Posted: April 29

Clear skies and new ideas

(Brussels) The experienced traveler would not thinking of heading north to Brussels, Belgium, without a sturdy umbrella close at hand. I had one with me on Friday as I set out from the retreat house where the communication group of Jesuits from central and Eastern Europe were to meet. But I did not need it then, nor on Saturday, nor on Sunday—this was without doubt the best weather that I have ever known in Belgium. The spring was just at hand and the grass was a deep, rich green. The retreat house itself is an old Franciscan monastery, a bit on the Spartan side for my tastes, but the meeting went very well anyway.

I introduced some of the themes about communication that came up during the recent general congregation, and I think that they open up a fruitful line for development. Instead of thinking of communication as an extremely specialized endeavor for a few Jesuits, the notion now is that communication is an integral part of all that we do. This opens up a lot more areas to work in and broadens the scope of the communication apostolate dramatically. The Jesuits who came to Brussels are specialists in different areas, some academic, others in production. Fr. Christof Wolf showed us the trailer for a new documentary film he recently completed about a multi-faith prayer service that takes place at Auschwitz every year. It takes a lot of time and money to make a movie, so if we reduce the discussion to such difficult endeavors, then we miss the opportunity for many other things that are perhaps more ordinary, but will have a major impact in our work.

The group scheduled the meeting in Brussels to get a sense of the European Union’s impact on the Society of Jesus. There are a few pastoral works in which Jesuits serve the small army of officials who man the vast bureaucracy of the European parliament, council and commission. People kept explaining those elements of the central government to me, but it is a bit hard for my American head to grasp this method of doing business. One thing that got my attention, though, was the passport an Austrian Jesuit showed me. Right after the official seal were the words, “European Union” and then on the second line came “Republic of Austria.” That brought home to me the fact that Europe is moving closer to being one country than just a collection of allies. French, Spanish, Italian—those identities are no longer paramount. Brussels has a role much like Washington, D.C. Even the Mass we went to on Saturday at the Jesuit center was celebrated in four languages (French, English, Polish and Italian). The chapel was not fancy, but the faith and friendship were evident.

Posted: April 20

Happy birthday, Rome

(Rome) Life in the Curia has returned to its normal rhythm, which for me means being busy with multiple projects, and even the seasons are starting to behave according to custom. Today was a beautiful spring morning, and the only appropriate thing was to head out on my bicycle, according to custom. At times I passed flowering bushes and smelled the scent of spring. Just when the day seemed the epitome of normality, I ran into police blocking off the street that runs along the old Circus Maximus near the Tiber. There were crowds in the open field and initially I thought that they were closing this street off just as they close the one running through the forum every Sunday morning.

Then I saw the banners and the soldiers in uniforms of the ancient Roman armies and men and wom en dressed in togas. Nor normal at all. Stop the bike and see what is going on. What was starting was a parade of people of all ages dressed in Roman attire: citizens in togas, senators, gladiators, soldiers, even dancing girls. Mostly it looked very authentic, since the faces I saw were the direct descendants of the people who built the statues and monuments that still exist. Today’s Romans dressed up in ancient robes look pretty much like the images of ancient Romans that you can see in museums.

Of course, there were some discordant notes. Among the gladiators were three women; and I doubt that is historically accurate, although the big woman with the long-handled wooden mallet and the frown did not seem the right person to ask about historicity. The soldiers legs also seemed a bit too pale and flabby, compared to the real Roman soldiers who regularly marched great distances. I couldn’t quibble, though; Romans have a right to dress up like their ancestors just as much as folks in the United States can dress up like Revolutionary War or Civil War soldiers.

Besides, Romans are celebrating the founding of their city back in 753 BC. The official birthday celebration is April 21 but special events precede that day, such as the historical parade I bumped into. They were headed for the Colosseums and then the Via dei Fori Imperiali before arriving at the statue of Caesar to put down a commemorative wreath. According to legend, the twin brothers Romulus and Remus were the founders of Rome. Following the murder of Remus, Romulus became the first king of Rome. The traditional date of Romulus' sole reign and the founding of Rome is April 21, 753 BC.

Posted: April 6

Dreaming about change

(Barcelona) It has been 20 years since I’ve been in Barcelona and this city on Spain’s northeastern coast does not seem all that different. If anything it is more prosperous looking, especially in comparison with Rome. The cathedral certainly does not seem to have changed much except for the video monitors mounted on the stone pillars along each side. We dropped into the dim space late Saturday afternoon as Mass was beginning, and few people paid attention to the monitors; fewer still sat in the pews. Perhaps that is a change as Spain has steadily moved away from the central, privileged status that the Church used to enjoy. The plaza right in front of the cathedral was however jammed with people doing a traditional dance. They formed circles of six to 10 people and moved slowly around as an orchestra seated on the cathedral steps played the stately music that they moved to.

