The Saint vs the Sow

 

Norcia is a rural village, nestled in the elevated plain amidst mountains in Umbria, an hour or so southeast of Spello, similarly from Assisi.  Assisi is larger than either Spello or Norcia, more famous and, if the grand and ornate architecture is at all reflective, richer.  Assisi, of course, has its Saint Francis and the cascading stream of Franciscan influence on Christian perspective and spirituality.  Spello has its classic and endearing hill-town charm.  Norcia, by contrast, has its pigs.  It is, by all accounts, the pork capital of Italy - especially cured pork and sausages.  Vegetarians are pitiably second class here - tolerated, as Italians are constitutionally bent to do, but not publicly indulged.  But if all those delectable and diaphanously sliced meats like prosciutto and salami and capocolla, lonzino and pancetta are your appetite, Norcia is your foretaste of heaven.

But though the restaurants and shops convey little evidence of it, and the streets hum only the faintest echo of its melody, Norcia is more than pigs and prosciutto.  It is also the birthplace of Benedict - St. Benedict.  You know, the Patron Saint of all Europe. Benedictine practice:  all those monks and nuns, all those monasteries and prayers, all that sense of the shape of each day and every night, all that sensibility about order and stability and community and humility and responsibility to each other, the world, ourselves and God.  There is a statue of him in the center of town.  There is a church across the piazza, though the earthquakes of 2016 largely destroyed it along with much of the rest of the town.

But there isn’t the collective, communal - civic, even - preoccupation with Norcia’s venerated child as there is around Francis in Assisi.  I had the feeling that if you wanted to talk about Benedict, you might go loiter around the statue, but the rest of the town has other matters on its mind.

We talked about that over dinner the following evening.  Why the vast difference?  I don’t recall anyone at the table voicing it, but it occurs to me in retrospect that, however ancient and even quaint his life now might seem, Francis is in the present tense a sexier, more viscerally appealing character.  He has become something of a patron saint of environmental awareness and care.  He invoked “Brother Sun” and “Sister Moon”, preached to birds and fish and mollified wolves.  I don’t want to caricature him, confining him to bird baths and petrifying him in garden statues. Taken seriously and conscientiously, Francis’ way is as demanding and challenging - perhaps moreso - than others.  It is just that his way sounds at least appealingly and comfortably warm.  Assisi is an easy place - an inspiring place - to visit.

Less so, Norcia.  For one thing there were those earthquakes I mentioned, and the devastation they wrought.  It’s hard to enumerate the scaffolding erected around and throughout this town.  It’s sobering, even after these succeeding seven years, to note the cracks in the walls and the crumbled plaster and the uninhabitable buildings.  

We sought out a monastery noted in a guide book.  Approaching the slightly ajar door, one of us called inside to seek permission to enter.  Answering silence drew us further inside, where we found an eerily empty courtyard and building.  There were tended potted flowers, and an empty wheelchair against the building as if vacated only for a moment with intention to return.  But there was no one there to return.  The compound was utterly deserted, as if in a vanishing moment. Comprehending eventually that if the space was unsafe for the nuns who called it home, it was probably unsafe for us as well, we retreated and pulled closed the heavy wooden doors behind us.  The nuns, we later discovered, had reconstituted their community in temporary quarters nearby and across the street, in a constellation of prefab portable buildings.  

“But where is Benedict?” I pressed my companions.

“Constantly competing with pigs,” one observed.

“And besides,” she continued, “they are focused on all that repair and construction, and how they are going to pay for it.”

And so it is that the Saint competes with the sow, and all that the scaffolding.  

