Suzanne M. Lewis 12/17/21 Suzanne M. Lewis 12/17/21

The Great O’s

TL, DR: The Second Coming is now.

by Lucy Tucker Yates

The prayers of the O Antiphons, the Great Antiphons of Advent, are the most urgent, elegant condensation of humanness I know of. As in the circular breathing of an oboist, the words on our lips give life to generations past. They focus centuries of adoration, impatience, woundedness like a spotlight. They are the poetry I would send out into space.

TL, DR: The Second Coming is now.

by Lucy Tucker Yates

There is a song by Charles Ives (Memories I) that goes, "Weee're SIT-ting in the op-'ra house, the op'-ra house, the op'-ra house, We're WAIT-ing for the cur-tain to arise With won-ders for our eyes... A FEEL-ing of expec-tancy, A CER-tain kind of ec-stasy, Expectancy and ecstasy--Expectancy and ecstasy---SHHHHHHSSSSS!!!"

Such FEEL-ings surround and bind us together during Advent: we huddle in the grand theatre of heaven-and-earth, eager to see our hero revealed, ready for our leading man to light the shadows, right the wrongs, mete justice. The gaze of all is upon the stage.

How is such poetry fashioned? “Antiphon” comes from Greek ἀντίφωνον, “opposite voice,” and Socrates of Constantinople writes that Ignatius of Antioch (the third down from Saint Peter himself) introduced antiphony into worship after having a vision of two choirs of angels. Antiphons are often lifted from the Psalms or prophecies and designed for call and response, and to be sung as refrains.

So imagine everyone in the world, together, with the house lights dimmed, with or without ushers, with or without tickets, singing "O come, o come, Emmanuel." Remember how the hymn works: the first half of each verse invokes a Messianic title and attribute of Jesus, and the second half makes a request, drawing on His strength, from our weakness. "And ransom captive I-i-is-ra-el." Notice that the hymn is a beautiful and durable recasting (in the Aeolian mode), but know now that in the ancient Italian antiphons (the first, “O Sapientia,” appears in Boethius in the sixth century) the body–of prayer, of poetry, of past, of future–is suspended between the "O" and the "come".

Each verse calls on the Most High, offering a quality, a role, a memory, as a fan might smile up at the star: "Remember when you were the commander in that crazy long battle? You shredded that day. Can you come down and shred here?" Some petitions sound well-bred and -schooled: "come, and teach us the way of prudence." Some seem brisk, but really anxious: "don’t be slow, already!" All are predicated on His coming.

And the call is always the same–a great round vocative. "Vocative" comes from Latin “vox,” voice, and one of the glories of the human voice is the shape of O. Drop your jaw and try one. You may find that the air can't decide whether to rush out hot, as in relief or in pain, or to swoop in cold, as in shock or in awe, or to park and pop open the vocal folds, as in recognition. You are suspended in a tunnel, or a cave, or a cathedral, or a cheekily perfect dewdrop. A mouth like a portal. Round as a belly. Curved as Time.

Because God is master of inversion–we know the plot of our Trinitarian play works upside down, backwards, and inside out–the lines allow a neatly flipped acrostic mnemonic. Here are the names from end to beginning, from 23 to 17 December:

Emmanuel (God-with-us, the peoples' desire, giver of laws)
Rex Gentium (King of the Peoples, who made humankind from earth)
Oriens (Rising Star, Sun of justice)

Clavis David (Key of David, opener of locks, shutter of mouths)
Radix Jesse (Root of Jesse, life abiding in the tree that was cut down)
Adonai (Lord, Ruler over nature and the House of Israel)
Sapientia (Wisdom, the creating Logos and incarnate Word)

From the Parousia back to the creation. "Ero": "I will be [there]"; "cras": "tomorrow." The answer is within the questions: He is coming! He is the other “choir” in our antiphon! The secret voice, the wider circle! But when is "tomorrow"? Might verb tenses not work back and forth, too–or around and around? What if He is already here? What if we are all in the play?

We are presenting the antiphons in their traditional setting, framing the Magnificat, so as to hear the expectations of the leading Man amid the satisfactions of the expectant leading Lady. We are singing solos, but we represent the whole Church, who plays not only the part of the Prophets but that of the Mother of God.

When singing of the First Coming we always invoke the Second: when yearning for the Second we always echo the First. Try the O again, and this time raise your eyebrows and open the top half of your face. Lift your cheekbones and twinkle your eyes. There, don’t you feel like a child who’s discovered a secret? OHHHHH!! That’s the kind of O we don’t often see, because its wearer claps their hands in front of it to avoid giving too much away. Inside its arena, the Parousia is all one. Emanuel, God (already) with us.

And is this not the fullness-of-time itself? To seek to usher in on earth that which we ask the Redeemer to grant from Heaven? To meld the memory of Alpha and the desire of Omega? May we always be rounded to call and willing for His response: I will be there. I Am. Here. Now. May we always be caught between the expectancy of "Come" and the ecstasy of "O."

_________________________

O Sapientia, quae ex ore Altissimi prodiisti,
attingens a fine usque ad finem,
fortiter suaviterque disponens omnia:
veni
ad docendum nos viam prudentiae.

        O Wisdom,
        which came out of the mouth of the Most High,
        and reaches from one end to another,
       mightily and sweetly ordering all things:
                   come,
                         and teach us the way of prudence.

O Adonai, et Dux domus Israel,
qui Moysi in igne flammae rubi apparuisti,
et ei in Sina legem dedisti:
veni
ad redimendum nos in brachio extento.

        O Adonai,
        and leader of the house of Israel,
        who appeared in the bush to Moses in a flame of fire,
        and gave him the law on Sinai:
                    come
                       and redeem us with an outstretched arm.

O radix Jesse, qui stas in signum populorum,
super quem continebunt reges os suum,
quem Gentes deprecabuntur:
veni
ad liberandum nos, jam noli tardare.

        O Root of Jesse,
        which stands for an ensign of the people,
        at whom kings shall shut their mouths,
       and whom the Gentiles shall seek:
                    come
                        and deliver us, and tarry not.

O Clavis David, et sceptrum domus Israel;
qui aperis, et nemo claudit;
claudis, et nemo aperit:
veni,
et educ vinctum de domo carceris,
sedentem in tenebris, et umbra mortis.

        O Key of David,
        and Scepter of the House of Israel,
        who opens and no one can shut,
        who shuts and no one can open:
                    come,
                        and bring the prisoners out of the prison-house,
                        them that sit in darkness and the shadow of death.

O Oriens,
splendor lucis aeternae, et sol justitiae:
veni,
et illumina sedentes in tenebris, et umbra mortis.

        O Day-spring,
       brightness of the light everlasting,
        and Sun of righteousness:
                    come
                       and enlighten them that sit in darkness and the shadow of death.

O Rex Gentium, et desideratus earum,
lapisque angularis, qui facis utraque unum:
veni,
et salva hominem,
quem de limo formasti.

        O King of nations and their desire;
        the Cornerstone, who makes them both one:
                  come
    and save mankind, whom you formed of clay.

O Emmanuel, Rex et legifer noster,
exspectatio Gentium, et Salvator earum:
veni
ad salvandum nos, Domine, Deus noster.

