Pontormo's Annunciation

This is the Annunciation I wrote about yesterday. When I wrote my proposal for this grant, I suggested that the story of the angel's annunciation to Mary would be an informing metaphor for this liminal space, this odd and wonderful time of not only rest and recreation but of allowing myself to be open to God's invitation for the next phase of my life.

I had no way of knowing 1. that in Florence you cannot take more than a dozen steps without encountering an Annunciation or a gelato shop, 2. that the story of the Annunciation is in many ways not only a favorite biblical story but a defining metaphor for the creativity that is Florence especially during the early Renaissance, or 3. that the Annunciation is included as an element of an enormous number of other paintings. It is as if the artists feel the need to acknowledge that without this one terribly raw and pivotal moment the project of God's salvation would not have proceeded as it did. It is as if the entire weight of the Christ event rests on this one angel and this one eighth grader. It did.

I'm not an art historian, so as I write about my encounters with the Annunciation, as I intend to do with greater focus and attention once I get to the library in Wales, it will not be with academic expertise. I do hope to be able to read enough and research enough not to be entirely ignorant, but I am approaching the Annunciation as a lens for enlightenment rather than as an object of study.

As I've spent a little over three weeks now meandering around Florence on my private treasure hunt, it feels to me as if God is a couple of steps ahead of me planting an Annunciation everywhere I turn. There was a dear one above the doorway of a flat in Fiesole yesterday, not to mention 13th century statues in the museum in San Gimignano and a precious pair of panels by Filippo Lippi, so different from and so much easier to fail to notice than his important painting (which I adore) in the Church of San Lorenzo. I've found I have favorites, which is a good thing since I cannot possibly write about all of them.

And so here it is, Monday, and basically we have no big plans. We were going to go to San Gimignano but maybe we'll do it tomorrow. It is a luxury to have the latitude of time that we've had, time to meander and discover treasures we don't have the good sense to know that they are waiting for us. Time to look and time to listen and time to reflect and ponder. Grazie mille.

Where you are and where you would like to be

The Duomo is the center of Florence. Except in a few places where the streets are close together, you can see the dome from just about anywhere. The Church of Santa Maria dei Fiori, St. Mary of the Flowers, is your reference point, with the Campanile, or Bell Tower right beside it. They tell you where you are and how to find where you want to be.

I was wakened this morning by the bells. It was a little before seven, and one of the myriad of churches in the neighborhood was summoning the faithful to early mass. What enthralls me is that these bells spill their beauty and disturb the sleep of the faithful and unfaithful alike. Sundays are the best, with bells going off from every direction all morning long. I wonder how many churches there are within half a mile of us. I imagine a dozen would be a conservative guess. They don't coordinate their bells. They just ring them when it is time to go to church and again at the moment of consecration and some, I suspect, to announce that worship is finished.

As far as I'm concerned, the bells don't need a reason. They are beyond reason. They break into my consciousness and call me to attention. Of course, because I am a Christian and a clergy type at that, they carry with their wild ringing not only the narrative that defines us...stories of creation, incarnation, forgiveness, salvation...but kinship with all the people who have listened to their ringing for all the centuries that people have lived and worshiped here.

There is a church next door to our flat, Santa Felicita. We heard its bells ringing from the little wine bar we like to stop at late in the afternoon. From the outside it is a plain jane parish church. Flat stucco with steps where kids sit and smoke. But then I learned that it was founded in the third century by Syrian Christians. Inside, not only is it exquisite, but it has what may be my favorite painting of the Annunciation I have found so far.



It is a quatroccento fresco painted by Pontormo. The angel and Mary flank the altar. What is fascinating me as much as how each artist has chosen to paint each of the characters is how he has chosen to deal with the space between them. These figures are soft and flowing as if painted in water color. Mary is in motion, as if the greeting of the angel has caused her to pause and turn just as she steps up to go indoors from the garden. There is none of the usual paraphernalia...no candlestick, no lily, no book...just an angel on the other side of the open space. And this angel floats. We don't see his eyes because his head is turned away. He has blond curls and a high forehead. This is not a confrontational angel. I imagine he announced his presence with little more than a whisper. It would be enough.

We know how the story will go. We know that this girl who is barely beyond childhood will say yes. We know she doesn't have time to think it over. In this painting she is wide open. I'm not sure the question has been asked. It is a moment in time interpreted by someone who had to have been touched by that moment, who must have felt the immediate presence of that holy moment in the time it took him to paint the scene. I wonder how long it took. I wonder how his life was touched by it. I cannot imagine that he could have gone home to supper untouched by the grace and generosity of it. I cannot imagine that he was not tinged by its holiness.

There is lots of paradox in this city. I don't know what to do about the beggars, who we are told are pros taking advantage of tourists. Thank God I haven't had a Gypsy mother throw her baby at me, but I am told it is done so they can grab your purse. Old women kneel in the street with scarves over their heads and their faces on the pavement. Young African men sell knock-off designer bags and scatter when a pair of caribinieri appear. The scarf that is thirty euros in a main market is three off the beaten path. I'm not under the illusion that everything is made holy by the presence of the churches or the profligacy of the bells or the legacy of faith that built this city. And, yes, the legacy of power and greed. The Medicis are everywhere as well.

But still the Duomo rises over all of it, an architectural incarnation of faith and human intelligence, which is of course a gift from God, which can be used for good or for evil. And still the bells ring and some of us accept their gift in a full sense of mystery and gratitude. For some of us, at least, they are as profound a call as the sound of an angel whispering your name.

