dinner. In the end, just 22 people sat in the church to revere a quiet merger of art, science, and sacred devotion.

The high standards of art and science do not belong just to the moderns; our medieval ancestors were using them for creative reverence more cleverly than we could image today.

I was the last to leave the cavernous room. The spotlight still had stories to emphasize, but our 7:30 dinner reservation was calling, not just to dine, but to thank our hosts for pointing us to a heritage that refuses to pass away.

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