...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.