But I wonder if maybe Benedict isn’t smiling from his grave all those centuries removed - approving of all but my characterization of competition?  I have much to learn about Benedict and his teachings, but my limited study convinces me that he had little time for “beliefs” and theological “abstractions”.   He was concerned about how we are to live together - the ordering of our lives, the conduct of our communities, the care with which we tend our hours - all in the light of God’s presence and intention.  Benedict, I sense, had a comprehension that everything is holy - every moment, every conversation, every piece of laundry hanging from the line strung outside the window, every trowel of plaster smoothed over a crack in the wall.  And he was determined that we not lose track of it.  Neither our moments nor our life in each other’s keeping is to be squandered, dissipated, or trivialized.  We aren’t simply to live and then die.  We are to parse our moments and practice our prayers, less in a closet than in the interactive commerce of our lives.  Granular, quotidian, enacted prayer. 

When I think of Benedict I think more of an orchestra than a pinball machine - the harmonious interaction of disparate voices, rather than the ricocheting ping off one surface, then the next. Far from esoteric abstraction, there was a reverent carnality to Benedict’s teaching.  

“Carnality”, as in “meatiness”, as in flesh and bone.  

And so perhaps my question, “Where’s Benedict?” was born out of blind ignorance.  The townspeople may not have called his name or invoked his civic progeny, but he was everywhere - in the scaffolding tending to the rehabilitation of where people actually worship and live and cook and launder; in the sausages and salamis that both nourish them and translate their labors into the economics of living.  Benedict might even call it prayer - sometimes uttered in words and adhered to the hours, but always ground and cased and cured from from the pieces and parts, the earthquakes and the pigs, of life as it comes to us this day.  

And the next.

Holiness, incarnate.  

In the fleshiness of these hours.

The Tree of Life and its Fruit

 In the small piazza near the Chiesa dei Cappuccini S. Severino, high and overlooking the panoramic valley, stands a bronze sculpture by Andrea Roggi titled, “Tree of Life”.  It is a subject by which artists are frequently intrigued; by which faithful are perennially haunted, and to which eternally drawn.  I know nothing of the artist, nor how the sculpture was prompted and finally settled into this location.  But whether simply purchased and installed, or inspired by this particular setting, it evocatively integrates the agricultural region stretching out around us, and the airy expanse of the hillside view.

 

In fact, the sculpture is more air than bronze – an open circle into which passersby love to poke their head, or through which to be photographed.  But if some might be offended by the playful interaction, I suspect the artist might smile at his successful execution as viewers are quite literally drawn into the art.

 

Held aloft on a pedestal perhaps 5-feet tall, the earth is an open globe with a tree rising from its upmost surface toward the heavens.  The tree’s roots dangle into the interior of the world.  But as evocative as are the descending roots, it is the tree, itself, that captivates – the trunk formed by two human bodies glorying in each other while stretching toward Divinity.  In his artist’s statement, Roggi writes:

 

In the Tree of Life, the embraced male and female figures create a bridge between the Earth, 

where the olive tree grows, and the other part of the world, the vault of heaven. 

Like tree branches aiming for the sky, striving to reach the greatest heights, 

we try to strike a balance between a part of ourselves that is rooted in the ground 

and a greater part yearning for the sky: 

part of us is in the ground, but most of us is above the sky.

 

I’ve been captivated by the art ever since passing by it on our first evening here in Spello – the openly beckoning globe, the dangling roots, the exuberant tree; the perfect harmony with the olive groves cascading throughout the hillsides. And that enchanting discernment of the bridge where earth and heaven conjoin.  It is both sensual and inspiring.

 

Various cultures have scratched around on such linkages.  Indigenous peoples have routinely called attention to sacred places – holy places – where Creator and creation come into contact.  Celtic people have given us the notion of “thin places” where the membrane between heaven and earth becomes diaphanous enough to see into the other side.  All recalling us to the intimate proximity of eternity with the quotidian.

 

“The embraced male and female figures…rooted in the ground and a greater part yearning for the sky.”

