Sometimes, All I See Are the Stella (Musings from My Journals in Italy)

God speaks Italian - did you know that? Oh how He loves to speak it. He loves to let those words wash over His people as they totter through the cobblestone streets of Orvieto, and Roma, and Fiorenze. He loves to shower them with flowing Italian in San Bernadino, the Duomo di Orvieto, in Santa Maria Sopra Minerva, in Santa Maria Novella... And so in Italy, in Italian, English, Polish, sign language, and the most wonderful language of all - silence - I hear God speaking.

The Uffizi gallery is quieter than in summertime, we're told as we huddle together, purple and green and black coats lurking in the entryway. We hike our way up flights of stairs, tired feet and heads full of so many frescoes I'm not sure which church is which, whether Fra Angelico painted the Annunciation in San Marco or the San Brizio Chapel in the Duomo in Orvieto. And then the customary hush when you enter the presence of Art. 


And there is so much art here. It lurks on the ceiling - detailed paintings of Machiavelli and Galileo, the Medici family. The marble of the floors is art. the sculptures lurking in their neighbors' shadows along corridor after corridor, the frame by frame beauty of renderings of St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Francis receiving the stigmata... and I am suddenly heaven-bound, lifted up out of these tired feet into stars. I see so much beauty I want to taste it. I see so much of the vibrant, technicolor world, its dimensions stretching beyond our customary four into the dimensions of hope and justice and promises. I sink into the leather couch and start, because who is there but the Annunciation, the angel Gabriel and Mary. Botticelli's famous Venus painting is a few frames away, but while tourists click and flash their cameras, I can't stop looking at the Annunciation. 


The angel has landed heavily, and I can hear the thud as his feet clatter to the floor. Mary looks startled, yet not surprised. I wonder if she expected to receive that visit that day. Was her heart so open, so ready, that she could not be surprised by the arrival? Or is the start painted more subtly, in the weighty thud of Gabriel and the visible shaking of the room? 


And suddenly - a poem has arrived. My own small annunciation. The words drip out of my pen onto the page faster than I can think them. How long has it been since a poem has arrived in my heart? And yet it is here, looking at this painting, Botticelli's art making poetry about art and circling all of this creating back to the source, the Annunciation, the arrival. 


Sometimes, all I see are the stella, the stars. Sometimes in between cups of cappuccino and kinder bars I find myself gazing at the world in childlike wonder, that he made all this, all THIS, for us to enjoy. He made all of this because it is all kinds of beautiful. Because He loves to make things beautiful. I gaze at the Italian night sky when our train pulls into the Orvieto station and discover that it is scattered with stella, their light beaming back the same joyful presence that I feel in my heart. They seem to smile down at my shivering body and messy heart and say, "Yes, Hilary, He really is this good, this kind of good, this full, this ready to love you more than you have ever been loved before."

Hear that today, friends. He is this good. He is stella good - the maker of stars and smallness, the One who writes Himself into universes and galaxies and the One who writes Himself in the sand of Nazareth and vineyards. In Italy I feel like Zacchaeus climbing the tree to see Jesus - the view is just so much better up here, where the air is clear and the wind quick, where I can cup my hand to my ear and hear good conversations and good questions, and the silence of art. The view is so good up here - and I can see how sometimes we get dazzled by the stella and we forget how to turn around and see Him. But He is that good, and that ready to love us beyond our wildest dreams.

I leave you with a poem (not mine - that's still being revised!) that I've long loved, by a poet I love:

FLYING AT NIGHT (Ted Kooser)

Above us, stars. Beneath us, constellations.
Five billion miles away, a galaxy dies
like a snowflake falling on water. Below us,
some farmer, feeling the chill of that distantdeath, 
snaps on his yard light, drawing his sheds andbarn 
back into the little system of his care.
All night, the cities, like shimmering novas,
tug with bright streets at lonely lights like his.

Ciao, Bella.

