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.
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