 

All that said, it is easy to feel like the two have little contact these days, heaven and earth.  Whatever it is in which our roots are dangling, it doesn’t seem very nourishing – or grounding.  Whatever it is toward which our arms our reaching, it doesn’t appear to be very salvific.  And as for embracing one another, well, there isn’t enough of that on which to comment.  We have traded loving for condemnation, exchanged embracing for killing, muffled exuberant reaching with stultifying embitterment.  We have become as estranged from each other as have heaven and earth.  At least earth from heaven.  Easter’s recent “Alleluias” remind us that the gardener still and determinedly toils among us, with saving determination.

 

Perhaps part of the problem is supposing that one approach – one aspect – is adequate. Could it be, however, that the artist is on to something with the inclusion of all three:

 

Rootedness in the earth.

Exuberant embrace of each other.

Celebratory reaching toward heaven.

 

Love of creation, love of each other, an insatiable ache for God.  

 

It will not, after all, go well for us without any one of the three. 

 

All three.

All three.

All three.

The Lingering Quietude of Holy Saturday

 

It is daylight, now, yet the sounds are more muted than a typical Saturday morning; bird song being the primary echoes of last night’s singing.  

 

Throughout the preceding days in this small, ancient Italian hillside village, workers had hung the large paintings – perhaps 8-feet by 4-feet - throughout the narrow streets of the town in preparation for Good Friday’s “Way of the Cross” procession.  Each painting depicted one of the traditional stations of the cross – one, imaging the Roman guards rolling dice for Jesus’ tunic, hung immediately across from our doorway.  

 

We had no idea what to expect.  At the appointed hour – just before 9 pm and well-after dark – townsfolk, perhaps 200 strong, gathered in front of one of the ancient churches, and, following the large cross and accompanying signs of the faith held aloft on poles by strong and fervent assignees, sang our way from station to station.  At each painting, now dimly illuminated by two burning candles on the pavement below, we paused for a reading from scripture, and a prayer from the priest, before resuming our song and our inexorable procession through the cramped lanes forward to the next artfully rendered scene and eventually to the miserable end.  There, after closing priestly words, we were bade to depart in silence – an admonition even we could translate, and with which everyone complied.  

 

Back through the now emptied streets we made our way back toward our apartment, pausing briefly as we passed the now lonely candles still flickering beneath the art.  In silence, and in darkness of more kinds than one, with only those small, flickering flames licking away the void, walked a more utilitarian procession of our own.

 

We are not Catholics, nor do we speak Italian, but we are no strangers to the story.  The images themselves were raconteurs enough.  The readings of the volunteers, the prayers of the priest, the guitar strums by the teenager leading the songs eventually devolved into the accompanying drone over which our own prayers and meditations were hummed. 

 

For as I say, we know the story.

 

There was rain overnight, no doubt extinguishing whatever candles might have remained burning; washing away  – at least literally if not essentially – some of the soot and smudge of the world.  The deeper cleaning needed requires sturdier, more spiritual bristles and water of a different character.  We will be reminded of those tomorrow.

 

But today, amidst the fragrant morning and the industrious joy of the singing birds, the memory of the darkness lingers – the crowd, the murmured responses, the foot treads, the images, the flickering flames.  A day – a mood – perhaps not unlike that one endured by Mary and Martha and Peter and John and all those others who had heard what they could not unhear, seen what they could not unsee.

 

Remembering, seeing, hearing afresh, wandering these same narrow streets now haunted by the echo of grace.

 

 

 

The Gift of Human Decency

 

“Those who think that the world can only be structured as they have known it are the slow learners of history.  They fail to realize that their slow learning curve is actually a form of narcissism and also a lack of knowledge.  Thus, change comes with great difficulty in human history.”

(Richard Rohr, in Hope Against Darkness)

 We have spent time recently in Italy where we are, in every way, out of our element. Despite our rudimentary efforts to familiarize ourselves with the language, we do not speak Italian.  We get by counting out Euros in place of dollars, but it remains to us a “foreign” currency.  Otherwise we point, we pantomime, we make up words.  Every once in awhile, one of them is even recognizable.  