Hilary

Life is Dolci (Musings from My Journals in Italy)

God speaks Italian - did you know that? Oh how He loves to speak it. He loves to let those words wash over His people as they totter through the cobblestone streets of Orvieto, and Roma, and Fiorenze. He loves to shower them with flowing Italian in San Bernadino, the Duomo di Orvieto, in Santa Maria Sopra Minerva, in Santa Maria Novella... And so in Italy, in Italian, English, Polish, sign language, and the most wonderful language of all - silence - I hear God speaking.


Today we boarded the train at 7:44am, eyes bleary and hands tucked into coat pockets and ratty gloves, our breath like smoke rings in the Orvieto morning. We were bound for Florence, or, as the conductor says, "Firenze Santa Maria Novella." I keep thinking about blogging as I am cut off from blogging, how I would like to scatter words about Italy to you like leaves you can't help but throw up after your mother has neatly raked them into a pile. And today I found two things, two little snippets and snapshots that might shed a little bit of this radiant Italian light onto your day: Santa Maria Novella and nutella gelato. 

Santa Maria Novella is a church built of Florentine marble, greens and reds and whites stacked like Lego blocks towering above me, such a change from the translucent whiteness of French churches. 

And the cloisters, echoey and wide, seem to welcome me and my feeble, warbling voice as I tentatively hum a few bars of "All Ye Who Music" - an old song from my 9th grade chorus. Italy, or what I have glimpsed of it, is full to the brim of these tucked away treasures, pearls of a great price that are known only to those weary travelers who, full of sleep and brioche and questions tramp their feet across the threshold. Beauty here is exceptional and everyday, taken as a simple fact of seeing this grand world but hanging out your laundry, because there is laundry to do and meals to cook. 


I want to run arms outstretched to the sky and shout, "Thank you!" for what else can we ever say, when, as wise Ann says, "all's Grace" - all of this crazy beautiful creativity. Humans are terribly, wondrously creative, our chisels and paints and words and pens and blogs and books. We map our world, we make metaphors and pictures, we sing and pray and laugh together. Who needs adjectives, I wonder, when so much of the beauty of being human is that we are verb creatures? We act and contemplate and love.

Yes, there it is again, that Love, dolci and bella and meraviglioso, that theme that won't let me go this year, this new season. Even as I roll through Umbria and Tuscany and gape at a blood red sun over the papal fortress walls, through copses of trees shaped like towers, or at fog so thick I could wrap myself in it.

Love, as I stroll the corso, my hands swinging at my sides, my heart brimming with the spirals of the duomo, the sweet sticky face of the boy eating a Kinder bar in the caffé where we get cappuccino.

Love, as my mouth smiles in delight when I find that I can order a gelato with raspberry (lampone) and nutella (cappriccio) and let them take me back to Pitango Gelato Company on 7th St in Chinatown.

Love, friends. Love in the language of nutella and Santa Maria Novella, in the chipping paint and scuff marks, the tortellini and the Tiber.

How much of this world have we forgotten to love today? How many sorrowful stories have we chosen to tell beyond our joyful ones? How many thousands of small gifts, moments of wonder, moments of the piercing clarity of His eyes have we missed because we were looking at empty hands, at what we didn't get for Christmas this year, at even the simple failure to pack our bags for school before leaving for Italy? He longs to put Love in our grubby hands - but He waits for us to say Yes first. Yes, Lord, I will see You here. Yes, Lord, I will journey scrambling over rocks and thorns and thistles, trek through the muck and mess and miracle of hearts to that place where You show Yourself glorious and where we can hear You say, "I love this one of mine."

And so in the midst of this country I call dolci, sweet, so sweet it smudges on my face like chocolate, I hear Him say that about all of you. And I hear Him scold me for forgetting about this great call to love, love of the mundane, of bread and wine and gelato and markets full of flowers and languages we can't understand and Italy.

So I pray with you, from the pages of this small journal cramped into a chair on Trenitalia, returning to Orvieto:

Heavenly Father, we give You thanks for the small gifts today, for meals to enjoy and friends to love, for the smells of peonies and the extravagant beauty of birds. We thank You for the questions children ask and the stories that humble us with their answers. We thank You that Your sovereignty is full and gentle, Your love is sweet and fierce, and that You create in us the ability to know You. May I be a vessel of Your love to this world and the people You have put in my heart. Help me to whisper always of Your love for them and for this world, that Your light may radiate forth and illuminate all things. In Jesus, Amen.

