Finding Spaces Through the Walls

The neighbor in Robert Frost’s poem proverbially remarked that “good walls make good neighbors.”  But Frost never quite seems to buy it, musing that nature seems to have a contrary opinion.

“Something there is that doesn't love a wall,That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,And spills the upper boulders in the sun;And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.”

Walls, in other words, have a way of coming down.  And though the neighbor in the poem resists it and religiously repairs the breeches, I am grateful for the gaps — especially those that are filled with doors that are hospitably opened.

Spello is a walled mountain village. Looked at — strolled through — from a certain perspective it has the feel of a fortress, which in a sense it was in the days when the Romans built the aqueduct to supply it with water, in the days when rivalries and conflicts were more fisted.  Spello was built for precaution.  The walls could be retreated behind.  The gates could be closed and locked.  

The threats have changed over the centuries, but Spello’s walls remain — its citizens adopting, perhaps, Frost’s neighbor’s side of the argument that good walls make good neighbors.

But if those gates and doors can close they can just as easily open, as happened yesterday — not by earthquake but through the agency of generosity.  

We had been to the market in the lower piazza — that weekly congregation of tents, trucks and townsfolk displaying pots and plants and underwear, dresses and shoes —  and were strolling back up the main road, passing one of the shopkeepers standing in her doorway.  Our friends introduced us — the wondrous alchemy of friends introduced to friends by friends — and we spoke of gardens; ours back home, the ones we were planning to see around the village.  And she insisted that we stop by and see her own.  “Ciao” we all exclaimed and we continued on our way, depositing our bags in our respective residences before continuing our exploration.  

Picking up our walk, we meandered along one sideway then another, before turning into still another until stopping near an iron gate in the stone wall that opened into a spacious but largely hidden garden.  We turned toward a woman’s cheerful greeting — our shopkeeper friend — who led us through the gate and in among the flowers, the vegetables and the chickens.  It was beautiful, and largely invisible to a passerby.  

Completing the tour, our host invited us inside her home to see her husband’s work.  Crossing in through a doorway cut into the opposite wall, we entered a room completely filled with a miniature village — handmade houses with tiny furniture and Lilliputian  dishes and inhabitants, fields with vegetables and animals; a complete and expansive Italian village and countryside culminating in a nativity scene all intricately carved from stone and fashioned from plaster.  

It was stunning — a masterpiece of minute detail and whimsically exacting imagination.  And then we were invited into their living space above — ostensibly to see more of his artistic creations, but almost certainly to feel welcomed into the intimacy of their space.  The art was masterful, but the hospitality within these stone walls was overwhelming.  

We descended the steps to the sunlit via outside, voicing our “mille grazies” and “buona sera’s”, and continued on our way; mostly silent for awhile, each of us reflecting on what we had seen and the privilege we felt at being invited behind the walls to see it.  

“Imagine what other wonders are kept silently behind these walls,” we pondered with a mix of awe and reverence, humility and gratitude.  

“Good walls make good neighbors,” insisted Frost’s own neighbor; and while I suppose there could be some truth to that I don’t subscribe to the belief.  What I can say with conviction, however, is that whatever the value of the walls, real friends know the passages through them...

...and use them.

Lunch, Olives, and Peace on Earth

Day 3

We gathered with ex-pats of one degree or another — a dozen or so adventurous souls from the U.S. and Australia who have transplanted their endemic roots to this ancient village. This is a swing time for the English speaking fellowship within this Italian village.  Some have just returned to Spello after a season away; others are preparing to leave for a time.  The luncheon was a chance to convene in the brief overlap.  Few of the group had visited this new oileria which had opened during the summer, and so was met this happy constellation of benefits — fellowship, culinaria, and support of a new local business.  

A single long, wood-plank table dominated the space.  After greetings and introductions we took our seats and the festivities began.  The proprietor introduced us to different varieties of olives from different regions, in different degrees of ripeness, moving on to the oils derived from them.  We sampled them on breads, moved on to vegetables — potatoes, cabbage, shaved fennel, zucchini— and ultimately hand-crafted pasta, with a post-scripting dessert conspicuously devoid of olive.  

In the course of our experience, a couple on the sidewalk outside paused at the door to inquire about lunch.  Virginians themselves, the two were visiting Spello for the day and, as it turned out, there were two empty places at the table.  They gratefully but hesitantly took their seats, and before long their English happily merged with our own.  They were a few courses behind the rest of us, but never mind; we weren’t in a hurry and our host could juggle the sequencing.  The food and the mountain, the commonalities and conviviality quickly enfolded us.  Strangers dissolved into friends.

What is the enzyme that enables such bonding to occur?  Is it the rarified air of mountainous antiquity or simply the common cause of meeting on foreign soil?  Is it the truncated nature of our acquaintance — a clean start devoid of the trailing stories, entanglements, misjudgments that often stain our presentiments and hobble our interactions?  Is it the stage of life that delivers us happily beyond our former competitions?  Is it the food or the wine or a shared exploratory curiosity?  Is it the possible but unlikely providence of a congregation of disparate individuals who simply “click”? 

