5 september, 2024
I am sitting in my room at the monastery of San Gregorio Magno in Rome, waiting for my guitar to be delivered from the airport. I got here Sunday; the Collings, alas, did not leave San Francisco until Monday. We know that it is now somewhere here in Rome. The courier sent us a message Tuesday night saying that it would be delivered by mezzogiorno yesterday. It is now 10 AM today. If it doesn’t get here by noon, I will head to Camaldoli anyway.
So, yes, I arrived Sunday to a sweltering hot Rome, in the 90s, no breeze, humid. Wow. I’ve had a wonderful room here, a double space, really, a small outer room with a desk and an inner room with a bed and bathroom. Long sheer drapes hanging from the windows, which I just love. Obviously have had the windows open the whole time and the drapes provide enough privacy. The jet lag hasn’t been too bad and I think I’ve overcome it already. Besides chasing down the guitar––and at one point I had very little hope that I would ever see it again and was already shopping online to see how much ITA airlines would have to reimburse me to replace a Collings C10 and a Calton case…easy $6,000––including two trips to the airport to catch the next day’s incoming flight (obviously to no avail), I’ve had a lot of desk work to do and this has been a good place to do it.
The main thing was re-writing three conferences that I had prepared for an event I am doing in Poland at the end of this month. I have always had a pretty good inner clock for deadlines, a sense of how long it’s going to take to do something without having to cram and rush at the last minute, and I had all the preparation for the next work laid out in my mind. I sent the three conferences off to my host in Poland to start the translations before I flew out Sunday. (I am going to present the whole conference in English and then he will re-present the whole thing in Polish.) They are adaptations of old conferences and I was so proud of the work I had done on them to improve them. But he thought they were, in a word, a little too scholarly for the group that was going to be gathering and maybe even beyond his ability to translate easily into Polish. So he advised me pretty much how I should revise them. It was kind of disconcerting; never had anyone ever before asked me to re-write something I was about to present (of course never before had I had to send my talks in advance to be translated), and not only exactly what I should talk about but pretty much even how I should say it! After massaging my wounded ego a little, I set about on a whole new set of conferences, with which he is pleased. And I must say they are good and hopefully also useful for future use. But I wasn’t expecting to be working this hard my first days in Italy!
Aside from the missing guitar and the revision of my conferences, the other unsettling thing about these first days is that I still don’t know where I am going to be living. I had asked Fr. George, vice-prior of San Gregorio, and Sr. Michela, guest master at Sant’Antonio, in advance if it was possible to stay long term either here with the monks or across the Circo Massimo with the nuns, but had only gotten a vague answer from George and no response from Michela. Well, we were at Sant’Antonio for Madre Michela’s 70th birthday party the other day and Michelina pulled me off to the side and apologetically explained to me that they have never hosted a man long term as a guest before, so no. The next day I sat down with George and asked him directly. I am going to be coming in and out of Rome three times in the next few months and also want to leave some stuff behind, since I brought enough things for the long term that I don’t need to cart around on my back. In short, there is a room for me for the first two times I am coming through, maybe the third time, but probably no room for me after January. The reason is there is construction going on here which will cut off access to an entire section of the building, so all the students will need to live in one section. They are not even accepting their other long-term boarders this year, which is very unusual. So that's a drag.
My next option will be to find out if I can live at Sant’Anselmo. That’s of course the Benedictine University where my boss, the Abbot Primate, lives, and since I am going to be working for the Confederation… If that doesn’t work I am told that the Cistercians also take in boarders, but of course there will be a cost to that.
It's an unusual feeling! I just want a little room somewhere to put my “stuff,” a place I can come home to, a place where I can pray and work. (“Is it too much to ask for a room with a view?!”) No doubt something will work out and I’m trying to sink into the poverty of it and enjoy it. At 66 years old I feel more than ever like a wandering mendicant.
So I head to the Sacro Eremo today. God-willing I will be recording some music with the Coro Camaldolese on Saturday for the legendary Christmas album. These are the guys I sang with for the Synod last year. I had great plans originally––including filming and posting videos from Camaldoli (my portable camera is also in my guitar case)––but I have trimmed my hopes down to recording two chants acapella, and maybe the three-part harmony for “Lo How A Rose Ere Blooming.” Then really solid down time until next weekend when my predecessor at DIM-MID, Fr. William Skudlarek, is coming up to Camaldoli to spend the weekend. (He actually video called me via WhatsApp yesterday evening just to check in while I was sitting in the piazza in front of Santa Maria Sopra Minerva, which was sweet and fun.) We will do some more transition stuff and long-term planning there, and then come back down to Rome together Monday September 16. The next day he is taking me to meet the Secretary of the Dicastery for Interreligious Dialogue for lunch, and then day after that he will deliver his report to the Congress of Abbots and introduce me as his successor, after which I will give a five-minute self-introduction. Then the next day off to Poland to begin this next leg of ministry.
I am really glad that I finally broke down my resistance to Rome last time I was here. I’ve gotten lots of exercise walking the streets––and sweating!––up to six miles a day. I especially love the area, heavily touristed now, around the Trevi Fountain and Piazza Navona, the Gregorianum and the Biblicum. But I am going to be happy to be on the rocky trails in the moody forest of Camaldoli again and covered by the blanket of silence at the Sacro Eremo. Sometimes it’s hard to imagine that we are all, Romani and Casentinesiani, from the same congregation.
It all feels very familiar and yet very new at the same time. I thought it was a Taoist aphorism, but I found out it actually comes from Heraclitus: “No one steps in the same river twice. For it is not the same river, and you are not the same person.” Sia Ganga che Tevere! Either the Ganges or the Tiber!