Ciao, bella.
Hilary

You are Meraviglioso (Musings from My Journals in Italy)

God speaks Italian - did you know that? Oh how He loves to speak it. He loves to let those words wash over His people as they totter through the cobblestone streets of Orvieto, and Roma, and Fiorenze. He loves to shower them with flowing Italian in San Bernadino, the Duomo di Orvieto, in Santa Maria Sopra Minerva, in Santa Maria Novella... And so in Italy, in Italian, English, Polish, sign language, and the most wonderful language of all - silence - I hear God speaking.


Our first day in Rome I am overwhelmed with the incomprehensibility of streets where there is no sidewalk and you press your little body up against the orange or yellow walls of the building and hope that the car doesn't hit you on its rambling way. I am overwhelmed in these churches, their Baroque ornate gold, inlays of marble and tiled floor almost too much for my eyes to take in. I am entranced by the sheer magnitude of Catholicism in this city. 365 churches. Four basilicas. There is almost too much to see. Dominican sisters pass me on one side of the street and Franciscans on the other. I hear the whispered words of the Liturgy of the Eucharist beginning as I shyly glance at the altars and paintings. And then there is the vision of St. Peter's from across the Tiber River.



 What am I, a small person in a gloriously old world, to say? I eat my zucchini and mozzarella pizza and think to myself as we pause in our day to exhale the things we have seen. What can I possibly say to this city? And I sigh and fold my scarf into my coat, my eyes tracing the curves of columns and arches, and a slight spring in my step. For if I have nothing to say, then I can listen. If I am not talking, I can hear Rome talking. And it says that history is meraviglioso - marvelous. In a world so transient that most of us cannot remember breakfast, in a world where we compose emails faster than we write a note to someone, in a world where we would rather use google to translate our Italian needs than ask in our timid reedy voices - we need history all the more. Walk these streets with me, readers - and feel with me the many footsteps you are stepping into. For more years than we are capable of conceiving, this stone has been rounded by the footsteps of strangers and friends, of enemies and wanderers. In this land, I feel how we are shrouded in time, how it hovers around us as a quiet reminder of its Maker. For more unfathomable than the towering columns and the extraordinary ruins -

 

More unfathomable than that vision is that God is outside our time. He sees me in my blue jeans and my wide eyed stare in the same eternal vision that He sees Dante, He sees Marcus Aurelius, He sees St. Teresa of Avila. God did not simply suspend time, or act outside it - He who made it entered it. He glorifies time and its passing by living in time itself. Jesus enters the history I can feel under my feet and that I smell in the dust floating above my head. Jesus lives in the history I touch as I run my fingers over the base of a column. History is suddenly of the utmost importance. The Incarnation reaches into the deepest corners of humanness - it touches not only our sorrows and our laughter, not only our material world of bread and wine and olive fields, not only our mothers and fathers, not only the quivering hopes and dreams we dream in monasteries in Orvieto - the Incarnation touches History itself, touches Meaning, touches Time. God who sees all and knows all and loves all sends Jesus to restore everything to Himself. I never understood the depth of the Incarnational touch until here. 

And I am in awe. You are Meraviglioso, God. Your hands that reached to touch the face of Mary Magdalene, Your voice that speaks and thus brings all of creation into being, Your love that promises, and fulfills all Your promises... You are meraviglioso to behold. 


At the very end of Advent, dear friends, I wrote this in my prayer journal. I pray it again with you, from bella Italia.

O Heavenly Father, how might I become as open as Mary, as the small stable in Bethlehem, as Bethlehem itself, so that Jesus might be born in me? Show me how to bear Jesus, O Lord, into this world You have made, so that all may see Him in my heart. Show me how to carry Your Son, Your only Son whom You love so dearly. May I bear Him, God? May I bear Christ in my heart today? O God come speedily and mightily to help us and bring Your Son Jesus to be our peace. Crack open my heart and prepare Yourself a home there. Be forever near me, Lord God Almighty. For with You alone is light and joy and love. With You alone is all of life.


Ciao, bella. 
Hilary