We were taking a break from a three-day conference of web masters of European web sites. The conversation as we strolled down the Ramblas on an early spring day wandered from new software like Ajax and the best way to do open-source CMS systems. If none of that makes sense to you now, it would after taking part in one of these meetings. It’s not only technology we discussed though. The most lively discussions came from arguing about how to do retreats on line. Can you just post information that people use as they want or can you bring in the back-and-forth dynamic of a typical Jesuit directed retreat? How can you achieve that sort of interaction if the one who is making the retreat and the director are not in the same room, or may not have ever even met each other? Should you even try to do it? I think I most enjoyed the session where we just dreamed about what we want to do without worrying about technical limitations. As voice over the internet technologies like Skype become more common, we could begin to think of spiritual direction done at some physical or geographic remove. People who do not live anywhere near a Jesuit retreat house could start to experience the benefits of an Ignatian retreat. We also dreamed about creating communities of prayer. I really liked the expression someone used, “You may pray alone but you are not alone in prayer.” Some of the new technologies could give people praying simultaneously but in greatly separated places a sense of community that encourages even more prayer.

Posted: March 31

Right on Time

(Rome) Sunday evening I was sitting in my room listening to folk music over the internet when I heard the acoustic blues guitar player Eric Bibb introduce his song “Right on Time.” He wrote it after performing for an audience that included John Cephas, one of his folk-blues heroes. Cephas came on stage later and said that he was getting old but he was content knowing that some younger musicians treasured the music to which he had given his life. He said that Bibb had come along, “Right on time.” Bibb turned the remark into a song, but his explanation got me thinking about art.

Yesterday afternoon I was just finishing a still life painting in my studio. I was at a stopping point and the light was failing, so I decided to head off down to Trastevere. One of my friends mentioned that he had been to the Museo di Roma where he saw a wonderful exhibit of watercolor paintings by Ettore Roesler Franz, who created 120 paintings between 1876-1896. Franz documented Rome as it was before the development sparked by the unification of Italy began a process of modernization that Mussolini ultimately pushed forward. Many of the old city scenes are long since gone, but some remain, or at least bits of them. If you live in Rome and know the city well, it is fascinating to see these paintings and compare what you see now and what once existed. The museum was packed, partly because this was the end of a special culture week during which all the city’s museums were opened for free.

Most of the people looking at the watercolors saw them as literal documents and focused on the subject matter. I looked at them as amazing pieces of art. For one thing, they were big, roughly two feet by three, if not larger. The colors were luminous, an effect that great artists can get from a difficult medium. I remember seeing lots of Winslow Homer watercolors in the vault at the Brooklyn Museum. Art at this level grabs your attention just by itself. A few of the paintings veered towards being illustrations that literally captured facts of life at that time. But most were beautiful paintings in their own right, with a soft color palette that captured the Mediterranean light that makes Rome so special. He also managed to maintain a wonderful balance between capturing details of the urban landscape and preserving a loose sense of the scene with big color shapes that formed patterns that caught my eye. One painting perfectly captured the pearly grey of a rainy winter day, while others had the warm ochre glow that characterizes the faded paint on Roman walls. I overheard one woman say, “Each one is more beautiful than the last.” Amen, I thought.

This exhibit might not have caught my attention so much had I not just read an account in Time magazine of a new exhibit of works by avant-garde artists Marcel Duchamps, Francis Picabia and Man Ray who worked a few decades after Ettore Roesler Franz. The three of them pioneered the ironic idea that any thing can be art and that traditional notions of craftsmanship and technique no longer mattered. The article was illustrated with a photo of Duchamps’ famous upside-down urinal which he simply signed “R Mutt 1917” and declared it to be art. (Ironically, the original was recently destroyed by a contemporary artist who was making his own performance art statement by hammering the urinal into pieces. Fortunately, it was not difficult to get another urinal and recreate what had become a very valuable “art” piece.)

The Time article said: “If ‘anything goes’ then skill, craft, sensuous handling, emotions, the artist’s personal expression and artistic originality are all optional—‘art’ can be any object untransformed, just presented in a gallery and given a title. Andy Warhol ran with this idea in the 1960s and so do Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst today. Art students are in awe of it.”

