Yea, the sparrow hath found an house, and the swallow a nest for herself, where she may lay her young, even thine altars, O Lord of hosts, my King, and my God.
“The backdrop of this whole visit is not what's happening in American politics or a presidential campaign. The backdrop is a world steeped in violence and bloodshed and rancor and hatred, and here we have coming to your city, to our diocese, a real prince of peace. If there's any princely title that should be associated with Francis, it's a prince of peace, it's a bringer of peace,” Rosica said.
“When peacemakers come, they upset those who are not at peace. So, if people are going to be upset in any side of the spectrum here, let them look inside themselves and see what those issues are first, because in the presence of Francis, as you know and as I know, you're in the presence of extraordinary goodness, of kindness, of intelligence and of humanity. So, humanity is coming to teach us how to be more human,” he added.
Whom do you bring to the faithful?
To whom do you belong?
“I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery.
“You shall have no other gods before me.
“You shall not make for yourself an image in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below. You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me, but showing love to a thousand generations of those who love me and keep my commandments.
According to the internet, I walked more than 16 kilometers yesterday.
Last week I went for a short stomp around the neighbourhood, and in a field close to the river I found a large quantity of wild hops growing in a spot where the farmers had cleared a lot of the brush. Yes, that's the same stuff that you use to make beer. The flower heads were the biggest I'd ever seen on the wild varieties, so I dropped everything and collected as much as my backpack would hold. Then I walked back to town and showed Br. Augustine, one of the brew-monks and he was so excited by this find that he suggested we go - all the brew staff - later in the year when the foliage had died off a bit but before the frost, and dig up the rhizomes to plant in pots so we could have some all the time. He said the when they do their next brew, he'll siphon off a few gallons and add the hops and see how it turns out.
Being terribly pleased with myself at this very positive reception of my explorations, I told Br. Augustine that I would go and mark the spot where I'd found it, tying a ribbon or something around the strands of the vines. Hops are a very vine-y kind of plant, and grow like clematis or bindweed all over other plants and trees, and it can be difficult to figure out where the plant originates in the ground.
So, yesterday, being somewhat fed up with the internet and it being a rather cool and cloudy sort of day, I packed up the backpack with a trowel a few plastic shopping bags and a length of non-biodegradable orange cloth (a duster) I set off back to the spot. I had seen that there are also forests of sloes ready to be picked and had been looking up sloe gin and sloe wine recipes, so I thought I would go and see what was ready. I parked the bike in my usual field behind a hedge and walked the rest of the way to the hops-place. I was only wearing trainers since I had intended just to go there and back.
but it was so beautiful out... the perfect day, cool but not cold, with patches of sun and fast-moving big fluffy clouds, that once I had found and marked the spot where the vines were starting, and had determined that the ground was quite soft and that it would be a cinch to get the rhizomes out, I looked around and thought, "Huh... wonder what's over there..."
Famous last words.
There was the field all full of a gorgeous wildflower I'd never seen before, so, you know, I just had to go and see if I could dig up a few samples. Then I was close to the river and it's beauty, all set about with willow and bull rushes, was mesmerizing. I followed it downstream and found a dozen places where it was obvious the fishermen would come to catch the trout, and I stood many times just watching the perfectly clear water flow over the sandy bed like liquid silk, and spotted the mysterious little fish, gently waving their tails in the stream.
Then I thought, 'Well, I've never been down the valley on this side of the river... I wonder what's over there,' and somehow just kept going. I found a ruined stone house and collected a new tile, nice and flat for painting on, dug up a few more wildflowers and found a bunch of wild raspberries growing on the riverbank and got some lively looking roots from them. We'll see if we can get some raspberries in the garden next year.
Before long, I found myself at the bridge, and being tired of listening to the highway, crossed and turned along the Ferrovia toward Serravalle, the little village where you change buses to go to Rome. It's only 15 minutes by bus of course, and I had heard there is a swimming hole somewhere along the river near there that I wanted to find. The Ferrovia is the old train line ("ferro" = "iron" - via... get it?) but the last train was 1968, and the entire line has been dismantled. Now all that is left is the wide track and the little station houses, apparently in the middle of nowhere, all falling into ruin, and a few rather forlorn looking old fashioned stone mile markers along the way.
These days it's a very popular hiking and mountain biking trail, and if you follow it you will see the whole valley (though I'm told some of the tunnels are no longer very safe.) I kept saying, 'You know, if you keep going, you'll end up in Spoleto... You are remembering that you'll have to walk back, right?' Somehow, though, this voice of reason made no impact, and my feet just kept going. By this time, I had decided I wanted to go as far as Serravalle, stop in the little bar where the bus goes, and say hello to the swans in the little pond there. I like swans. They're the only creature in the world with crankier dispositions than me.