        O Emmanuel, our King and Lawgiver,
        the desire of all nations and their salvation:
                   come
                       and save us, O Lord our God.

Suzanne M. Lewis 3/25/21 Suzanne M. Lewis 3/25/21

We Have an Announcement to Make

You and I gain nothing from Mary’s yes unless we each begin to seek out and recognize and affirm the incarnate body of eternal Love in the fragile and fleeting stuff of our own daily existence. If only it were enough to say yes once a day, or once weekly, when we respond amen to the body of infinite Good on earth! Unfortunately, one daily amen is worth less than none at all if it betrays a lie at the heart of our lives: that we say yes with our lips, while our hearts, at every other moment, are far from him.

A little over two thousand years ago, an Angel delivered a message to a young woman. Most of us know the content of his announcement: You will conceive and bear a son… the child to be born will be holy and will be called the Son of God. Most of us also know how Mary responded to this message, with a phrase that expresses the summit of human freedom: yes.

Today each of us will receive many proposals, messages, and announcements. In all their variety, perplexity, and cacophony, they will each convey the exact same tidings:

You – who sit at your desk, or on your couch, or cross-legged on your yoga mat, or in the front seat of your car – you will conceive and bear – in your thoughts and in your words, in what you do and in what you decide not to do…

in the spreadsheet you fill out,
in the diaper you change,
in the weeds you pull up,
in the teen you teach to drive,
in each vaccination you give,
during each audition,
as you scrub the bathroom tiles,
with each stamp you affix,
with each stroke on your keyboard,
and in all the memos you read

– a son… the Son of God.

You and I gain nothing from Mary’s yes unless we each begin to seek out and recognize and affirm the incarnate body of eternal Love in the fragile and fleeting stuff of our own daily existence. If only it were enough to say yes once a day, or once weekly, when we respond amen to the body of infinite Good on earth! Unfortunately, one daily amen is worth less than none at all if it betrays a lie at the heart of our lives: that we say yes with our lips, while our hearts, at every other moment, are far from him.

Christ is present in the feet of the person who delivers the mail, the emails of my accountant, the eyes of the barista, the hands of my daughter, the voice of my boss, the heart of the person I like least...

But, but, but… my postman is incompetent, the accountant misses deadlines, the barista is surly, my daughter slapped me, the boss just fired me, my neighbor gossiped about me, and everyone believed her.

Nonetheless, Gabriel announces to you, and to me, that the Holy Spirit intends to overshadow each of these circumstances and that Christ will be born in them, whether we find them convenient or destructive.

Some might say that Mary’s own immaculate conception conferred on her a strength that allowed her earthly life to manifest a continuous fiat, while we, poor slobs, are incapable of becoming a walking talking yes. But let’s not fool ourselves; once baptized, you and I can repeat, with King David, there is no thing I lack… We might tremble at these words because of all the responsibility they imply.

Responsibility: the urgency to respond.

When the mail carrier drops a letter into a puddle, or delivers a package for someone who moved out over a decade ago, or feeds your ebay purchase to the neighbor’s dog, saying yes to Christ’s concrete and fleshly presence in your interaction with him does not mean endorsing incompetence.

Instead, we’re invited to recognize and affirm every slightest and most ephemeral spark of Truth, Goodness, Beauty, Justice, and Love that waits, with divine patience, to be born in us, given to us.

These glints require kindling before they can burst into a conflagration: I came to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it were already aflame!

How will you respond?

Suzanne M. Lewis 2/2/21 Suzanne M. Lewis 2/2/21

May We Be as Free as Simeon and Anna

February 2, 2021 marks the five year anniversary of 501(c)3 nonprofit status for Revolution of Tenderness. On this day, we renew our pledge to take up God's challenge to count the stars, and we are dead earnest in our commitment to laugh at the wonder of new life and light that Christ constantly pours out and leaves puddled everywhere around us.

Ring Around the Rosie, by Edward Henry Potthast — *Ring Around the Rosie*, by Edward Henry Potthast

By Suzanne M. Lewis

Step into any Catholic church, early on a weekday morning, and you will observe a ragtag contingent of volunteers reporting for duty. Many of these, with gray heads and bent backs, will shuffle or limp, often with the help of a cane. Their presence is easy to overlook in the Sunday crowd, who arrive to fulfill an obligation; but at daily Mass we can clearly see the faces of the free men and women in our midst. And most of those faces are wrinkled.

If God were to come to earth and mix his life into ours, according to a schedule, at precise addresses in every city and town across America, could you imagine any appointment more important for you to keep? Could you imagine wanting anything more than to show up each day for this stupendous, recurring miracle?

* * *

When my Grandma was in her eighties, one of her daughters noticed dust bunnies lurking in the corners of her house. In a shaming tone, my aunt said, "Mom, I remember when you used to get down on your hands and knees to scrub the baseboards with a toothbrush! Now look at what's become of your home. How could you let it get like this?" Grandma replied, "Did it ever occur to you that I was out of my mind when I did that?" Then she broke into gales of laughter at the very thought of her past lunacy.

* * *

As I grow older, I'm struck by the elderly people who play a part in the stories surrounding Jesus's birth and earliest life: Elizabeth and Zechariah, Gaspard (the grizzled magus), and then Simeon and Anna. A long established tradition in the Church also imagines St. Joseph as an old man.

These Gospel figures remind us of Abraham and Sarah, who followed God's challenge to "count the stars," while each† laughed in delighted wonder at the astonishment of an "impossible" child.

Simeon and Anna bear a gift for the rest of us. When given a choice between the busyness and demands of ordinary life, they each chose instead, day in and day out, to keep their appointment with wonder. We can follow their example. This is freedom.

* * *

One morning, as our motley band filed out after daily Mass, some small children noticed that it had rained while we were inside. My friend Wayne, who was 93, stopped dead in his tracks as the kids ran past him to jump in the puddles. Wayne stood and stared, his mouth open with surprise and his eyes full of joy as the happy children stomped and splashed water with abandon. He stayed like that until the game was over and the kids had been bundled away to their car. Then he turned to me, laughed, and said, "God must feel as delighted when he looks at us as I feel when I see those children play in the puddles! He loves us and enjoys us so much!"

* * *

Most of all, we promise never to let dust bunnies disturb our sanity.

† Please see: Genesis 17:17: "Then Abraham fell on his face and laughed..." and also Genesis 21:6: “Then Sarah said, 'God has brought laughter for me; everyone who hears will laugh with me.'"

Suzanne M. Lewis 1/1/21 Suzanne M. Lewis 1/1/21

You Won’t Miss the Burgers

Annunciation (detail), by Matthias Stom — *Annunciation* (detail), by Matthias Stom

by Suzanne M. Lewis

In 2017, I noticed a sore on my tongue.

By Sunday, October 1, 2017 (the feast of St Thérèse, my Confirmation namesake and special friend), my oral pain was intense as I had the joyful task of thanking each of our speakers and volunteers for their rich contributions and gifts of self throughout that beautiful long weekend at Pittsburgh’s St. Paul Cathedral, where we’d just held our 6th annual Festival of Friendship. I didn’t suspect, then, that two weeks later, on October 15 (Teresa of Avila’s feast), I would call my husband from outside an oncologist’s office to say the three-word sentence that no one wants to speak or hear: “I have cancer.”

