31 August, 2019
The
fact of praising a human and religious tradition does not mean despising the
others. The synthesis between all of them can seem improbable and sometimes
even impossible, but that which is urgent and important is not the unity
between the religions, but their harmony. (R.
Pannikar)
Oh my goodness. I almost
don’t know where to begin. It was a wild and wonderful time in Sicily, not
without its challenges, but still…
It started out with an
overnight train trip to Palermo from Rome. I had made this train trip before,
20 years ago, but during the day, and I remember it being one of my favorite
trips ever, seeing the northern coast of Sicily at dawn; crossing the Straits
of Messina in a huge ferry boat––the entire train entering in; hugging the
Mediterranean coastline; getting accosted by vendors in Napoli; finally my
young (at the time) confrere Natale hanging off a column waiting for me and
waving when I arrived for the first time at Roma Termini that night. This time,
not much excitement: an overnight trip in a little cucetta with three berths shared with one guy who had no desire to
talk and then a long bus ride in the dark from Messina to Palermo. It was again
exciting to cross the straits and I was impressed even more this time at how
close the mainland and the island are to each other. We had arrived at the
crossing point around 4:30 AM, so by the time we got the train loaded on the traghetto and started across, the first
hints of dawn were slipping in.
I was greeting at the
train station in Palermo by Fr. Eraldo Cacchione, S.J., who had been my main
contact for this conference. We had met once, he reminded me, 10 years ago at
New Camaldoli, but I had no recollection of that. The only other meeting of
sorts was over WhatsApp from Florence and scores of emails. He and another
Jesuit, who I had met several times including once in India, Fr. Fausto
Gianfreda, S.J. are the organizers of this now-annual conference called “Zipoli: Corso di Formazione alla
Spiritualità nell Musicà,” a course of formation in spirituality in music.
They had invited me to come already for the first and second editions of this
conference (this was the third) in 2017, but it was impossible for me to get
away at the time. When I was plotting this sabbatical, the first thing I
thought of was being able to participate in this edition of it, and I let them
know right away. However, in addition to offering a conference myself (more on
that in a minute), Eraldo then asked me to organize all the liturgies for the
week too. That was quite a job, first of all in Italian and secondly doing it
long distance, flying blind. In the end Eraldo and his team put together a
beautiful Vademecum booklet with the
music tha I had put together for the four Lauds’ and three Vespers’ services,
in addition to some music for Eucharist.
I really didn’t get the
full scope of this event, nor my part in it, until I got here. The participants
were college-aged young people (18 to 25, a great age to work with as far as I
am concerned), and a relatively small group of them––this year we started out
with 15 and in the end there were only 10! They (we) lived together for the
week in a state sponsored dorm that was right next to the Jesuit church and residence
in a noisy little neighborhood known as Ballarò. It has been a Muslim area for
well over a thousand years and still boasts of a rambling open air
market––Eraldo referred to it as a souk,
in fact. When I was in Palermo with Mom and Dad in 1999, one of the memories I
have is of a friend of our cousins driving me to various spots in his Fiat 500,
stopping the car and then telling me, ‘Vai,
fai in giro––Go walk around,” while he sat in the car smoking. I didn’t
speak much Italian at the time and had no idea what I was looking for or
looking at. And at one point he brought me to an open market that was actually
kind of startling to me in all its foreign chaos. And I have a feeling that
this was the same market.
My first hours with
Eraldo were spent going over the week and the music for the liturgies, and then
getting a quick tour of the most important venues. They had chosen several
different sites throughout the city, all within walking distance, for the
various presentations, plus we were going to have our regular liturgies of the
hours in a little chapel a half a block away, called the Capella delle Dame–the chapel of the Ladies. It’s a fusty little
place that is the home of a congregation of noble woman who minister to girls
and young women who get brought over to Sicily under nefarious pretenses and
often wind up in prostitution or other forms of human trafficking. The chapel
and its antechambers, which are filled with Baroque accoutrements, is usually
closed up and rarely used, so someone from the congregation had to come and
open for us at the arranged times. They were very sweet and welcoming. The
space worked well enough for us though it was very hot and airless inside, and
I, wearing my choir robe for the liturgies, was usually drenched in sweat by
the end. We then went to the site for my own presentation, which was to be the
first of the week the next morning. That was my first gasp.