All of these or some combination or some factor altogether different?

I haven’t a clue.  I only know that in the company of occasional neighbors, recent arrivals and total strangers it was present around that table.  Lives effortlessly mingled.  A different kind of oxygen filled the lungs of our soul.  Smiles flickered like holiday lights.  And hours passed.  The church bells above the piazza rang four o’clock as we pushed our chairs away from the table and bid each other farewell until who knows when.  

And I know how much I wish I could distill it, cultivate it and disseminate it freely like open-pollinated seeds.  

Because the world could use more of this kind of fruit...

...and the olive branches from which it grows.

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.

Settling In to Spello

DAY 1

Delivered by the various planes, trains and automobiles to our long-anticipated apartment in Italy’s Spello, Umbria we shook off the residue of the time difference and the labors of travel and walked around. Spello is a hill town in the green heart of Italy — Roman, with later medieval accretions. There are more modern overlays, but those are less apparent; receding behind the more ancient cobblestones, walls and narrow passages. More crowded than we had anticipated — it was, after all, Saturday in the closing weeks of tourist season — we relaxed at our sidewalk table and over a simple lunch let the reality of our surroundings settle in.

We began planning this trip over a year ago — longer than that if you include my near-constant supplications over the past decade to Lori and the gods not to let me die before returning to Italy. We arranged for an apartment over the internet, eventually purchased our flights, and began to dreamily anticipate. Italy has had its problems over the course of its history, but there are good vibes here — a magic that I’m sure exists elsewhere, though perhaps nowhere quite like here. There is a depth, a grounding, a sweeping authenticity that is at once settling and centering, but also stirring and inspiring. There is an affectionate appreciation for the individual — the village flirt, the neighborhood artist, the aspiring poet with a constantly rotating collection of hats — subsumed beneath a more profound reverence for the community ethos within which those individuals, colorful and quiet alike, find place. Symbolically appropriate, then, that on our first full day in Spello we participated in the dedication festivities of a new outdoor public art installation evoked by that very theme: the many and diverse, within the larger and overarching community, as conceived and executed by an American artist who lives with her Italian husband part-time in Spello.

Whatever else we saw in these welcoming first hours and days in Spello — whatever else we ate and touched and dodged and felt — what we heard as the constant soundtrack on the streets and in the piazzas, punctuated by joyful exclamations and cheek kisses, were well-wishes. “Good morning.” “Good breakfast.” “Good Sunday.” “Good afternoon.”

“People here just want to wish you a good everything,” our friends and guides for the day explained.

And somehow we were included in the greetings and the smiles and benedictions. It’s a nice and welcomed contrast to the hyper-competitive, elbow-to-the-front-of-the-line, trash-tweeting, self-interested jostling that has made our home culture such a full-body contact sport. My soul is breathing again. Deeply.

Buon giorno, then. Have a wonderful day

Now, With Death Considered, We Vigorously Get On With Life

We feel fine.  Really.  We are healthier than we have ever been, deliriously happy and looking forward to much, much more of the same.  And no, we aren't feeling particularly apocalyptic.  I'm not burdened with any heavy sense that these are "the end times." And it has nothing to do with the fact of my 61st birthday barreling down on me like one of the several hurricanes sweeping its terrible eye into the Gulf.   It's just that I am happy that it's done.  Finally.

Throughout my ministry I have encouraged people to consider their final arrangements.  By that I mean funeral plans.  What I have tried to communicate is that any number of people care about you, but no one wants to make your funeral plans.

On a few days notice.  In the midst of tears.

"Making your own arrangements, before they are needed, is the caring thing to do..."

...I have said to others -- for years -- but not myself.

Until, that is, a few months ago.  As Memorial Day approached, we began to consider our own memorials.  We talked about how we wish to end up.  We talked about where we wish to end up.  We talked about what kind of service in our memory we would prefer, what we would like included -- and excluded.  And after making all manner of decisions we sat down with a funeral director and put it all on record.  We purchased a cemetery plot (one, since our cremains will be buried together); we picked out a monument and how it should be inscribed.  And we wrote numerous checks to underwrite it all.  And we wrote drafts of our obituaries.  It's amazing how exemplary our lives have been when we get to be the ones describing them.   OK, that's a joke.  More truthfully, it's amazing how simple, straight-forward and succinct our lives are when we commit the salient details to print -- what we have valued; what in it all we disregard.  We could say more, of course; going on and on about this or that.  But eventually a kind of silliness ensues in the self-congratulation that we simply wouldn't condone.

And so there it is.  All of it finally done.  The ideas are formed, the plans are made, the Wills are updated, the necessaries are purchased and the stone is even solidly in place, awaiting the final chronological inscripted details.