In the waiting room before one of my chemo infusions, I met a woman wearing a wide apron, in which she carried her own IV bag that provided a slow drip and allowed her to live at home while receiving treatment. She had arrived for her periodic changing of the bag, and began to explain to me how the medicine she was receiving had changed the flavors of food: “A hamburger just isn’t a hamburger anymore, you know? It tastes funny, like. And forget nachos! I can’t enjoy the taste of my favorite meals. I tell you, if the cancer comes back after this, I’m going to refuse treatment. I’d rather die than live like this.”

This past year, on October 1st, it felt particularly gratifying to kick off the month-long online 2020 Festival of Friendship by offering a panel discussion honoring St. Thérèse and St. Teresa, as well as Edith Stein and Mother Teresa, four “boss” saints who have had such an enormous impact on the world. Only two weeks earlier, my cancer doctors at Cleveland Clinic had pronounced that marvelous and golden word: remission. I knew these four women were at least partly responsible for my healing.

But I’ve also wondered about that woman, whose life meant so little to her that she would trade it for the taste of a Big Mac. Meanwhile, throughout this year, our society’s many failures to respond generously to the exigencies of the pandemic have uncovered a different sort of cancer: despite our stated belief in the right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” there are numerous signs that the particular human lives of our fellow citizens do not matter to many of us. This year’s Festival of Friendship addressed this problem from multiple angles, including a focus on the inestimable value of elderly persons; ethical concerns arising from the pandemic; restorative justice in Brazil; and music produced by Black female composers, poets, and vocal artists. These events each revealed a common root cause for the evident disinterest in the lives and well-being of our fellow citizens: a fundamental apathy toward one’s own, unique, God-given life.

At some point, in the experience of each and every authentically religious person, a luminous question arises. This question carries with it all the wonder, all the longing, and all the curious hope expressed in Mary’s query to the angel, “How can this be?” (Lk 1:34). The same astonishment reverberates in Elizabeth’s amazed exclamation, “Who am I that the mother of my Lord should come to me?” (Lk 1:43).

Who am I that You are mindful of me? (cf. Ps 8:4). If you have never asked God some version of this question, then you’ve also never allowed Christ’s own question – Are not all the hairs of your head counted? (cf. Lk 12: 6-7) – to sink down into the roots of your being and startle you out of your petty worldliness. You may engage in all sorts of religious practices, but you haven’t yet embarked on the adventure of a truly religious life. Only after you’ve made a habit of viewing yourself with the esteem God has for you, can you turn your gaze to others and recognize that the Lord cherishes each human life as fiercely and as wholly and as astonishingly as he loves you. Without this intuition, you cannot fulfill Christ’s commandment to love one another as he has loved you.

When you – one lone person – begin to ask this question (“Who am I that You are mindful of me?”), your life becomes something new, something exceptional. Christ refers to this as an “abundant life” (cf. Jn 10:10) or as “the hundredfold here below” (cf. Mt 19:29). With this hundredfold, you develop an endurance you can’t explain and discover a patience you could not produce through force of will. Your creativity grows as you see an increase in your desire to address the predicaments and wounds of others. Soon, another person, unbidden, joins with you. One by one, others see and are magnetically attracted to the two of you. Together you will each roll up your sleeves and take the small, possible steps indicated by the boundless esteem for life you share. You will “start by doing what's necessary, then do what's possible, and suddenly you are doing the impossible” (St. Francis of Assisi). Believe me, you will not miss the hamburgers when this happens.

Welcome to your one wild and precious life.

Suzanne M. Lewis 11/17/20 Suzanne M. Lewis 11/17/20

You Will Be Found: The 2020 Festival of Friendship Ushers an Online Revolution of Tenderness

What bread could we possibly share with those far removed from us, or even with those geographically close, whom we cannot visit out of concern for each other’s health and welfare? How could we possibly share a meal with someone who has passed away? The answers to these questions will point us to a way through. We all desperately need to be found. The Festival this year has provided us with the assurance that we will be found... that even you will be found.

By Suzanne M. Lewis

Knowledge is Always an Event. I first heard this phrase in 2009, when it served as the theme for the annual Rimini Meeting of Friendship Among Peoples, a free cultural festival that provides ongoing inspiration for the Festival of Friendship, which is organized by the nonprofit, Revolution of Tenderness. The Festival began in 2012 and has just completed its eighth run. We usually organize this free cultural extravaganza in Pittsburgh, over the course of one rich, packed weekend per year, but in response to 2020’s extraordinary challenges, we made the decision to move all the Festival’s offerings online and to spread them over the course of a month.

Knowledge is Always an Event: Let’s take a look at just one of the words, that final one: event. In our everyday speech, we don’t use the word “event” to mean “unanticipated surprise,” but to understand what the Rimini Meeting’s organizers hoped to communicate with this phrase, we need to invoke the sense of an unplanned, unexpected, unforeseen, impossible to control, exceptional and astonishing breakthrough of something new. Something other. Something we didn’t invite because we didn’t know its address, or even its name. And yet, somewhere in our secret heart, we hoped against hope that this mysterious not-yet-known “something” would arrive and shake us out of our sleepiness. Bring us back to life. Crack us wide open to let the light pour in. Find us.

Thus, inspired by the song from the hit musical, “Dear Evan Hansen, “ we chose You Will Be Found as our theme this year. We decided to bet on our sure hope that the adventure of being surprised by the event of knowledge can and would awaken us to a new, more abundant way to face these difficult times.

Gonxha

For example, during our first panel discussion (October 1st), when Fr. Saldaña revealed that Mother Teresa of Kolkata’s middle name, Gonxha (the saint was christened Agnes Gonxha at her Baptism) means “little flower” in Albanian, I was suddenly struck by the reverberations and the web of communion that suffuses the lives of the four great Teresas, whom we first grouped together simply because of the coincidence that they share a name. Their common name, though, far from being a superficial fact, turns out to be the most significant aspect of their identities… I have called you by name and you are mine. The Mystery summons each of us in this way. And when we address the one who generates us and makes us whole, we beg: hallowed be thy name.

Sir Michael Edwards, during the panel discussion on poetic inspiration, “Deliver My Mouth of the Praise It Owes You,” (October 22), commented on the inexpressibility of God’s name and wondered aloud about why we would ask that this particular aspect, God’s name, be hallowed– rather than God himself? Edwards observed that the more we consider the word “name,” the less we understand its full significance. In fact, earlier in that same talk, Edwards reflected on the “Adamic” language, whose function was to give names to all the animals. Edwards pointed out that the language spoken by Adam and Eve no longer exists; all other human languages can only hint and approximate, but the names that Adam gave to his fellow creatures were capable of expressing each one in its fullness and mystery.