I sometimes feel apologetic about my own paintings because they are representational, which is so out of style. I care about color and technique and I feel closer to Eric Bibb than to Duchamps. Art is a conversation as much as music is, and it is important that people come along who are still interested in methods of artistic expression that have an inner life that continues to be recreated by new generations. Painters that I would like to engage in this conversation include the Spanish painter Joaquín Sorolla (February 27, 1863 - August 10, 1923), and John Singer Sargent. Obviously I cannot paint just like they did, nor do I want just to imitate their work. But they had a language of brush strokes, color notes and visual forms that intrigues me and makes me want to see what I can do with it. Metaphorically, I would like to make my own music that plays off theirs. Sargent’s treatment of water in his Venice watercolors echoes Franz’s treatment of the Tiber River, and Sorolla captured Spanish cityscapes as deftly as the Roman artist.

One of the side notes in the Time article was the fact that Duchamps secretly he devoted himself for two decades to an ambitious project: an installation “with sparkling light, an invisible motor and a nude woman made of plaster casts of body parts covered in calfskin” according to Time. No one knew about this project during his lifetime. His ironic pose that the actual way of creating art did not matter was contradicted by his devotion to this project that he took more seriously than he could publicly acknowledge. The good thing about music is that musicians still take their craft seriously and care about the traditions—the conversations—to which they dedicate themselves.

Posted: March 26

Dancing with Devils

(Prizzi, Sicily) The stone streets of this small Sicilian hill town cooled rapidly as the Easter sun slid behind late afternoon clouds. A teacher at the Jesuit school in Palermo where the three of us were taking a holiday had invited us to visit this ancient town perched on a rocky nob about an hour and a half into the interior of the island. He grew up in Prizzi and wanted us to experience what is undeniably a unique way to celebrate Easter, the “dance of the devils.”

If that seems hard to understand, it is. We began the learning process by stopping at the home of our host’s parents. We parked the car on a narrow street clinging to an abrupt drop off and then wound up steep lanes bounded by tall, narrow houses. The parents’ house was bigger than it seemed, two rooms and some stairs, another room and more stairs, and so on. You would have to be fairly tough just to manage daily life in a hill town. Prizzi is known to be tough, one of the Mafia towns near Corleone where the Cosa Nostra leader Totó Riina came from.

There are many churches in Prizzi, but the town is best known for its devils. The town published a slick brochure that explains this custom that inexplicably has not become a major tourist attraction. There are two main costumes that are used. One is a yellow one-piece sort of overalls capped with a mask with slanted eyes and glaring fangs; the other is red with a grotesque round face crowned with horns and a long mane of hair. The yellow figure represents death while the red figures are devils whose red color represents flames.

So on Easter morning, the time when Christians celebrate the resurrection of Jesus, kids in Prizzi put on these costumes and go around town banging on doors and demanding gifts from the awakened neighbors. This is actually not so different from the U.S. custom of Halloween, but it seems strange to have it on Easter Sunday. Of course, after the children finish going around, people go off to Mass to celebrate the formal rites of the day.

The dance begins in the evening. Part of the ritual is a widespread medieval custom of remembering the meeting of Jesus and his mother after the resurrection. One group of men carry a large statue of Jesus on their shoulders, walking through the town seeking the other large statue of the Madonna, carried on their shoulders by another group. This is typical. Even St. Ignatius has a meditation in the Spiritual Exercises to imagine this encounter that is not mentioned in the Gospels but makes emotional sense.

The twist that Prizzi gives to the practice is that Death and the Devils dance in the street between the two statues, trying to prevent their coming together. The yellow and red figures rush back and forth until the two sword-carrying angels command them to bow down before Jesus. The men carrying Jesus also start rushing back and forth, and lower the statue threateningly towards the devils. I found myself hoping that the men carrying the big statue were strong enough to keep it from tipping over as they ran towards the devils.

Of course, this dance does not happen just once, but six times in various streets around town. We stayed for two of them. The town band appeared the second time, and the devils danced with each other. I think the folks enjoyed the devils more than Jesus and Mary. At first I stayed up on a balcony overlooking the scene; some friends of our host opened up their house to us. But I couldn’t get good photographs removed from the action, so I walked down into the crowd. Soon one of the devils collared me and led me dancing away to a store front beyond the crowd where I had to pay something to escape their clutches. The atmosphere seemed more Carnival-ish than Pascual. Finally, Jesus and Mary appeared, and the angels forced Death and the Devils to bow down before the One who one the victory.

The main idea seems to be that the devils are celebrating because they think they won after Jesus was crucified, but Easter means that Jesus won. I’m not sure how all this fits in with Mafia or Sicilian traditions. The people who invited us are certainly kind and good and proud of their town which they opened to us.