I'll acknowledge that these are not comfortable conversations.  We haven't particularly enjoyed all this talk about our demise.  But we haven't thought of it as morbid.  We have thought of it as a gift -- to each other, to my kids, or to whomever else is left to sweep our proverbial floor.  Our preferences our clear, with enough leeway built in to overrule them as desired.  The tangible choices are made, the financial burdens are lifted.  All our surviving loved ones need do is grieve.  And that, of course, is up to them.

For our part, with these ending questions answered and their practical implications arranged, we can get on with living.

Fully.

Happily.

And hopefully for a long time to come.

After all, there is hanging fruit to harvest, new seeds to plant, fresh grains to thresh, and more eggs to gather.

A Call to Something More Holy Than Supreme

I don’t want to talk about the President.  It’s not that I don’t care about the office or have no opinion of its current occupant.  It’s simply that in these ham-handed, binary times during which subtlety and nuance have become casualties of public discourse where reason and reasonable objectivity once felt comfortably at home, I’ll express my political thoughts in the ballot box.  Besides, I try to keep in mind that nausea and diarrhea are not the real problems when I’m suffering such maladies, but the outward expression of something deeper. 

So no, I’m less concerned about the President than I am about the rest of us.  This is surely not the first time in history that a people have lost their way, but we seem hell-bent on elevating our particular manifestation of lostness to epic heights.  Or perhaps we should be speaking, instead, of depths.  Wiser social observers than me will better understand what brought us to this morass.  Stolen opportunity.  Economic frustration.  An increasingly crowded and diverse public and philosophical space.  Instant and constant communication of both news and opinion with no rubrics to differentiate the two.  All of the above.  And more.  But whatever the drivers, they have brought us to a very loud, aggressive, intolerant and unforgiving place.  And it’s frightening.  I wish that the shameful clash of people and ideologies last weekend in Virginia – fueled by prejudiced hatred – was the exception, but alas it is paradigmatic. 

Only two descriptors present themselves in what remains of the conduct of our public life:  “me”, and everyone else.  Every now and then multiple “me’s” seem able to make common cause, but they are marriages of convenience rather than sacred vows, as fragile as the egos that beat their chests behind them. 

But of all the battling contestants in this Roman Coliseum called “America”  I am perhaps most disappointed in my own lifelong community:  the church.  Our most visible representatives have become “hater apologists” – or, in the words of our biblical forebears, “Court Prophets.”  And our congregations, once ideologically royal purple, have segregated into Reds and Blues.  More partisan than confessional, more defensive than invitational, more condemning than caring, it’s hard to find much residue in our worship and our “discipleship” of the one we profess to follow. 

As long as we view ourselves as “supreme” – racially, politically, patriotically, morally -- we are missing the point, and are well along the way to losing our soul. 

The fact is we simply cannot love by hating.  We cannot welcome through exclusion.  We cannot heal by brutalizing.  We cannot grow deeper by becoming more and more shallow.  We have a better story than that.  We have a better message than that.  We have a nobler mission than that. And we have a more powerful example than that.

Learning How to Cry Like A Baby

At six and a half months of age, Truett is an extraordinarily happy and easy-going baby.  He smiles, he laughs, he scrutinizes the various textures with which his fingers come into contact, he studies intently nearby objects and movements with a decided preference for ceiling fans whenever he can catch sight of one.  He will concentrate on curiosities for minutes at a time.  But make no mistake, he does, indeed, cry.  He cries when he is hungry, and he cries when he is overly tired -- this latter, of course, along with an occasional whimper when a diaper change is overdue, is hardly his fault.  Credit those tears to his caregivers who have gotten busy with other matters under heaven.  So, hunger and fatigue.  That's pretty much it, which I find to be an amazingly short list.

When, I've begun to wonder -- and for what reasons -- does that list begin to lengthen?  By the time a person reaches my age we are crying about all sorts of things -- skinned knees and hurt feelings, griefs, disappointments regardless of merit, even unspeakable joys.  We cry because we don't get our way, we cry because of what was said about us on the playground or by the media.  We cry at movies, we cry in church, we cry with relief.  But even as I review the list which is intrinsically incomplete, I note that somewhere along the way tears of need -- for food, for rest -- give way to tears of want.  I cry because I received what I didn't want -- or conversely, I cry because what I desperately wanted actually came my way?  

I don't mean to malign the “wants”. After all, developmental psychologists would dig down into several of them and find them  sprouting from core needs like validation and basic security of one form or another.  That said, I can't help but wonder if our lists of crying offenses haven't gotten a bit out of control.  Could it be that when we call someone a “big baby”, rather than the target of our derision we are slandering instead the babies in our midst who reserve their tears for the core essentials?

Maybe that's what Jesus had in mind when he encouraged us to become like little children, rather than the whining adults we have excessively become.