Heavenly extended family

Years back, I was a director of music in a Franciscan parish. It was a friendly, casual environment, with a congregation consisting largely of Italian immigrants and their children. I love the Italian attitude towards God, Mary, and the other saints (an idea to which I'll be returning.) Perhaps southern Italians are not the most avid churchgoers (Cranmer would never approve), and, as far as worship is concerned, they generally are more attracted to devotions than to liturgy and sacrament. The church is their father's house, and they are quite comfortable there (when they do visit - which may not be anywhere near as frequent as time with their earthly parents, whose care is a large and godly responsibility.) Italian people will wave, shake hands, kiss in greeting, talk, laugh, play with their children, and so forth in church.

In the parish where I served, the cook, Mary, was a blunt, down to earth sort. The chief sorrow of Mary's life was the corns on her feet, and anyone within earshot would hear the details - though it was far from her only topic of conversation. Who knows a parish inside out better than the cook?

Once, I shared a silly joke with Mary, about a man who always made the wrong decisions. I'll spare my readers the details, but the joke ends with the man falling out of an aircraft, and calling out, mid-air, "Saint Francis, help me." A big hand comes from the sky and grasps him, but a voice asks, "Francis Xavier or Francis of Assisi." I'd told this joke to several people, with one response being, "It must have been Francis of Assisi!," the other, "Oh, if it were the wrong one, I can't believe he'd drop him." But Mary, very matter of fact but with an undertone of annoyance, informed me that, "It's no use talking to Saint Francis. Do you know how many times I have told him about the corns on my feet?!"

For all that I tend to get lost in speculation about our deification, disappearing into a quiet and sometimes dark haze of apophatic mist, a part of me longs for the simplicity and trust of those - such as I met at the parish, and a number of people within my own family - who can turn over temporal needs to the saints.

Surprised? Well, please do not write me some stern lecture about how saints are unnecessary, God should not be made inapproachable, Jesus as the only mediator, and the like. My mother used to pour out woes to Saint Mary, shout at Saint Anthony if he did not 'come through,' bring temporal needs to the Infant of Prague. (How I wish I could do it with the simple trust she had!) God was hardly inapproachable - she gave him bloody hell at my dad's funeral, for causing her to be left alone. The saints were extended family. Just as one might tell a sister about this problem, another sister about that one, one's cousin about another (especially if he was well connected), my mother did this with the saints.

One Sicilian devotion (of which I was unaware, since my own family is from Avellino) was to "Our Lady of Miracles." The parish I mentioned had a little alcove where her statue, complete with other figures of those who had been healed through her intercession, was displayed, to be placed near the sanctuary for her feast day. When the church was remodelled, and the "lateral altars" removed, the section to the right of the altar was designed to contain the tabernacle (a ghastly, modern one which resembled a 1970s ice bucket.) One devout man, irate at the change, asked, "Why don't they take out that box and put Our Lady of Miracles there?"

I was young and foolish then, and undoubtedly made some comment about devotion to the Eucharist. (Which naturally would hold today!) But a remote, mystical, incomprehensible God - the very one that I somehow have been called to worship - would be too difficult with which to identify. A peasant woman, who must have felt just awful travelling to Jerusalem on a donkey in a state of advanced pregnancy - whose cheeky adolescent son contradicted his elders and disappeared for three days, not even offering an apology when his distraught parents found him - who well may have been a widow whose only son left her alone to go about with all that dangerous preaching - and who suffered the agony of watching her beloved son executed - is far more likely to be a confidante.

I attended a small Italian festival today, in a little Benedictine house near my home. The chapel is devotional grotesque - the sort of nightmare one might have if one combined garlic and Saint Anthony's oil, tossed it on pasta, and ate it right before bed. The grounds are inviting and lovely, and open to all in a spirit of OSB hospiality. I was unfamiliar with the particular Marian devotion. The procession was led by a nun, who sang Italian hymns into a microphone in a voice which must be the worst on the planet, and those processing joined in with great fervour, largely in voices no better than hers, but good and loud. (I was saddened, missing the days when I had a polished operatic voice, but joined in the songs nonetheless - with a bit of pathos, remembering my deceased family members and the priests I'd once known there who also have gone to the next life.) There were copes and incense in abundance, and everyone recited the rosary in Italian - what did it matter if one ate a sausage or drank wine and beer from paper cups en route?

I'm going to blush and 'tell one on myself.' One lady, hearing my rough peasant accent on the Ave Maria, approached me, asking my 'region.' She burst into tears when I mentioned Teora - she herself is from the neighbouring town. I'm sensitive about all of my accents, ruefully recalling when a professor of music told me that my Italian 'sounded like the fish market.' I once commented, in front of a simple man I knew, that, for all my operatic training and concentration on diction, my Italian would have the 'market' accent of Teora. (I'm not even going to tell you what my English sounds like... though fortunately, thanks to the Sisters from Cork, at least my grammar, vocabulary, and diction are usually impeccable.) Carlos responded, with a degree of truth that evades us overly intellectual sorts, "But that's great - that's who you are."

Carlos, of course, was correct. And today's feast moved me deeply, because folk religion, simple peasant faith, earthiness, pragmatic views of life, and so forth are also part of who I am. When I returned home, I took out my mother's old book of novenas, and petitioned Saint Anthony to help me in my flat hunting. In fact, I addressed Anthony in Italian dialect (yes, he was Portuguese, but who's counting?), going into such detail as, "I know there is not terribly much in my price range, and I'm indeed grateful to have a roof over my head at all, but, after all, this flat will be my monastery - please help me find one I'll really like, and don't forget that I need to be near the bus or train."

I'll let all of you know if the prayer works. Had it been my mother who uttered the same words, Anthony would arrange for her to be informed of the perfect property on his feast day tomorrow.