During the second panel discussion to explore our theme, entitled “How Do We Respond to What Finds Us?” Samuel Ewell, III (author of Faith Seeking Conviviality and founder of Eat Make Play, a British charity that fosters conviviality in community life), made reference to a one biblical pun contained in the opening chapters of Genesis: the name “Adam” derives from the Hebrew word אֲדָמָה (“adamah”), meaning "earth.” Thus Adam’s name calls to recognize that we are taken from the earth and have a sacred connection to it. Ewell pointed out that the Hebrew word translated as “tend” or “till” or “cultivate” in Genesis 2: 15 (“The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to till it and keep it”) is שָׁמַר, (“shamar”), which is better translated as: “to observe, to give heed” or “to pay attention to.”

During our final keynote talk, given by Mary Mirrione, she spoke of how following the discipline of the Catechesis of the Good Shepherd reveals the urgent and fundamental function of observation in catechesis. Mirrione, who is the National Director of the National Office of the Catechesis of the Good Shepherd (CGS), highlighted, in example after delightful example, how a humble and objective attention to the religious life of the child yields extraordinary fruits for our own spiritual journeys and in the lives of children, even those of different nationalities and backgrounds. Mirrione is one of the CGS formation leaders who travels the world to provide formation courses for the Missionaries of Charity, an order founded by Mother Teresa of Kolkata. In the years since Mother Teresa first received the name Gonxha, and later assumed the name Teresa, the order she founded has adopted Catechesis of the Good Shepherd as the only method the Sisters use in their catechetical and educational work around the globe and as an essential part of the formation and education of every novice who enters the order. Her successor explained the reason for this choice: “In the Catechesis of the Good Shepherd, we find true contemplation.”

In Every Separation is a Link: Being Found Behind Bars, one panelist, Lance Graham, spoke about enrolling in a creative writing class, offered through Arizona State University, while he was a prisoner at the Arizona Department of Corrections. The process of writing and of receiving feedback and companionship through the class, “found” Graham in an extraordinary way. Once out of prison, he completed advanced studies and became an instructor in the same ASU program he’d enrolled in. To describe his own journey, Graham quoted Tupac Shakur: “Did you hear of the rose that grew from a crack in the concrete?” The very next evening, before the screening of the new opera, “Sweet Land,” Lucy Tucker Yates (who played in the opera’s orchestra and whose son, Leander Rajan, sang the part of Speck in the opera), described an outtake from the opera: as a train passes by, its plume of exhaust leaves behind a trail of white flowers, which Speck then picks, one by one. Yates explained that the train smoke represents our prayers (as does incense during a Vespers service), so the small flowers embody our cry for companionship, for wholeness, for healing of the earth, and for true dialogue between and among peoples. One member of our audience recalled attending the Festival’s opening event and observed, “Listening to Francesca tell the story of the Little Flower, it really struck me for the first time that we are found even in our littleness.”

The littlest flowers, first made to bloom in the garden of Eden – where the earth-man Adam was given the sacred duty to contemplate them and the privilege to name them – these little flowers have found their expression in the hints and signs we glean from the lives of our four holy Teresas, who through some strange new math, together embody an equation that might be expressed like this: 1+1+1+1=(10)^(10^100)4 (one plus one plus one plus one equals googolplex to the power of four). Tennessee Williams, in Camino Real, wrote: “The flowers in the mountains have broken the rocks.” Indeed, and what more obdurate stone is there to be found that could compare to the hardness of the human heart?

One Multitudinous Human Voice

Out of the numerous musical performances we offered over the course of the month, there are three worth highlighting as examples of the sheer diversity of styles, performers, and composers we witnessed this October: Jazz is Love, a concert of Mary Lou Williams’ compositions performed by the Deanna Witkowsky Trio; soprano Angel Riley’s performance of A Woman’s Life: A Song Cycle by Richard Danielpour on seven poems by Maya Angelou; and To Live in a Sea of Happiness, a concert of traditional samba music from Rio de Janeiro, performed and introduced by Ney Vasconcelos and Antonio Gomes from their local haunts in Brazil.

Deanna Witkowski first discovered the music of Mary Lou Williams, a Black composer originally from Pittsburgh, 19 years ago. Deanna describes the moment: “She Composes a Jazz Mass: reading this headline changed my own career trajectory. That was the year that Dr. Billie Taylor invited me to perform at the Kennedy Center’s Mary Lou Williams Festival. Now, I didn’t know much, at the time, about Mary Lou Williams’ music… So I visited the Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers, where her archives are held, and there I read this headline… I had written two of my own jazz masses. Now, with Mary Lou as my mentor, I began to book my trio in churches around the country, doing my own sacred music.” While inviting friends to listen to Deanna’s concert, which took place on October 4, I would describe Mary Lou as the greatest of the Jazz Greats you have never heard of. Her career spanned a many of jazz’s subgenres and movements of the twentieth century, and she collaborated with and mentored figures such as Jelly Roll Morton, Fats Waller, Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Tommy Dorsey, Benny Goodman, Cab Calloway, Bud Powell, Theolonius Monk, and Dizzy Gillespie, to name a few. As a jazz pianist, composer, and arranger, Mary Lou received the highest respect from the towering figures of jazz in her day, but her name and memory have been largely obscured to history. One of our hopes, in inviting Deanna to give this concert, was to lift that veil of obscurity for our friends. While working to reveal Mary Lou’s opus for new generations of audiophiles, Deanna described how Mary Lou and her music found her, as a pianist, a composer, and in her spiritual life. How striking it was when Deanna remarked that the most important quality for a jazz musician is the capacity to observe and to listen! Without this close and intense concentration on the other musicians in one’s band, the vital heart of jazz’s special contribution to the world of music would be lost. Each performer must give the full force of her attention to her fellow musicians in order to engage in a meaning-filled and lyrical “dialogue” or conversation amongst the various improvisations born from the encounter with this living, present-tense music. The imperative to pay attention recalled the insight that when God invites Adam to cultivate the garden, scripture uses the word שָׁמַר, (“shamar”), that is, “to heed or to observe,” and which evokes how we learned from Mary Mirrione how crucial it is for catechists to commit themselves to observation.

In A Woman’s Life, the Festival of Friendship concert given on October 17, we listened to a different Black female musician, Angel Riley, accompanied by Lucy Yates on piano, sing the song cycle composed by Richard Danielpour on Maya Angelou’s poems. Angel’s and Mary Lou’s lives, musical commitments, training, and performance histories could not appear to be more different, yet each of these women gives expression to a unique cultural presence that has endured suffocating and brutal campaigns to repress and silence it: the Black woman’s experience in American life. Angel explained, during an interview with Meghan Isaacs, that it is “[...] important to present a work strictly relating to Black women due to the lack of positive portrayals in art and media. This set is ... unique in that each of the songs comes from a Black woman’s perspective. Dr. Angelou was specifically committed to uplifting Black women in her life.” Angel pointed out that Angelou’s poetry shows “this uplifting of Black women, and Danielpour’s setting of the text really highlights that.” Richard Danielpour recalls, in the program note that he wrote for the Festival’s concert, that he approached “Dr. Angelou, who had been a friend for many years, [for help in composing] a song cycle for a voice and orchestra that would show the trajectory of a woman’s life from childhood, to old age. She mentioned that this already existed, hidden, in her book of collected poems and promptly asked her assistant to furnish her a copy of her book. [... That day,] she read seven poems to us, sometimes clapping in rhythm with the poems, sometimes repeating lines of the poem that were not actually repeated in the text. By the time she finished, I was in tears. It was one of the greatest performances in my life that I had ever witnessed.” Among Danielpour’s many extraordinary gifts, he has a most striking capacity to attend to and map the topography and texture of performers’ unique instrumental landforms and waterways, interior distances, geological formations, microclimates, and botanical riches... and to then compose music that both fits and is complementary to these human, musical landscapes. So that day in Dr. Angelou’s home, he soaked in every nuance of her compelling performance and later remembered the exact timbre and every cadence in her reading. These elements informed and gave life to the music he later composed for the poems. Each time during the Festival that a new speaker or performer returned to this theme of attention and observation, new understandings and directions opened up for those of us who were privileged to be present.