I have read quite a bit
about the confluence of cultures in Sicily around the dawn of the first
millennium and was very anxious to see some of the spots I had read about. To
summarize a very complicated history: in the 9th century, the
Byzantine Greeks on the island were feuding with their counterparts back in
Constantinople over some political issues (power and money) and so they asked
for some help from the Berber, Arab, Persian, and Iberian Muslims from Carthage,
what we know as Tunisia in northern Africa, with whom they had already had a
trading relationship for some time. (Side note: I was corrected by someone the
other day who said that it was a misnomer to refer to it as simply Arab
influence, when there was this mixture of tribes, though most books do refer to
it as such. This gentleman said it was much more accurate to refer to it as
Muslim or Islamic.) That “help” from the north African Muslims turned into a
Muslim-Arabic takeover of much of the island in the 9th and 10th
centuries. In records from that time Palermo itself (then known as Bal’harm)
was often referred to as the medina,
“the city” and was one of the largest and wealthiest Arab cities along with
Baghdad and Cordoba. A number of churches were converted to mosques, but in
keeping with the teaching of the Qur’an a great degree of religious tolerance
prevailed. There was also a significant Jewish presence on the island and large
Jewish quarters in both Palermo and Siracusa. The Arabs brought with them a
high degree of learning, erudition and innovation, which melded into the
literacy and education of the Byzantines and Jews. Not unlike pre-15th
century Spain, it seems to have been a golden era.
That era was followed by
the Norman conquest in the 12th century. The Normans were an
amalgamation of Vikings, Franks, Romans, and Celts who spoke an ancient dialect
of French. They had already made their presence felt throughout northern Europe
and England. This was also the time of William the Conqueror, and just after
the great schism in Christianity that separated East from West, so-called Greek
Orthodox from Roman Catholic. It must be said that the remaining Byzantines in
Sicily were happier under Islamic rule that they were about the prospect of
submitting to Rome and losing their rituals and beliefs. Strange bedfellows,
but at this point at least, just as under Islamic rule, there was still
religious and cultural tolerance. And this is the period I was so fascinated
with, many traces of which remain. As a placard that I saw at several points
around the city describes it, Arab-Norman Palermo is “an outstanding example of
a socio-cultural syncretism between Western, Byzantine and Islamic culture,” an
“interchange which gave rise to an architectural and artistic expression based
on new concepts of space, structure and decoration that spread widely
throughout the Mediterranean region.” Nine religious and civic buildings from
this era in Palermo, Monreale and Cefalù are considered UNESCO sites.
All that to say Eraldo
then took me to the site where I was to present/perform the next day. And to my
delight and astonishment, it was one of the places I had wanted to see, Santa
Cristina. Built in 1174, it’s one of the oldest churches in Palermo. Its
architecture is very sober and austere, and it has almost no interior
decorations. That’s what marks what is known as the Arab-Norman style. It was
known as a place that welcomed pilgrims, Sicily being a stopping point on the
way to the Holy Land. As a matter of fact the street it is on is still known as
the Cortile dei Pellegrini. In
addition this church was for a time the abbey church of a group of Cistercian
monks. Needless to say, I was delighted that this was going to be my venue. The
typical Sicilian style that I was to see over and over again is pretty
overwrought high Baroque style with every inch of wall space covered with
something, and lots of anguished holy faces. This chaste Romanesque style,
always my favorite ever since I studied art history, was like a drink of cool
water after a salty meal, and I was glad to be able to experience it several
times during my days here.
I had that evening before
the conference started to myself, walking up and down the centro storico, many of whose main streets are blocked off from
traffic so as to accommodate the throngs of tourists. My host later at the
B&B in Bisacquino, who is a Palermitano himself, told me that it is only in
recent years that Palermo has cleaned up this area so as to cater to tourism. When
he was a boy––less than twenty years ago––it was not so. I heard every version
of opinion about this development. One man told me that the Sicilians don’t do
enough to promote tourism when there is such a cultural treasure there. Another
said that the Sicilians are glad to have all this tourism as a boost to the
economy. On the other hand I saw a poster around the corner from the dorm
complaining about the raised prices, lack of affordable housing, and abundance
of franchises over local businesses.
The next morning I had
to jump right in, head first. We had morning prayer at 8 AM at the Capella delle Dame. I had not yet met
the kids but I had to lead them in a brief rehearsal of the music, sight
unseen, in Italian. I had spent a good part of the early morning rehearsing how
to say things like “Now you try” and “Listen and then repeat” and “A little
louder” and “Turn to page 3” in second person plural. Like my stilted conversation
about guitars a week before, it’s amazing what vocabulary you take for granted.