Along the way I found out that hops are a common wild plant, and collected a bunch more. I found a crab apple tree and filled a shopping bag with the windfalls, about four pounds. They're in the freezer to put together with the rosehips when they're ready to make some crab apple and rosehip jelly to go with the Christmas turkey.
The blackberries had clearly suffered during the Big Heat. 12 weeks of 35-38 degree weather had killed most of the crop that were facing the sun and now the only place you find berries for eating is in the shady spots. Well, one field had plenty of this, and I must have eaten half a gallon of them.
The walnut trees were dropping their little protein bombs, and when I sat down at the base of a large one for a rest, I just picked them up out of the grass and cracked them between stones while listening to the leaves rustling in the breeze. I kept thinking that surviving in the wild here wouldn't really be too difficult... at the right time of year.
This late in the season there are not many people along the Ferrovia. I only encountered a middle aged English couple and one woman dressed for vanity-jogging who looked strangely out of place in those lonely and mostly wild surroundings. Other than that it felt like I could be the only person in the valley.
The Ferrovia runs parallel to the highway, but apart from the occasional truck taking sausages down to Spoleto, the only sound was my footfalls and the constant refrain of the river.
I had left the house just before noon, and it must have been (left my phone at home) about 4 pm when I found the little cemetery of Serravalle, like a walled garden, and stopped to say a little prayer for the sacred dead. It had clouded over, with the weather that had been brewing over the tops of the mountains in the morning finally boiling over and flowing into the valley. I felt a few drops of rain then, but it was far too late to worry about getting a bit damp. Even without the side-trips through the fields, the march back along the Ferrovia was going to be at least an hour and a half.
The cemetery was nearly on top of the exit from the Ferrovia path where the little side road takes the bus to the bar, so I knew I had almost made it. As I came off the trail and onto the road, right in front of me was a sign, pointing almost straight up the mountain on the other side, towards a large church, perched up high on a cliff face. The sign said, "Chiesa San Claudio. XIII sec." and had a little stick figure of a man with a backpack and walking stick. The sign for the official trails is a little red and white flag, and there were other signs giving the estimated distance to "San Lazaro"; 7.5 km.
(San Claudio as seen from the Ferrovia is at 1:38)
I had seen the church with its tall bell tower far above the road in glimpses along the trail, and had thought there must be a road to get up there. Well, it turns out that the "road" was a rocky, overgrown track that would have been impossible with anything more than a donkey. San Claudio had once had a hermit occupant, who had died in 1986. Since then there had been sporadic efforts to get funding to save it, or at least to prevent the bell tower from collapsing. I stood at the bottom of the trail looking up with a keen sense of longing... It was at least as steep as 30 degrees in places, but somehow, from the bottom of the trail the church didn't seem that far.
I couldn't resist. I started climbing and the little voice that had been talking about how far it was to get back, now became quite insistent. The climbing was steep and difficult and it was hard to imagine that anyone would have been willing to take this route regularly, even in the 13th century when people were tougher, and the way less overgrown. About 50 yards up the slope, common sense finally got the better of me, and even though it was heavily overcast I could tell that the daylight was not going to last more than a couple more hours. When the trail took a turn and the church could be seen, I discovered that it was a great deal higher up than it had seemed from the road. I hadn't brought my climbing stuff either; no sticks, no boots, no cell phone, no nothin'. Not even a bottle of water.
When I felt the rain starting a little harder and heard the roll of thunder, I finally thought better. The trail was deeply gouged in places where the heavy rains we'd had at the end of August had caused little rock and mud slides. I suddenly realised rather keenly that a single misstep could be disastrous in my soft little shoes. I had already gone up high enough that I felt my right knee (the oldest part of my body, apparently) protesting loudly as we climbed back down the path, dislodging little stones that went rolling merrily down ahead.
I got to the bottom and apologised to my ancient joints, and promised myself I'd come back with the proper equipment... and a buddy.
The bar at Serravalle was only about another 50 yards and as I sat eating the only thing he had to eat - a not-very-fresh cornetto integrale - and drinking my water, I had time to wonder what had possessed me.
The walk back was an easy stroll by comparison, straight along the Ferrovia and I didn't stop again. The rain had become steady, though light, and I pulled out my umbrella, the one piece of equipment I had been sensible enough to bring. It wasn't cold, and there were plenty of places along the trail where the trees completely sheltered the path. The bike was, of course, where I left it, and I was pushing up the hill as the 6 o'clock Angelus bell was ringing.