 

What bridges the gaps of understanding?  Sometimes it is the signage or the menus that charitably offer English alongside the native tongue – a generosity rarely exhibited at home.  But as often as not, it is the kindness of strangers that offers the synapse between blank and desperate stares and grace filled comprehension.  Sometimes it is the merchant that is managing a transaction.  Often it is someone simply standing nearby equipped with more multilingualism than either of us mono-speakers.    

 

This is high among the many reasons we visit here:  the immersion in the effluent generosity of strangers.  Italians count it a virtue to be helpful - to notice need, to pay attention to distress, and do what they can to alleviate it.  Yes, that’s a generalization.  There are certainly exceptions, but they are exceptions that prove the rule.

 

Italy, of course, is hardly stainless.  There was and is that whole problem with the Mafia, and more than a little corruption.  And Italians have had their own experience with totalitarian fascism.  Mussolini headed Italy for 23 years, asserting self-interested nationalism and suppressing egalitarianism, while installing dictatorial rule by both legal and illegal means, and ultimately allying himself with Hitler during World War 2.  Eventually Italians recognized that Mussolini was one of the bad guys and, without going into the details, it ended badly for “il Duce.”  Let’s just leave it at that.  Neither he nor his way were ultimately adjudged to be “Italian” in the truest sense of the word.

 

I’ve been thinking about the juxtaposition of our experience with generous Italian hospitality and the current fervor in my own country – choking, as it is these days, with authoritarian suppression, repression, condemnation and sedition. Orwellian doublespeak has become the language of the day, where words have been inverted to suggest the opposite of what they mean.  “Freedom” suddenly looks, for all the world, like coercion. “Liberty” is now enforced by constraint.  Imagination is now blasphemous, self-exploration and expression are now immoral, while exploitation is nonchalantly assumed.  As for historical reflection, that’s now against the law.  “Remembering” is only permitted to be patriotic so as to romanticize it; never honest or critical so as to learn from it.  Has there ever been a time in American history when more freedoms have been removed in the name of…freedom?

 

Moreover, our elected leaders are actively and openly scissoring the fabric of American concourse.  Far too many of them.  They are actively undermining – without supporting evidence other than a dislike of outcomes – our electoral process.  The Governor of the state in which I live recently beat a path to a news conference to condemn as illegal and immoral a grand jury’s indictment brought forward in another state – a grand jury of ordinary citizens of that state, on which she had not sat, and had not been privy to the evidence, and therefore about which she can hold an opinion but no intelligence, and yet about which she feels qualified to speak.  And she is in plentifully ignorant company.  Surely this attempted discrediting of the very legal system by which our country thrives is irresponsible, if not treasonous.  She should know better.  We should all expect better.  We should all collectively be better.  

 

This isn’t theater.  This isn’t a television show.  This isn’t farce contrived for our collective entertainment.  This is “us” – or at least it is who we aspire to be.  Or once did.

 

Honest, not duplicitous.

Imaginatively large, not judgmentally puny.

Expansive, not constraining.

Blessing and encouraging, not mockingly condemning.

Generous, not selfishly stingy.

 

I think about how wonderfully kind it was for the young Italian woman in line behind me to help me know where to go to wait for my cappuccino, and the woman at the market who helped me weigh and label my vegetables; the stranger at the station who confirmed I was boarding the correct train.  The farmer a few miles away who picked us up for a visit because we didn’t have a car.

 

And countless other mercies.

 

And how in earlier times we Americans helped each other build barns.  We gave each other rides.  We shared our equipment.  We shoveled each others sidewalk.  

 

We were community.  Because somehow we knew it was the human way to be. 

 

As I clumsily counted out my Euros, and turned to wait for my coffee to be brought to me on the porch, I knew there was more I should say, but all I could mouth was, “Grazie.”

 

Thank you.  

 

For being human.

 

And recognizing me to be, as well.  

 

Thanks for the lesson in patient, common humanity.

 

Grazie.  Grazie mille.  

 

Perhaps, should you come to my country, I can return the favor.

 

Just don’t ask the Governor.