When in Rome: Just for Fun

Sr. Margaret brought a set of magnetic words to play with--you know, the kind where you arrange the various nouns and verbs, adjectives and so on to come up with poems or odd lines. Her set of words was a special "Church" pack of words related to religion, so between the two of us, we got some very interesting phrases...

Sr. Margaret's:

• Prayer: Spirit's Dance in a Soul
• Faith. Need to Question, Grace to be Sure
• Adultery is Having One Too Many!
• Resurrection: Let God Steal Your Death
• Mary wondered if Saint Joseph would ever go by the Old Marriage Rule Book
• Protest "Religious" Rapture
• Always Believe Your Rabbi That Another's Creation Should Sing Out Now & Then
• Why has School Crucified True Witnesses?
• Gossip Works Better in Smoke (she says this sounds like something Nero would have said!)

Mine:

• Brimstone thoughts cast many into hellfire.
• One commandment or ten to remember?
• So wonderful you love Jesus.
• Take Sunday religion, please, Lord.
• Thy Sure Holy Ghost shalt raise up Apostles Unto Peace.
• Convert temptation into Salvation.
• Mother Eve had earth.
• Thou Strong Savior Will Keep Communion Amen.
• Have Good Holy Gospel Truth.

When in Rome: Music

If Dante had been a musician instead of a poet… he might have composed something for his Inferno similar to what I have been hearing all month. Truly, God listens to the heart and not the voice! We had an excellent organist, and she had only a small synthesizer to play. She worked wonders, but it was not enough. About ten distinct notes sounded among the assembly, and the better known and loved the hymn was, the more variations there were on the melody, and the more notes vying to be chosen as the proper tone. And we sang a lot. Morning prayer and vespers, Mass and adoration—a minimum of three pieces of music every time, every day. The psalms were sung to very simple lines. One day, I noticed that there was a peculiar kind of harmonic rendering of the psalm tone: three (at least) tones, following an approximation of the melodic line. It would have been impossible for a professional choir to replicate the sound. For one, the top line of the chord was about a quarter-tone flat. (The “organ,” mind you, was still playing.) Then there was another line about a half-step below the flat tone, and beneath that, a bass line not quite a half-tone below that. These three tones continued, up and down in imitation of the line of the psalm tone, and I am sure each singer believed they were carrying the melodic line. One of the sounds may have even been a 3/8ths tone. It was hard to believe it could really happen.

Every time I heard the sister in charge announce a hymn number, I would cringe. I hope it wasn’t too distracting to the celebrant. (I was in the front pew!)

As you can imagine, this constituted my major distraction throughout the retreat. I kept trying to match my tone to the brave little organ, but I really could hardly hear myself—especially when it was a popular song. One spiritual application was the realization that God is also continuing to play his melody for me, and I need to be quiet enough to hear it so I can tune to him…

When in Rome: Weather

Dad always quoted his mom saying, “If you can make a sailor’s jacket out of the blue, it will be a fine day.” Well, that rule does not seem to apply here. There have been days when the morning sky could have clad an entire navy, and then rain, rain, rain. And since we have had a remarkable Indian Summer since I got here (hurray!), the rain brings… mosquitoes. The special yellow-striped variety (tiger mosquitoes) that pack a huge punch in their venom. We’re talking welts here, with severe itching that lasts for almost a week. Romans have discovered screens since my last visit here (appropriately called “zanzaniere,” which can be translated roughly as “mosquito thingys”), but they only use them on balcony doors and not on windows. You can imagine the results.

As I said, it has been Indian Summer, but now the weather is taking a turn towards genuine autumn. Jane’s birthday was the first truly brisk day. In fact, the grape arbor has very few green grapes, and not many full bunches of ripe grapes; the fruit on the six grapefruit trees is ripening so that it is now visibly yellow; the leaves are beginning to turn brown on the edges and fall—they don’t turn colors here. And the “pollen bomb tree” that assailed me when I first got here has greatly diminished its offensive activity.

I really appreciated (and frequently thanked God for) the continued warm weather (today, my birthday, is a balmy 75°): in Chicago I had to wear a jacket to Church in September! And you know how I hate cold weather. So this has been wonderful, even if the last three weeks have been more than a little rainy.

When in Rome: Laundry

Not to make too wide a generalization, but you could almost say that Americans will not do by hand what can be done by machine, while Italians (nuns, at least) will not use a machine for what can be done by hand. This is especially the case for laundry. I already knew what to expect, so I came prepared with a supply of Oxy-Clean in a zip-lock bag. (I am a BIG Oxy-Clean believer.) I would soak my laundry in Oxy-Clean solution overnight and then the next morning take them up to what is euphemistically called the laundry room to add some of their wonderful detergent (really good stuff, called “marsiglia”) and then (and as Dave Barry would say, I am not making this up) scrub it on the washboard that is built into the laundry sink. Yes, it is true, and I took a photo of it as evidence. The photo even has my little pile of laundry there waiting its treatment. (Photos are still on the memory card; I won’t be accessing them until I’m back in the States, so as not to risk fragmentation.)

Of course, I didn’t really know what I was doing, or how much to do, so I just followed what the others did. If they slapped the wet laundry on the washboard, so did I. If they rubbed the fabric together, so did I. Then we would wring out the water and hang the items on “stendini” (an apparatus that serves as a kind of clothes line) on the outside terrace. That’s why all the houses in Rome have either terraces or balconies: to dry the laundry.

