|
 He discovers continuity in
what seemed chance career choices—to teach at a black
university in New
Orleans the year
Martin Luther
King was shot;
to step forward,
30 years later, to
lead the 100 year
commemoration
of an infamous
incident of racial
violence.
He
examines the
paths that converge and diverge in his own journey of
faith—a Church that threw open its doors to reform,
then all too soon retreated; his discovery, during those
same years, of a Catholic tradition richer and deeper
than the cultural Catholicism of his childhood and
youth.
The book is a celebration of family, of the mentors who
inspire us, of the friendships that abide. For the author,
it is also a journey of self-discovery whose end, to
paraphrase T.S. Eliot, is to arrive where he started and
know, as if for the first time, his own gifts as a teacher
and a writer.
|
|
Click here to download a PDF of
the final chapter,
"Building a Compassionate Society" |
from the Preface
Lo
scrittore
The home of Anna and Carlo Meletis, where
we were lodging in Florence, was off the Borgo degli
Albizi — which means in Italian, roughly translated,
the quarter of the Albizi family, the merchant
family which had seized control of Florence by force
in 1382, then found themselves supplanted 50 years
later by their rival, Cosimo de Medici. From our
bedroom, we could watch the street theater in the
lively Piazza San Pier Maggiore below our window.
Though it was early November, the days had been
sunny and mild; and at night we had to leave the
windows opened a crack. Well past midnight, the
animated conversations of students — most of them
non-Italians enrolled in a semester or year abroad
program to study Renaissance art or history or
taking a one- or two-week language immersion program
— floated up to us from the Lion’s Fountain Irish
Pub which was almost directly below our fourth-floor
bedroom. We had stayed with Anna and Carlo once
before, six years earlier in 2009, when Lisa was
herself a student in a weeklong Italian immersion
program at Istituto David; an integral part of the
experience was lodging with a family that spoke only
Italian.
We are at the end of the evening meal, which is
included in the board. Lisa, Anna, and Joanna, an
Austrian house guest here in Florence to hone her
Italian, are talking. Lisa sits beside me, her
bilingual dictionary ready to hand on the table to
the right of my plate; she consults it now less and
less and speaks the language quite fluently. To the
immersion experience, she had added four semesters
of Italian at UNC — the one grandmother in classes
packed with twenty-somethings.
I am following their conversation, more out of
politeness than interest; since I speak no Italian,
I only catch a familiar word now and then. Lisa, of
course, encourages me, telling me I am picking it up
and will soon be fluent if we keep returning to
Italy. She is wrong. She acquires languages with the
same seeming effortlessness that she picks up crafts
—watercolor painting being only the most recent
example. I have no such gift. I do, however, have a
gift she doesn’t; I appreciate spatial relationships
and have fallen in love with this city which is “a
whole, a miraculously developed design . . . what
Italians call an insieme, an all-of-it-together.”
During our last visit to Florence, I had decided I
would like to have my ashes scattered over the
waters of the Arno. Now I am wondering, how would
you do that? Surely you couldn’t just carry an urn
to the middle of the Ponte Vecchio and dump the
ashes out over the side.
I have drifted off. Lisa has been asked a question,
and she is rifling through the Italian-English
dictionary. Her answer includes a word that sounds
like “scrivener” — writer. I lean over and ask her
what she had said. “Joanna asked what you did,” Lisa
answers. “I told her you were a writer.”
I have never referred to myself as a writer. Though
it was a calling I had once aspired to, life
circumstances and, I thought, a vein of talent that
ran too thin, seemed to have put it out of reach. It
was true that in the past three years I had edited
and published two books, to which I had contributed
an increasingly significant amount of the content.
Had that somehow tilted the balance?
I firmly believe that we come to know ourselves
through the mirrors others hold up to us. We never
know ourselves in solitude. Lisa told me I was a
writer. I had been a writer all along. And that is
how — and why — this book began. |