After the concert, given by Soprano Angel Riley, accompanied on piano by Lucy Tucker Yates, the world-renowned composer of “A Woman’s Life,” Richard Danielpour, joined the live Q&A session with the audience and the performers. He expressed his wonder at the name of the nonprofit that sponsors the Festival of Friendship: Revolution of Tenderness and related how he counsels all his students, “If you want to be an artist, you need two qualities; you need both curiosity and generosity. And when you combine these two qualities, you get tenderness.” He went on to explain how important tenderness is for the creative process. The next day, he reached out to Revolution of Tenderness to explore the possibility of collaborating on a project that he’d been thinking about for some time: the performance of a new composition that will promote healing for our world as it suffers the effects of Covid-19 and the particularly divisive 2020 election season. As a result of this invitation, I’m very excited to announce that Revolution of Tenderness has commissioned and will debut a new piece for string instruments, entitled “Homeward.” We will release this performance sometime early in 2021.

The samba concert video, To Live in a Sea of Happiness, seems, at first blush, to take us far, far away from the desires and the impetus that gave rise to the other two concerts. Suddenly, on October 23, we found ourselves in Brazil, with some new friends, who wanted to share a musical tradition belonging to the favelas, or slums, of Rio de Janeiro. Samba de raiz (“roots samba”) expresses a strange joy and sensitivity to beauty in the face of poverty, heartbreak, exclusion, toilsome labor, and even death. “Each inhabitant of the favela bears an individual face marked by her own distinct pain. The fierce fight favelados must conquer in order to endure every minute of life, with its myriad adversities, has made each of them a maestro in the art of survival. The samba musician of the favela does not hide this acquired skill, but rather, through poetry and music, expresses and generously shares it with the world.[1]” The beautiful video, filmed and produced by Marcelo Rocha, performed by Ney Vasconcelos (on guitar), narrated by Antonio (Toninho) Gomez (who also provided the vocals), and featuring a cameo by flutist Alessandra Sterzi, called forth a powerful impression: that these far-flung friends had invited us to join a living adventure of musical companionship through a land both new and familiar: the experience of the human condition, lived with great intensity.

The instruments were different in each of the three concerts; the performers sang in different languages; in each case, the personal histories of composers and musicians seemed to have very little in common; and the ambient sights and sounds all gave rise to diverse contextual atmospheres. Yet, surveying all three concerts, a unity emerges, despite the differences in genres, musical traditions, and cultural contexts. In each case, we heard the expression of a single human Voice – one that takes form in a dizzying collection of accents, dialects, tones, vibrations, and volumes – but one Voice, nonetheless, that somehow manages to sing the rest of us listeners into a greater awareness of and appreciation for our own humanity.

Shared Bread

Following the definition of the word “event” that we began with, we can readily see how 2020 has struck us as wholly unanticipated, unforeseen, unintended, unplanned, and impossible to control; but the year’s surprises have also been unwanted, constricting, and paralyzing. Bewildered by an unprecedented death toll, disease, hatred, violence, and financial and emotional hardships, we have grieved and raged against the limits our new circumstances have imposed. We long for a return to “normal,” even as we know, in our bones, that this return is impossible.

In the midst of this set of challenges, my friends and I dared to imagine that we could be “found.” In fact, our conviction has been so strong on this point, that we had the nerve to say to the world, You Will Be Found, and to invite new friendships to develop on the basis of this one judgment: that even here, in 2020, and without denying a single occasion for human suffering that arose in this year, the event of knowledge can awaken us to the hidden light that pervades even the deepest darkness.

The insights gleaned from our many panel discussions – especially the ones that addressed the problems that plague our culture now: a lack of consensus concerning public health policy, how to find the most ethical way to live the limits imposed by the virus, how to uphold the dignity of each and every human life, etc. – uncovered many unusual and surprising answers: the experience of prisoners can inform and enrich our own need for redemption and freedom; literature and fine arts can become means to respond to (and find responses to) pain and joy, weakness and strength, loss and love; and our need for companions can somehow, miraculously, find an answer that cannot be halted though oceans separate us, technology frustrates and seems to alienate us, and culture and language seem to throw up barriers to understanding. Even disease and death do not have the final word, as we learned from our exploration into the lives of saints and other “revolutionaries of tenderness,” such as our buddies who share the name Teresa or our new pals, Charles de Foucauld and Mary Lou Williams, whom we met through Deanna. This point is the most exceptional of all. Because the root meaning of the word “companion,” is “one who breaks bread with another” (from Latin com "with, together" + panis "bread," from PIE root *pa- "to feed"). What bread could we possibly share with those far removed from us, or even with those geographically close, whom we cannot visit out of concern for each other’s health and welfare? How could we possibly share a meal with someone who has passed away? The answers to these questions will point us to a way through. We all desperately need to be found. The Festival this year has provided us with the assurance that we will be found... that even you will be found.

Suzanne M. Lewis is the Founder and Coordinator of Revolution of Tenderness, the nonprofit that organizes the Festival of Friendship and several other initiatives, including an arts magazine called Convivium Journal, a small publishing house, a radio station, a podcast, and various educational programs and classes. Suzanne earned Masters’ degrees from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Bryn Mawr School of Social Services. She has published several books of prayer and is the mother of five daughters.

The theme for the 2021 Festival will be: Your One Wild and Precious Life.

[1] Pier Luigi Bernareggi, Rosa Brambilla, UM CÉU NO CHÃO. A SKY ON EARTH. THE MORRO SAMBA, from the Rimini Meeting website.

Suzanne M. Lewis 11/4/20 Suzanne M. Lewis 11/4/20

Feast of St. Charles, Final Day of the Double Novena

St. Charles used his own family funds to support the needs of the impoverished and to set up hospitals and hospices for the sick and dying during the plague of Milan. Through his intercession, and that of master fundraiser, St. Martin de Porres, we are confident in reaching our goal for Revolution of Tenderness’s end of year campaign. Please give generously.

Two great men each died on November 3. Charles Borromeo passed away on that day in 1594, and exactly 45 years later, on a different continent, Martin de Porres died in 1639. Their lives overlapped by 15 years, but they never met; most likely neither… — Two great men each died on November 3. Charles Borromeo passed away on that day in 1594, and exactly 45 years later, on a different continent, Martin de Porres died in 1639. Their lives overlapped by 15 years, but they never met; most likely neither one ever heard of the other. *Here are the prayers for Day One*, *Day Two*, *Day Three*, *Day Four*, *Day Five*, *Day Six*, *Day Seven [All Saints Day]*, *Day Eight, and* *Day Nine*.
Scroll further down to find today’s novena prayers.