I checked on Google Maps when I got home, and discovered it was 8.25 km from Norcia to Serravalle. No wonder my feet were sore.
remember that time when Pope Pius XII used to constantly say such insane and incomprehensible and kinda heretical-sounding things all the time - off the cuff-like so no one could really call him on it - and the rumours went around all the time that he wasn't really the pope and he ditched all the traditional symbols of his office like living in the Apostolic Palace and refused to wear the pope-stuff and then he appointed a public pederast to run his household and refused to bless people because they might get offended by Christianity and then his hand-picked subordinates started publicly demanding that the Church either change or ignore the words of Christ in the Gospels because nobody liked Him any more and then Pius just sat there saying nothing and didn't correct them or fire them or issue clarifications and then instead stood up on the loggia and got on TV and told everybody what great theologians they were and then he fired the guy who objected to it and then started chumming around with Hitler and Stalin and told the Jews and the people in the Gulags that that torture and starvation and extra-judicial arrests and getting beaten and murdered by the secret police were really good for them because Jesus said "Blessed are the poor" even though He really didn't and then when Pius misquoted Scripture all the time even in official documents and implicitly denied the Divinity of Christ by repeatedly denying the miracles in the Gospels and then when his cardinals and bishops started saying that if he kept on this way there would be a giant catastrophic schism in the Church and he just kept on doing it and never even responded...?
Oh, and remember that time when his predecessor Pius XI resigned in the middle of a giant clerical homosexual-abuse scandal but didn't give up the papal name or papal whites and went on calling himself Pius XI and lived in the Vatican and sometimes issued letters and stuff under his papal name and then it was revealed that a group of ultra-progressive cardinals at the Conclave had decided they needed Pacelli because they knew he would give them what they wanted and went around campaigning to get him the votes even though that would have invalidated the election?
Remember that?
Oh, and remember when the uproar and outrage caused by his behaviour resulted in him having to make a public statement that he wasn't really either an anti-pope or the Antichrist?
Yeah...
me neither.
“Maybe I have given an impression of being a little bit to the left,” the pope admitted. “But if they want me to recite the Creed, I can!”
Pope Francis said a cardinal “who is a friend” was telling him about an older Catholic lady, “a good woman, but a bit rigid,” who had questions about the description of the Antichrist in the Book of Revelation and if that was the same thing as an “anti-pope.”
“‘Why are you asking,’ the cardinal said. ‘Well, I am sure Pope Francis is the anti-pope.’
“‘Why do you say that?’
“‘Well, because he renounced the red shoes, which are so historic,'” the pope said the woman responded.
People have all sorts of reasons to think, “he’s communist or he’s not communist,” the pope said.
Actually, yeah. Yeah, I think I would like you to recite the Creed. Often. That would be a good thing for a pope to do now and then.
I think, in fact, that from now on if you just recited the Creed every time you saw a microphone in your face, that might be good.
But just give me a few minutes to step back a little. Like maybe into the next block.
Because nothing says "mercy" and "joy" like a seven-story high neon picture of a communist mass-murderer.
Yes folks, it's the Pope Francis in Cuba show! Brought to you by the Obama administration and Pope no-one-was-ever-merciful-in-the-Catholic-Church-until-I-came-along Francis.
Apparently, some of his biggest fans have been waiting for a long time to meet him.
Around 70% of Cuba's 11 million people practice syncretism, the blending of traditional Christianity with African religions that arrived on the island with the slaves imported during colonial times.
Only about 10% describe themselves as Catholic, once the dominant faith.
The Santeria tradition has survived both the hostility of the Catholic clergy and the state atheism the communist government decreed for more than three decades after the Cuban Revolution.
Today, many followers say they plan to turn out to greet the pope during his four-day visit.
"As pope, Francis has brought the honey that was missing in our lives," said Juan Manuel Perez Andino, a "babalawo," or Santeria priest.
He said he has seen a subtle shift in the Church under the Argentine pontiff, even if the Vatican and the Cuban clergy still officially frown upon Santeria.
"Now the Church lets us go there with the 'iyawo' (new initiate) to perform the ceremonies we need to," he said.
A friend of mine just posted this blog to FB and said that he thought he was just about going to curl up into a little green puddle of jealousy.
Even for me, "jealous" hardly covers my feelings:
"But, in all seriousness, my family and I are so blessed to be here. Some people dream of playing professional sports, some doctors, some teachers. For the last dozen years my dream job was to be a caretaker of a monastery. I remember the first guy I met with that job. For years I spun that pea around in my little head trying to figure out how to land that gig. And here I am."
A few years ago I visited a friend at Christmas time who lives in a caretaker's apartment built into the old servants' quarters of a 17th century National Trust stately home in Scotland. I don't remember ever wanting a gig that much. Then it got worse. I was taken on a little tour of the estate grounds, and got to see the large walled "kitchen garden" that was about 1/2 an acre but completely unused. It was just bare raised beds and an empty glass house. I was told that the Trust was looking for someone to hire to start gardening here again.
