Coming Home After A Time Away
The calendar on the kitchen wall drove home to me how long I had been away. The page was turned to August and it was now Oct 8. I had returned home after six weeks in Italy — leading a pilgrimage, teaching, and traveling — followed closely by another trip away, to guide a retreat at the New Camaldoli Hermitage in Big Sur, California.
Travel can be exhausting. It is also exciting and renewing. When we travel, there is likely “a change of heart and of mind,” as the poet and theologian John O’Donohue observed. All five senses are on high alert. I am never so grateful for having five working senses as when I travel. What we see, smell, touch, taste and hear introduce us to new experiences. It is like learning to love the world again.
I appreciate too the coming home again. I bring with me that same heightened sense of awareness. I notice, as if for the first time, sights I might have simply ignored before, lost in a well of familiarity. When I returned this time to daily Mass at one of my local parishes, I enjoyed looking up at the images in the stained-glass windows as if I has never seen them before. I reacquainted myself with my neighborhood trees, the impatiens and geraniums in the front yard flower boxes, the song of the morning crows.
Travel also has a way of reinforcing the principle that the universe leans toward kindness. It’s easy to forget that in the current politically-heated, socially-fractured times we are experiencing in the U.S. Many times, I benefited during my recent travels from the kindness of strangers and near-strangers. Once, when my husband and I were cruising down a narrow road in a remote area of Italy, we feared we were hopelessly lost. We hadn’t seen a person or a house for miles.
Suddenly, on the side of the road, an elderly man in a farmer’s overall appeared like an apparition In half-Italian, half-English, he assured us we were on the right path to our destination and patiently counted out for us how many roundabouts we’d see before we could get back onto a main road.
Some sort of guardian angel? Who knows?
In a completely different part of Italy, Rita Salvatore, a friend of mine and the president of Slow Food Abruzzo — a group that advocates for locally grown foods and traditional recipes — invited my husband and me to a meal at her friend’s restaurant. The owner, Alfonso D’Alfonso uses only ingredients that he grows on his own land, including the grapes for his wine and olives for his olive oil. I had the best meal of my life on a Monday evening at Alfonso’s restaurtn, La Terra di Solina. Later, I learned that La Terra di Solina is normally closed on Mondays. Alfonso had opened his restaurant and called in his chef to prepare the meal just for us!
Kindness was also on broad display during the retreat I guided at Big Sur. The New Camaldoli Hermitage is perched on a high cliff overlooking the Pacific Ocean. There are no houses or street lights surrounding the monastery. When darkness descends, it is pitch black. Our retreat sessions ended after sundown, which meant I had to walk back to the hermitage where my husband and I were staying in complete darkness — a prospect that was not too comforting for a city-born and bred girl like me.
Beth, one of the wonderful women on the retreat, swiftly offered me her flashlight and proposed that she accompany me on the walk back to my cottage. Another woman on the retreat, Arda, lent us her flashlight as well, so we’d have more light to guide us on the path.
I was especially grateful for Beth’s company in the dark after she told me of having stared down a California bear who had wandered onto her patio as she sat sipping iced tea with a friend. Beth later learned that the same bear had opened the patio door of her neighbor’s house, headed for the kitchen, opened the refrigerator door, pulled out a carton of Talenti gelato and proceeded to feast on the ice cream.
You’d want someone like Beth accompanying you in the dark. She is not only kind, she is also brave.
Of course, returning to the U.S. after so many weeks, I was confronted anew with the unfortunate lying and nastiness that has characterized the presidential election. Whatever your policy positions or concerns, there is simply no excuse for a presidential candidate to refer to fellow human beings as “vermin” and “animals” or to his political opponents as “scum.”
It is even more demoralizing that thousands of our fellow citizens cheer this particular candidate when he says such things. I can’t help but think the people applauding are some of the same people we see in churches on Sundays. For me, that is the truly demoralizing part. Rather than grow angry, I’ve concluded that it is more necessary to pray for them, that they might one day see more clearly. I’m reminded of the slogan that Sabrina Ciancone, the mayor of Fontecchio, Italy, told me she chose for her city and her campaigns: “Kind Because We Are Strong.”
Mayor Ciancone says the beauty of that slogan is that the inverse is also true: “Strong Because We Are Kind.”
Amid all the political signs that have cropped up in my neighborhood since I left on my travels in August, one in particular caught my eye. It is a simple poster put out by the United Methodist Church that says “Kindness,” with these words inside of a heart: “Do Unto Others.”
I’m grateful for all the strangers and others who showed me kindness in so many singular ways during my recent travels. The sign in my neighborhood is a great reminder to make a special effort to be kind in these final days leading up to the election. A reminder too that the universe not only leans toward kindness, it cries out for it.