Many are familiar with how St. Charles risked personal contagion during the plague of Milan in order to give medical and financial help to the sick and dying. What is not well known, though, is that for as long as he put himself at risk for infection, he practiced social distancing to make sure that he didn’t pass the plague onto others. His biographer, Giovanni Pietro Giussano, reported: “For himself , he acted as if he were actually an infected person , allowing no one to come near him or wait upon him , and having a rod carried before him when he went abroad , in order to keep off every one from himself and his assistants.” Charles would place this rod, which was over six feet long, on the ground between himself and anyone who wanted to approach him. St. Charles also instituted an alternative to public prayer assemblies: “seven times a day, when the cathedral bells rang, the residents of Milan, now homebound, would come to their windows and doors and sing prayers and litanies. The effect was, it seems, not unlike contemporary instances of quarantined residents joining in communal serenades: the voices of some ‘three hundred thousand souls,’ Giussano wrote, ‘resounding and echoing, calling all heaven to help in that court of misery’” (Matthew Guerrieri, Boston Globe music critic).

The Prayers:

St. Charles Borromeo
Day Nine [Feast of St. Charles Borromeo]:

“When you pray the [psalms], think about the words you are saying and the Lord to whom you are speaking. When you take care of other people, meditate on how the Lord’s blood has washed them clean so that all that you do becomes a work of love. This is the way we can easily overcome the countless difficulties we have to face day after day, which, after all, are part of our work: in meditation we find the strength to bring Christ to birth in ourselves and in others.” [Charles Borromeo, Homily]

You, Lord, who have the power to renew the heavens, the earth, and all things, give to all of us that new heart, that new spirit which you promised us through the mouth of your prophet: And I will give you a new heart, and put a new spirit within you (Ezekiel 36:26). Bestow it upon us, Lord, with such abundance that it will produce in us, efficaciously and constantly, new resolutions, new customs, a new way of life, and in the end, that eternal renewal which the new Adam, our Lord Jesus Christ, already came into the world to bring us. With this help, our heart shall be enlarged, reforms will no longer seem hard, nor your service burdensome. But the yoke will be sweet and the weight of your holy commandments light to us. We ask this through your son, our Lord, Jesus Christ.
[Charles Borromeo, “Booklet of Reminders”]

Preserve in the midst of your people,
we ask, O Lord, the spirit with which you filled
the Bishop Saint Charles Borromeo,
that your Church may be constantly renewed
and, by conforming herself to the likeness of Christ,
may show his face to the world.
Who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, for ever and ever.

Our Father, Mail Mary, Glory Be

St. Martin de Porres
Postlude:

To you Saint Martin de Porres, we prayerfully lift up our hearts filled with serene confidence and love. Mindful of your unbounded and helpful charity to all levels of society, we offer our petitions to you. Pour out upon our families the precious gifts of your generous intercession; show to the people of every race and every color the paths of unity and of justice; implore from our Father in heaven the coming of his kingdom, so that through mutual benevolence in God, people may live in the peace of Christ.

Blessed is the man who is found without fault,
who does not make gold his life's object,
who does not put his trust in wealth.
- His future will be secure in the Lord.

Who is this man that we may praise him,
for he has done wonders in his life?
- His future will be secure in the Lord.

O God, who led Saint Martin de Porres
by the path of humility to heavenly glory,
grant that we may so follow his radiant example in this life
as to merit to be exalted with him in heaven.
Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son,
who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, for ever and ever.
[Collect for the Memorial of St. Martin de Porres, Roman Missal]

Our Father, Mail Mary, Glory Be

Suzanne M. Lewis 11/3/20 Suzanne M. Lewis 11/3/20

Martin de Porres Litany in Honor of His Feast Today

Join us today as we pray this beautiful litany in honor of St. Martin on his feast day.

*Portrait of St. Martin de Porres, c. 17th century, painted during his lifetime; Monastery of Rosa of Santa Maria in Lima*

The Litany of St. Martin de Porres

Lord, have mercy,
Christ have mercy.
Lord, have mercy.

Christ, hear us.
Christ, graciously hear us,

God the Father of Heaven,
have mercy on us.
God the Son, Redeemer of the world,
have mercy on us.
God, the Holy Spirit,
have mercy on us.
Holy Trinity, One God,
have mercy on us.

Holy Mary, Queen of the Most Holy Rosary,
Pray for us.
St. Martin, ever in the presence of God,
Pray for us.
St. Martin, faithful servant of Christ, etc.
St. Martin, lover of the Holy Eucharist,
St. Martin, devoted to our Blessed Mother,
St. Martin, spiritual patron of Americans,
St. Martin, raised from the depths to a heavenly mansion,
St. Martin, honored son of Saint Dominic,
St. Martin, lover of the Most Holy Rosary,
St. Martin, apostle of mercy,
St. Martin, winged minister of charity,
St. Martin, miraculously conveyed to far-distant lands,
St. Martin, freed from the barriers of time and space,
St. Martin, seeking the conversion of sinners,
St. Martin, protector of the tempted and repentant,
St. Martin, helper of souls in doubt and darkness,
St. Martin, compassionate to the sorrowful and afflicted,
St. Martin, consoler of the discouraged and unfortunate,
St. Martin, peacemaker in all discords,
St. Martin, touched by all suffering,
St. Martin, comforter of the sick and dying,
St. Martin, angel to hospitals and prisons,
St. Martin, worker of miraculous cures,
St. Martin, guardian of the homeless child,
St. Martin, humbly hiding God-given powers,
St. Martin, devoted to holy poverty,
St. Martin, model of obedience,
St. Martin, lover of heroic penance,
St. Martin, strong in self-denial,
St. Martin, performing menial tasks with holy ardor,
St. Martin, gifted with prophecy,
St. Martin, symbol of interracial brotherhood,

Lamb of God, Who takes away the sins of the world,
Spare us, O Lord.
Lamb of God, Who takes away the sins of the world,
Graciously hear us, O Lord.
Lamb of God, Who takes away the sins of the world,
Have mercy on us.

V. Pray for us, Saint Martin,
R. That we may be made worthy of the promises of Christ.

Let Us Pray.

O God, who exalts the humble, you ushered St Martin into your heavenly Kingdom. Grant through his merits and intercession that we may follow his example of humility on earth and so be exalted with him in Heaven, through Christ Our Lord. Amen.

