On Being, Rather Than Merely Appearing

 “There is kindness wherever there is virtue...
Just as there is the sky wherever there is the star.”
—- Dante (from Convivio)

Day 2

There is, we have found in Spello, a ready sense of belonging.  It manifests in the stories of tourists who visited once and took up residence, along with others who simply return again and again.  It manifests in the authentic greetings to us by the townspeople who readily discount our foreignness and ignorance of the language within a larger and more valued understanding of community.  We are here, which seems to be the only prerequisite of welcome and embrace.  More than once in these recent days, we have applied the metaphorical image we have associated with our farmstead — the taproot — to our experience here; deep, anchoring, earthy, and reconnecting with a cultural and formational ancient heritage in these mountains and fields that has dissipated in our contemporary, New World expression.  We aren’t native here — our ancestors were German and Irish — but we are feeling more Italian by the day.

Here, the ancient stories are embodied in the stones first mortared together in Roman times and later modified in medieval.  There are satellite dishes on roof tops, and power lines stretched between buildings — this is no artifact starved of modernity — but those roofs and buildings have seemingly been here forever with a kind of resident wisdom that informs and teaches and animates and frames.  “These days” are lived in constant and respectful conversation with “those days”, and life seems steadier, more grounded for the mortar of these ancient witnesses.

Angelo Mazzoli, a teacher and poet we met on our first full day in Spello, describes a “biblical animism” which presumably he believes to be this community’s aspiration and which has certainly been our experience, that “can bring new hopes for the future:
— the humility of feeling ourselves with all the others, nobody excluded.
— the intellectual honesty of to be and not to appear.
— the ethical strength of wanting to create the good.”

“Being,” rather than “appearing.”  Authenticity rather than artifice.  Stone that stands through the ages rather than sheet metal we throw up and just as easily tear down with little or no trace.

There are stories here; solid ones; cumulative ones; new ones stacked on top of and informed by ancient ones.

And so it was that yesterday we walked.  We explored a few of the side streets — the vias — that wind among the tight buildings.  Our friends stopped at one point, noticing the carvings above an ancient doorway signifying what had once been a church.  We mused about its interesting location and nondescript facade.  Our friends hadn’t noticed it before despite their years of exploring these pathways.  As we moved away from our pondering an elderly gentleman paused beside his car next door and engaged us in conversation.  Our friends translated his explanatory narrative about the church being built on this hillside as one of several fortress churches in the area by Pope Innocent IV in defense against the competing Pope in Avignon.  Here, on the “Way of Francis” a short distance from Assisi, that ancient Pope intended to prevail.

As he reached the end of his impromptu lesson our historical guide grew silent and we thanked him profusely; appreciating not only his generous gift of time and extensive knowledge, but his willingness to include us within its circle.  He simply shrugged and with a seasoned smile observed quite matter-of-factly that “if you have loved, remember it; if you have learned, share it.”

I don’t know how many times that elderly sage has voiced that rubric, but I suspect I’ll never stop thinking about its wisdom — and taking it to heart.

Remembering.  Sharing.  Fingering Dante’s virtue manifest in kindness.