It went fine. I had decided to try to bring in all kinds of “chant” for these
liturgies, mirroring our theme of multiculturalism, and this first day, besides
a couple of easy chanting tones, I had opted to begin and end morning and
evening prayer with the nama japas
from Shantivanam and the collection “Hare Yeshu.” They picked them up
easily, thanks be to God, though they were looking at me a little mystified.
We then went right over
to Santa Cristina where I was to offer my presentation, which as I said, was
the first of the week. By now it was clear to me what the concept was, but of
course I had not idea what was going to follow. Each presentation was to follow
the format of an hour and a half of presenting the material, a brief pause,
followed by a period of questions and/or a summary, ideally lasting two and a
half hours. (Two and a half hours!)
I realize that we
Americans really are quite literalists, and I had laid my presentation out
exactly––and I mean exactly––as they
had asked me to: to speak on music in Benedictine formation; the sound of the
Spirit in my spiritual and vocal chords; inter-religious dialogue; music and
California; and the various genres from folk to Gregorian chant; and to make it
autobiographical as well and to perform for and with the students. The title of
my presentation was “From Liturgy to the Religions of the World.” Needless to
say I was over-prepared as usual; I had twelve pages of notes typed up. To sum
up I spoke on how the music I listened to outside of church influenced the
music that I wrote for the liturgy, as part of the wave of music that came out
post-conciliar in the attempt to find a musical vernacular to go with our
vernacular language, and my specific voice in all that. And then how my
background in liturgy and liturgical spirituality (this is something our
beloved Bruno used to tell me about myself) helped me in my approach to
interreligious dialogue.
I am happy to report it
went extraordinarily well. Eraldo and Fausto had done a pretty long
introduction since this was the first presentation, so I was actually cheated
out of a half an hour and I had to cut two songs and some spoken material,
otherwise I think I had exactly the right amount. Every now and then I would
stop and ask, ‘Si capisce il mio
italiano? Do you understand my Italian?” And they kept saying
enthusiastically, ‘Si, si!’, me all
the while being rather surprised. The questions were very penetrating and right
to the point. Looking back I think there were two things that were especially
good about it. First, out of all the presentations, not only did I have the
most musical examples mixed into the speaking, but I was certainly the only one
that had participation. (It was the best performance of “The Drink Sent Down”
ever, with the students singing the alhamdullilah
ostinato throughout.) Secondly, again looking back, I really did inadvertently
set the tone for what was to come afterward and would be reaffirmed by the
final presenter on Sunday morning, Raffaele Pozzi, who spoke on “Music and
Spirituality in the Global World.”
One of the things that
keep coming to my mind is that I do very few gigs anymore but the ones I do
usually take a lot of preparation. I don’t mind this a bit––it’s like going
deep rather than wide. The two that I accepted for this sabbatical time, for
instance: the opening event for the International Thomas Merton Society took me
many hours of reflecting, research, writing, and rehearsing over the course of
several months; and this one, even more, with the addition of preparing and
sometimes re-scoring and/or translating and adapting all the music for the
liturgies besides writing the talk, took even more. And what a sense of
satisfaction when they are done. I hope that both of them will have a permanent
format at some point: we’ve talked about filming a version of the ITMS
presentation and Eraldo said that they want to gather the talks from Zipoli in some
kind of a publication. (Italians love to publish things!) But even more, I hope
I get to repeat these performances in an appropriate venue.
I’ll write more about
the rest of the conference and the time in Sicily later, but before I forget: I
just heard that two new “products” (such a crass word) are at the printers/duplicators
even as I write and will be available hopefully by the time I get home. First,
the film of the concert that we did at Holy Cross in Santa Cruz last year,
thanks to the amazing work of Devin
Kumar (Bhattacharya); second, the book Hermit,
Preacher, Wanderer: Songs and Stories from the Road, which I am so excited
about, from OCP. That contains not only the sheet music for twenty of the songs
from the Santa Cruz-wandering era, but also prose explanations of the songs and
the traditions that they come from, plus photos and excerpts from my
travelogues. I’ve never seen anything quite like it before. So please watch for
them both.
I'm taking the guys out for pizza again tonight as a thank you, and then leaving from Rome
tomorrow morning for the long journey home. I will try to write more along the way.