Suzanne M. Lewis 11/3/20 Suzanne M. Lewis 11/3/20

St Martin’s Feast (Double Novena, Day 9)

Today we’ll look at a very different piece of music, Black Christ of the Andes, composed and performed by jazz giant, Mary Lou Williams, in 1962, the same year that St. Martin de Porres was canonized

Yesterday we listened to a short oratorio, composed by Marc Antoine Charpentier, to honor St. Charles Borromeo and his deeds of love during the Milanese plague. Today we’ll look at a very different piece of music, Black Christ of the Andes, composed and performed by jazz giant, Mary Lou Williams, in 1962, the same year that St. Martin de Porres was canonized:

“‘St. Martin de Porres,’ begins with a choir singing a cappella. The chords — dense and full of satisfying tensions — showcase Williams' previously underutilized aptitude for vocal arrangement. As they sing the saint's name, the choir slows down, masterfully swelling on the vowels as if to prove their devotion. When Williams finally enters on the keys, she does so with an Afro-Latin groove, perhaps a nod to the heritage of the hymn's subject.
It is the perfect, haunting invitation to the world of this recording, which feels unexpected and refreshing at every turn. ‘Mary Lou Williams is perpetually contemporary,’ Duke Ellington once said. ‘She is like soul on soul.’ Black Christ of the Andes feels like soul on soul, perhaps in ways beyond what Ellington intended by the phrase. The entire composition is concerned with salvation, the wellbeing of our souls”
(Jenny Gathright, for NPR).

During the 2020 Festival of Friendship, Revolution of Tenderness hosted a free concert of Mary Lou Williams’ compositions, played by jazz pianist Deanna Witkowski and her Trio. This concert was acclaimed by all who tuned in for it, and was just one of the many excellent free programs that we organized this year. Please support our end of year campaign so that we can continue to provide free concerts.

We have an added gift for you today: a beautiful litany to St. Martin de Porres that you can recite in honor of his feast.

The Prayers:

St. Charles Borromeo
Day Eight:

“You must realize that for us nothing is more necessary than meditation. We must meditate before, during and after everything we do. The prophet says: ‘I will pray, and then I will understand.’" [Charles Borromeo, Homily]

Our Father, Mail Mary, Glory Be

St. Martin de Porres
Day Nine:

“In the banquet of life Martin took the lowest seat at the table. Overjoyed to be at the banquet, he chose to sit with the poor, the sick, and the vulnerable. And, at that end of the table, he shared with his neighbors whatever he had. As a result, when in 1639 he went home to the Lord, the Good Shepherd spread before him the banquet of eternal life. At that banquet, Martin was invited to sit at a very high place, close to Jesus himself and to his Mother Mary, surrounded by the saints and angels.”
[Archbishop William Lori]

Our Father, Mail Mary, Glory Be

Suzanne M. Lewis 11/3/20 Suzanne M. Lewis 11/3/20

Double Novena Day 8

St. Charles and St. Martin each inspired composers to write glorious music about their extraordinary presence in the world. The selfless and heroic charity that St. Charle exhibited while caring for the plague-stricken citizens of Milan inspired Marc-Antoine Charpentier to compose a motet, “Pestis Mediolanensis” (“The Plague of Milan”). This short piece of music, “like many of Charpentier’s other oratorios, …features a double choir, two groups of singers sometimes in counterpoint, sometimes in competition. In his [oratories], Charpentier used double choirs to represent opposed groups... At first, the choirs in ‘Pestis’ seem similar: a city divided against itself, in which ‘servants begged for compassion from their masters, and the poor begged from the rich.’ But in the final chorus, the choirs’ imitation might be heard as a united congregation, reverberating citywide, a call-and-response praising Borromeo’s holiness and generosity” (Matthew Guerrieri, Boston Globe music critic). You can listen to this motet here. Tomorrow we will consider a very different (but also hauntingly beautiful) piece of music that was composed in honor of St. Martin de Porres.

Please donate to our end of year campaign in order to support the concerts we offer through Revolution of Tenderness.

The Prayers:

St. Charles Borromeo
Day Seven:

“Do not neglect your own soul, do not give yourself to others so completely that you have nothing left for yourself. You have to be mindful of other people without becoming forgetful of yourself.” [Charles Borromeo, Homily]

Our Father, Mail Mary, Glory Be

St. Martin de Porres
Day Eight:

“In another episode, Martin negotiated a treaty of sorts with the convent’s rodent population. Too many mice had found their way into the building and were causing significant damage. Then one day Martin was seen ushering an orderly regiment, consisting of several hundred mice, outside to the garden. There he explained he would feed them once a day if they stayed outdoors… St. Martin’s miraculous authority over animals speaks to our beginning and our end—where we’ve been and where we’re (hopefully) going. They gesture toward the order and harmony constitutive of mankind’s original, and final, glory. And they point the way to get there.”
[Jordan Zajac, O.P.]

Our Father, Mail Mary, Glory Be

Suzanne M. Lewis 11/2/20 Suzanne M. Lewis 11/2/20

Special All Saints Day Prayers for the Double Novena (Day 7)

The vast majority of saints never defy the laws of physics and never have mystical experiences. Their one claim to heaven was love, and they loved so well, according to the pattern of love that Jesus showed us, that they initiated others into the Holy Trinity’s companionship of Love.

“There is only one tragedy in the end: Not to have been a saint.”
(Charles Péguy)

We would be in serious error if we were to imagine that St. Charles’ position as bishop and cardinal, or St. Martin’s gifts of bilocation and being able to communicate with animals, were what “made” them saints. Each of these men was, first and foremost, a practitioner of love. Their love was a divine love, not because it came with worldly honors or strange marvels, but because they loved without distinction, without “reserving” their love for the “deserving.” Like Christ, they loved the morally upright and also the sinners, the poor and the rich, those who were sick and those who were well. They loved everyone who happened across their human path, and they loved these people with all their energy and strength. That’s more than enough.

Our end of year campaign provides you with a way to collaborate in our mission to offer hope and healing during our uncertain time. Through education and the celebration of all that is good and true and beautiful, we seek to strengthen our human capacity for dialogue and mutual aid. Revolution of Tenderness is a 501(c)3 nonprofit. All donations are tax deductible. Please be generous.

The Prayers:

St. Charles Borromeo
Day Six [All Saints]:

“Calling the saints to mind …arouses in us, above all else, a longing to enjoy their company... We long to share in the citizenship of heaven, to dwell with the spirits of the blessed, to join the assembly of patriarchs, the ranks of the prophets, the council of apostles, the great host of martyrs, the noble company of confessors and the choir of virgins..” [Bernard of Clairvaux, Homily]

Our Father, Mail Mary, Glory Be

St. Martin de Porres
Day Seven [All Saints]:

“Let us long for those who are longing for us, hasten to those who are waiting for us, and ask those who look for our coming to intercede for us. We should not only want to be with the saints, we should also hope to possess their happiness. While we desire to be in their company, we must also earnestly seek to share in their glory. Do not imagine that there is anything harmful in such an ambition as this; there is no danger in setting our hearts on such glory.” [Bernard of Clairvaux, Homily]

Our Father, Mail Mary, Glory Be

Suzanne M. Lewis 10/31/20 Suzanne M. Lewis 10/31/20

San Carlo and San Martín, Day 6

We are full of wonder and gratitude to announce that, due to the generosity of our most committed donors, we have already received over $8,000 in gifts; this brings us more than halfway to our end of year campaign goal of $14,000. We need you to join us in fostering dialogue and healing in the public sphere. Your contribution makes you a standard-bearer in the cause to build a culture of encounter and mutual respect. Please contribute to our end of year campaign today. Revolution of Tenderness is a 501(c)3 nonprofit. All donations are tax-deductible.

