God in Light and Shadows

It is a busy time here in Rome. Dan Weiske, a good and close friend from last year at Mundelein, is in the middle of his visit. The weather is finally starting to cool down, and it is raining more often. It is not too cold in the city yet, usually I only need to wear a sweater or a light jacket around town. With the cool weather the atmosphere has cleared up, and I can clearly see snow falling on the mountains that surround Rome. My Italian teacher in August said that she thought that it would be cold winter. I do not know how she knows this, but Italians really take "old-wives tales" very seriously, and she was saying something about caterpillars and dogs that I didn't understand. So who knows?

Last night I went to Vespers with the Monastic Community of Jerusalem at Santismma Trinta' dei Monti, the church at the top of the Spanish steps. The specific charism of this community is "to promote the spirit of the monastic desert in the heart of cities." (See their website [in French] at http://jerusalem.cef.fr/). They are allowed their own monastic psalter, so their vespers service does not correspond to our breviary. It is very beautiful and prayerful though. It starts with a ceremony centering around Christ as our light, which includes an incensing of the altar and lighting a row of candles. It then goes into a number of psalms and readings in French interspersed with periods of silence for meditation, and concludes with the Magnificat and Te Deum in Italian. Since it is first vespers for Sunday, they see this service as the beginning of Sunday and as an invitation to enter into the day of prayer, so it is not ended with a formal dismissal or blessing. It is actually very simple and prayerful. Since I do not know French (or Italian all that well) nor the chant modes, I guess some people would say that this liturgy is not open to "active participation," but this is simply not true. Our Holy Father, in line with the Council Fathers, sees the primary aspect of active participation as a participation on the "altar of the heart," and these Vespers through the interplay of light and darkness, sound and silence, common gestures draw me into the spiritual reality that no matter what the language there is a sacramental aspect to prayer, especially the liturgy of the hours.

As far as the Italian is going and the Italian exam, let's just say that the Gregorian University is inviting me, along with two-thirds of my class-mates, to study Italian for sixty more hours. It is funny since I really do have understand most of the lectures. I can read fairly well in Italian. But that is the way things are, and it will not hurt me to study Italian a little more. Classes in general are going great. It is a lot of self-learning, since I need to do a lot of reading on my own, but I enjoy this. I can understand all of my professors, except for one. This is Father Tanner, S.J., who teaches Ancient and Medieval Church History, and he is an authority on this subject. He is brilliant, and yet no one can understand him. Like most of the professors at the Gregorian he is not a native Italian (he is British in origin), so Italian is not his first language (with him it might be his eighth). He speaks an odd hybrid between Italian and academic Oxford-style English. I usually find this to be a good time to write letters home. To be honest.

In other aspects I am doing well. It is time to start visiting apostolate sights, so that is what is what I have been doing. It has been interesting. I have been visiting hospitals and soup kitchens in Rome with some of the "old men." This past Friday I visited a soup kitchen which is run by a Catholic lay movement of Sant'Egidio. (See their website at http://www.santegidio.net/en/index.html). What is very different from my previous experiences working in soup kitchens was that this environment was much more pleasant than I have previously worked in. Instead of having the clients go through a soup line we serve them as waiters. They are given choices on what to they want to eat, and in general in this one little soup kitchen at the bottom of the back side of the Janiculum hill their dignity is respected. It was very nice. I hope I get an assignment in this area, since it is the area that I have the least experience with, and I also very much feel drawn to it. When I walk the streets of Rome and see people asking for money, I feel drawn to them. I do not know how to handle them, since I am told it is foolish to give them money. I can't help it sometimes though. I will also take oranges from the college and give them away. At the very least I look at them, and try to offer them a kindness of the heart. If I had to be materially poor, I think I would much rather be so in the United States, since we seem to have a better tolerance for them. In Italy they are getting fed-up with them, and this is getting expressed in official policy such as a few weeks ago when the city of Rome bulldozed some of the squatters' camp on the outskirts of the city.