Then, if you can imagine it, it got even worse when my friend introduced me to the "estate naturalist" - who proceeded to show us where there were barn owls nesting - and I thought I was going to have an envy-aneurysm and just drop dead of acute longing right there on the spot.
When I lived in England I gave some very serious thought to going to a local agricultural college and taking their two-year countryside and wilderness conservation programme. All hands-on, outdoorsy work, building stone walls, laying hedges, learning botany and zoology... I still kind of yearn for it.
Since my visit to Scotland, I've moved to Norcia, which is pretty darn nice, I have to admit. But in truth, it's not my natural habitat. I'm fine with that, and there are of course loads of compensations but Italy will forever be a foreign exile for me. Britain, cold, rainy, overcast, drizzly Britain - with black pudding and fried mushrooms for breakfast and the smell of coal fires wafting through the crisp November air - is where I'm from, down to the level of my DNA. I won't ever stop wishing I could go back, go home, even if I never actually do it.
Reason 10,096 for living in Norcia: I've already taken the mosquito curtains down.
We're past the Big Heat of the hottest summer on record (TBTG!!). I've had a couple in the sitting room and I've been bitten a few times when out on a stomp because I forgot to use the Muskol someone brought me from Canuckistan, but on the whole the mosquito thing that was such a misery and plague in S. Marinella is just not really a big issue here.
I had the curtains up this summer, but mostly kept the windows and shutters closed through the day to combat the heat. (It worked too, and when it was 38 outside, it was at leat 10 to 15 degrees cooler inside.) But now that the temperature has dropped and the nights are a little longer and a little cooler - enough that I'm pulling my cardies out of the box - the annoyance of fighting with the curtains has outweighed the usefulness of keeping the bugs out.
In this neighbourhood, with a dairy farm across the next field, the bigger issue than mozzies is flies. Got me onea them electric tennis racket things, which I'm getting pretty good with.
The contrast is with Santa Marinella, where if you don't have your windows screened and have nets over the bed, you will be eaten alive in summer. And by "summer" I mean April to the end of October. And even then, at the height of the season you have to sleep with a bottle of bug-off and a tube of antihistamine cream under your pillow. I used to routinely do a perimeter security check around the bed every night before climbing in to make sure there wasn't any little opening. You have to tuck the ends of the nets under the mattress. Even so, I would be bitten while sleeping at least three times a week. Wake up at two am, turn on the light and there the little bastard would be, stuck inside the net.
You got used to it, I suppose, (and of course it wasn't as bad as the arctic where the mosquitoes come literally in clouds) but the bugs were really miserable on the coast. I never went anywhere without a bottle of bug spray in my handbag.
Hey guys: can you please pray/have masses said for a friend of mine? I know it was years ago, but I was just re-reading the teaching on suicides and it brought it to mind. My friend took his own life a few years ago and I was shocked. There never was a jollier fellow, happily married and well respected. But he was heavily involved in a rather rough sport in which he sustained many head injuries over the years. I had an email from his wife who said that he had been very badly affected by this. What he and his family did not know was how severely. He suffered from bouts of depression so severe that he would be hospitalized. After he died, they were told that the head trauma had created a cumulative effect such that the only way to ensure his safety was inpatient treatment, though with brain damage they didn't know if there ever had been anything they could have done for him.
Chuck was one of those guys in high school who was constantly joking around and his good nature and prodigious musical talents always made him the centre of attention. I was a wallflower in high school and was terribly intimidated by him. But we had the same free period one semester and he always spent it in the cafeteria playing the piano they kept in the back. I would come and sit near by and listen while I read or worked on drawings. He always took requests and didn't mind me singing along. Those were the times I think the real Chuck peeped out, and it turned out that without an audience for his clowning, he was almost as shy as I was but also a kind and generous guy.
Years later we connected again in the SCA where he had rocketed to fame and fortune and become the head of a large household (don't laugh, non-nerds, this is a pretty big deal in this subculture, and quite real. He was a genuine leader of at least 40 people, all of whom very much looked up to him IRL as well as SCA context...we live in terrible times and people need a tribe, however goofy it might look on the outside.) In that period, I was pretty much a nobody and he was (literally) a king among men, and even so, he would take the time to invite me to things, make sure I was included in things and always had time to chat and share a beer.
When I heard he'd died and how I was surprised how affected I was, even though I'm sure I hadn't seen him in 15 years.
Anyway, from what his wife told me I expect that there was little chance that he was responsible for his act, and I told her I would pray for him and for her. Her name is Heather, his is Charles.