Surprises...or why letting go of Plan A should have been Plan A in the first lplace

The brochure for the Lilly endowment sabbatical grant proposal simply said, "What will make your heart sing?" I took that as an invitation to let my imagination go wild, so I spent the next several weeks, with the counsel of wise friends, dreaming up a five week trip to Florence. It was a warm Texas May, and I was imagining a cool Tuscan autumn.

To have received this wildly generous grant is an incredible privilege. I am grateful beyond words to the Lilly Endowment and to my parish for their support, but what I imagined and what is real have turned out to be two different things. Not to worry...my heart is definitely singing.

First of all, there was the time at home before I left. Well, suffice it to say that it turned out to be a mite busier than plan A. There were three good trips in that time...two to see sons and their families, and it doesn't get better than that, and three days in Minnesota, which were admittedly work days. Add to that our home remodeling, aka chaos.

But as I reflected with my spiritual director, it is all so right. I had no idea that the first creative step for this time had to be a dismantling of the old order. And since the kitchen and my study are the symbols of creativity for me it is entirely appropriate that they are both being recreated in this time, and it's ok that they took up some of the energy I thought I'd be using reading books at a lakeside coffee shop. It was too hot to sit outside anyway.

I thought I'd be blogging daily as well. Up to now that hasn't happened. Why? It turned out that sister time trumped blog time. Score another point for things turning out just right. Betsy just turned sixty (she's my little sister) and in all these years we have never before had ten days together without parents, husbands, or children. It was quite a bit of Lucy and Ethel do Italy. We laughed and walked and ate and drank cappuccino and just a bit of wine and laughed and cooked and read and looked at a lot of art (I think I overdid that for her) and totally enjoyed each other's company. I do not regret the posts that didn't get written. There is still time.

I also envisioned wonderful pictures both here and on Facebook. Well, my tech arrives on Saturday, so they will be coming. I have been taking wonderful pictures, just can't figure out how to get them posted. What worked at home is not working here.

So it's Tuesday and I woke up to rain, which is an invitation to stay home for at least a while. Home is a delightful flat on the fourth floor of a building that ovlooks the Arno, where rowers row in the morning and evening. The Ponte Vecchio is just to the left, very photogenic but sort of the Bourbon Street of Florence, lined with junky jewelry stores and crammed with tourists. At night various sorts of musicians play there, and since our air conditioning is our open window, we'd rather they didn't. But our neighborhood is quirky and full of treasures. I'll walk maybe a quarter of a mile to the Pitti Palace in a while to hang out with a couple of Annunciations I want to see. Pay a little extra for my cappuccino so I can sit at a table all afternoon if I want to, stop by the wine bar for a focaccia or a salad. Or maybe I'll find that there is another plan for the day.

...Mother Mary Comes to Me, Speaking Words of Wisdom, Let It Be...

(written on Sunday, September 30)

It is 5:45 in the afternoon and church bells are ringing. They ring all over the city to call the faithful to worship and to announce the hour of the day. They ring at different churches as the same time, different pitches, different tempos, they start and stop and punctuate the air of the town as tourists and residents go about their business and motorcycles swarm and cars and taxis and buses vie for position in the narrow streets, which were not made for machines.

After three days we are beginning to get into the rhythm of things. The church bells help me to locate myself in time and space and remind me that I came not as a tourist but as a pilgrim. I felt very much a tourist yesterday as we waited in line to get into the Uffizzi with our guide. We decided it would be wise to have someone with experience take us for our first visit. I expect there to be many more visits to this incredible museum. Nobody told us that yesterday was the Italian equivalent of the Susan B Komen race for breast cancer and that 35,000 people would be coming to participate, every one of them in a blue T-shirt, nor that the museum would be open to the public for free. It was hot and it was crowded, but once we got inside I was reminded why I wanted to spend time in Florence.

Earlier in the day we had watched the runners and walkers and strollers from the sidelines at the edge of the Piazza della Signioria. And then we went to the Duomo for church. It is Santa Maria de Fiori, Saint Mary of the Flowers. A sign announced, "Crossing the threshold of this building in effect means penetrating the mystery of the mother of God." I'll bet a zillion people pass that sign and maybe even read it without letting it stop them in their tracks. This is not something to be done lightly. To penetrate the mystery of the mother of God.

The mass, of course, was in Italian. As I stood and sat and was bathed in words and music, I remembered the first poetry class I ever took. I'm not a poet. I haven't taken many. My teacher was Dana Gioia, an amazing poet and a brilliant teacher. The blackboards were filled with poetry, but this was an experience I'd never anticipated. We began looking at Sappho, written in ancient Greek. It was a purely visual experience, yet recognizable as poetry. We couldn't say the words or hear them or comprehend what they meant, and yet we were impacted by them, as we were with the poem in Cyrrilic on the next board. Eventually we were given increasingly familiar languages, words we could sound out even if we didn't know what they meant, and only finally a poem in which we could participate in the various sensory experiences that comprised the poem.

Familiar as I am with the shape of liturgy and the language of the prayers, my experience in church was something like that. I let the words and music wash over me, and they were real and left their impact on me. I noted with sadness that the one thing the bulletin was clear in communicating was that if one was not a member of the Roman Catholic Church, one was not welcome to take communion. The mysterious mother of God must be sad that her beloved offspring express anti-hospitality to each other. But I feel sorry that they are threatened by what it might be to invite others to their table.

The city is chaotic, but there is something holy in this chaos, where churchbells ring at every hour of the day and night and where Jesus and Francis and Peter and sweet Mother Mary are everywhere just waiting with their mysteries to penetrate our illusion of reality.

New post later today

Sorry for my silence. I've been having issues with blogger. With a little more work his afternoon we should be up and running. Rest assured that my sister and I are thoroughly savoring life in Florence.