There is a very fine washing machine in the laundry room—a front-loader, I think the brand name is Mieta or something like that—would that we had such a fine machine in Chicago! But they only use it (and the equally state of the art dryer) for sheets and towels and tablecloths (de rigueur; no self-respecting Italian would eat off a bare formica table).

Anyway , even though it has been a challenge, I seem to have been doing okay keeping things adequately clean. At least no one has complained yet!

Rome Report, Free Day 2

After 20 days on retreat...
Greetings from Rome! If you find an unusual amount of typing errors in this missive, it is not due to my poor orthographic skills, but to the European keyboard, which has an extra key on the right, as well as punctuation marks in unexpected locations…

We have a free day today, marking the completion of the second of three stages in our month-long retreat. The weather is quite warm (delightful for me, of course), today is sunny—though we had lots of rain during the second stage of the retreat—and the broadband is functioning (yes!). The Casa San Paolo where we are staying is on the grounds of the Daughters of St. Paul generalate. There is a tree-covered hill, a small orchard (kiwi, pomegranate, grapes…) lots of birds (and bugs) and at night, bats flitting out of the trees like little wifts of charred paper from a fire. (The image came to mind because the night I found myself watching the evening air show, a farmer a few miles away was burning his fields, and the whole area smelled of smoke.)

I haven’t been able to enjoy much gelato this trip, though now that I think of it, there is a pretty good “produzione proprio” place not too far from here… But the food here at Casa San Paolo has been quite good. Pasta or risotto every noon, of course, but the pasta does not come with the usual tomato sauce most Americans think is the necessary corollary to spaghetti. For the most part, the pasta is seasoned with olive oil, a light white sauce or white cheese, mushrooms, or (heaven help us) chili peppers so hot they would make Tabasco Sauce evaporate. And there has been a nice array of salad veggies, so dear to me. One thing that has me a bit confounded is the propensity here to serve cooked vegetables at room temperature… I get around it by putting it in my salad. They also use a LOT of eggs. And cheese. Today Sr. Margaret Joseph and I stopped at a local supermarket (yes, a real supermarket, even if for the most part smaller than its American counterpart). The cheese counter offered probably over 100 varieties of cheese. And that isn’t even counting the packaged cheeses in the refrigerator case with the other mass produced dairy items! Breakfast, I admit, is boring, boring, boring: caffe latte (yum) and bread with your choice of spreadable cheese, nutella, apricot preserves, anchovies, eggplant, olives…. on our last free day I got a jar of Dutch peanut butter (the label is Dutch on one side, German on the other) to go with the preserves (and occasionally with the nutella: YUM) as an occasional switch.

During these weeks I have been especially impressed with our FSP missionaries who are making the retreat here. There are missionaries from Romania, Germany and Taiwan. They are characterized by what I can only call ardor. They are intent on mission, and direct everything in a missionary key. All three are Italian. The sister from Taiwan has been there almost her whole religious life. She learned Chinese in just two years, and has really helped, you could say, establish and raise up our Chinese presence. She is really “Chinese with the Chinese,” as St. Paul might say.

Participants in the retreat are not only Daughters of St. Paul, but members of several of the Pauline institutes. In fact, this afternoon we will all board a tour bus for the shrine of the Queen of Apostles, because it is the feast of Bl. Timothy Giaccardo, Father Alberione’s vicar. Mass will be celebrated near his tomb, and we will also (finally) have a chance to visit the tomb of Bl. James Alberione (which was incomplete when we came for the beatification). I am looking forward to seeing people I knew from when I lived here four years ago.

Every day there are little experiences I would love to write about, but I am trying to focus a bit particularly on Jesus right now. These are just a few things I wanted so highlight.

Solemn high silence begins again tonight at 9. Please pray for us!

Rome Retreat

This is being posted on Halloween, because we just got off our 30-day silent retreat last night, but it was written ten days after retreat began, on our first "free day."
Today we had a free day from our 30 day retreat. I went shopping by the Vatican (peanut butter and rice milk!), and while on my way to the Church of the Gesù, I was asked for directions to the Pantheon. Turns out the gentleman with the map was from Chicago! I walked him over to the piazza (took a shortcut through Piazza Navone, what a lovely, lovely piazza that is) and got treated to a delicious gelato (pompelmo and fragole--grapefruit and strawberry--kind of like sorbet, and made with the real ingredients).
Visited Santa Maria sopra Minerva, the Gothic church near the Pantheon (with Bernini's elephant statue just outside). Prayed at the tomb of St. Catherine of Siena for nieces Caitlin and Kate.
Made it to the Gesù Church, too, where I found that the huge silver-plated statue of St. Ignatius was not in its usual place. I inquired in the sacristy. The same brother was there who had been minding the little book table and preparing the sacristy chapel for the noon mass six years ago! He told me that the statue was fine; it was the painting behind the statue that needed renovation, and it seemed to be taking forever. A rather nice painting that rolls up behind and then under the altar. Well, three hundred years of that kind of treatment can do some damage to a canvas. Walked back toward Castel Sant'Angelo, and got some lunch--pizza al taglio. (Prepared sheets of pizza, with your portion cut off--tagliato--with a pair of scissors!) Mine was thin sheets of potato over a layer of cheese, sprinkled with rosemary. Quite delicious. Leaned against the wall by the Tiber, looking at the Castello and the lovely blue sky.
It was just the right way to spend my little free day. Tonight, the solemn high silence begins again.