Throughout our novena, we have been considering connections and confluences between St. Charles and St. Martin, but today we cannot help but think about St. Francis of Assisi when we read about St. Martin’s ability to communicate with animals and to tame wild bulls.

Both Francis and Martin valued begging as an important spiritual discipline. Because St. Francis and his brothers subsisted on whatever they could raise through begging, their association was called a “mendicant order;” meanwhile Martin approached the wealthy Spanish nobles of Lima to ask for funds to support the orphanage and the medical clinic he founded. Each saint was a catalyst for the free flow of money across castes and classes.

Being able to approach wealthy donors in freedom and confidence requires great humility. Perhaps the power to connect with animals is a sign of a saint’s simplicity or a gift that results from radical humility.

*The full-length version of this image shows Martin with his animal friends*

The Prayers:

St. Charles Borromeo
Day Five:

If your job is teaching and preaching, then study diligently and apply yourself to whatever is necessary for doing the job well. Be sure that you first preach by the way you live. If you do not, people will notice that you say one thing, but live otherwise, and your words will bring only cynical laughter and a derisive shake of the head. [Charles Borromeo, Homily]

Our Father, Mail Mary, Glory Be

St. Martin de Porres
Day Six:

There are many “accounts of the wonders Martin worked with animals. ... For example, when the novices brought two bulls into the convent for a mock bullfight and the antagonized bovines started to attack for real, Martin came to the rescue—by reasoning with the bulls. They heard him out and obeyed. Giving them a snack, Martin instructed the elder bull to let the younger eat first, as was the common practice in the convent. The bull respectfully complied, and nuzzled Martin as if kissing his habit.” [Jordan Zajac, O.P.]

Our Father, Mail Mary, Glory Be

Suzanne M. Lewis 10/31/20 Suzanne M. Lewis 10/31/20

Your One Wild and Precious Life: End of Year Campaign

We are full of wonder and gratitude to announce that, due to the generosity of our most committed donors, we have already received over $8,000 in gifts, which bring us more than halfway to our end of year campaign goal of $14,000. We need you to join us in building a culture of dialogue and healing in the public sphere. Your contribution makes you a standard-bearer in the cause to build a culture of encounter and mutual respect.

Our theme for Festival of Friendship 2021 Photo courtesy of: Sister Thea Bowman Cause for Canonization — Our theme for Festival of Friendship 2021
Photo courtesy of: *Sister Thea Bowman Cause for Canonization*

by Suzanne M. Lewis

We have found that the best tools for fostering true dialogue and effecting real healing within our broken culture are humanities education and free cultural events.

Humanities Education

Despite an overall increase of 29% in bachelor’s degrees awarded over the ten-year period ending in 2016, the steady decline in the number of humanities degrees conferred has only accelerated. In 1967, 17.2% of all degrees conferred were in the humanities. By 2014, that figure was down to 6.1%. Why should this precipitous drop concern us?

The very name “humanities” provides the answer: the various subjects that make up the humanities provide a curriculum for becoming more human. The more we lose touch with the humanities, the more we lose access to certain dimensions of our own humanity.

“Where scientific observation addresses all phenomena existing in the real world, scientific experimentation addresses all possible real worlds, and scientific theory addresses all conceivable real worlds, the humanities encompass all three of these levels and one more, the infinity of all [imaginable] worlds.” ― biologist, Edward O. Wilson

The humanities teach us how to extract and absorb facts from a document, how to interpret data, particularly in relation to the whole field of knowledge, and how to evaluate whether a claim is true or false; they also show us how to formulate an argument and find evidence to support our own claims; most importantly, they put us in conversation with others who grapple with the same human questions that preoccupy us, expose us to other perspectives, and open us to continuous learning – even teaching us how to learn from those with whom we disagree.

A quick visit to a handful of social media platforms, or a cursory scan of the headlines for competing news outlets, provides overwhelming evidence of how the tragic decrease in humanities education has had devastating effects on our public discourse.

“Depth of understanding involves something which is more than merely a matter of deconstructive alertness; it involves a measure of interpretative charity and at least the beginnings of a wide responsiveness.” ― English literature scholar, Stefan Collini

With these considerations in mind, Revolution of Tenderness has founded Convivium: A Journal of Arts, Culture, and Testimony, Convivium Press, and the Festival of Friendship. Each of these initiatives provides educational tools and programming to introduce humanities education into the public sphere. We sell our journal, and all other educational resources, at cost so that they may be accessible to the greatest number of people. Our free cultural programming offers content from pre-eminent scholars and experts while modeling the practice of respectful dialogue.

Free Cultural Events

The annual Festival of Friendship, our largest free and open cultural event, contributes a celebratory dimension to our educational work. This year, though we had to move the Festival online, we had nearly 1,300 attendees, a new record for us!

While our printed texts, videos, and other materials provide crucial substance, our events confer a body with living, human features. Without this living body, learning becomes a dry and toilsome duty, a “prize” to capture and use, or a meaningless intellectual exercise. Instead, our free events serve as life-giving feasts for the human heart and mind.

Our next exciting project will involve a commission for a new piece of music from composer Richard Danielpour, who spoke at the Festival of Friendship last month. The projected performance will take place in early 2021. We’ll provide further details as they become available.

Our working hypothesis, that “all things cry out in unison for one thing: Love” (13th Century friar and poet, Jacopone da Todi), allows us to “assume an extended shared world” (Stefan Collini) and meet anyone and everyone with curiosity and an embrace. Our festive gatherings serve as laboratories, where speakers and performers present their findings and launch new experiments in human flourishing.

Your generous support for Revolution of Tenderness makes you a creative protagonist who generates a culture of dialogue in the public arena. Please contribute to our end of year campaign today. Revolution of Tenderness is a 501(c)3 nonprofit. All donations are tax-deductible.

Suzanne M. Lewis 10/30/20 Suzanne M. Lewis 10/30/20

Day Five of the Double Novena

This coming Sunday, November 1st, in honor of All Saints’ Day, we will begin releasing the videos from the 2020 Festival of Friendship. We will host a watch party for our first two videos, “Like a Boss: Presentation on St. Therese of Lisieux, St. Teresa of Avila, St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, and St. Teresa of Calcutta” and “A Cloud of Witnesses: Gracie Morbitzer’s Icons of Modern Saints.” We hope that by making these videos available through our youtube channel, our friends in other time zones will be able to enjoy the extraordinarily convivial experience of our Festival.

“There were only a few… who could remember the plague, which fifty-three years before had ravaged the greater part of Italy and particularly the Milanese provinces where it was – and still is – called ‘the plague of St. Carlo.’
”Such is the power of charity! It could make the memory of one man stand out over the varied and solemn memories of a general disaster, because it inspired that man with feelings and actions more memorable even than the evils themselves: it could stamp him on people’s minds as a symbol of all their misfortunes, because it had urged and thrust him forward into all of them as their guide, help, example, and voluntary victim; it could turn a general calamity into almost a personal triumph for him; and name it after him as if that calamity had been a conquest or a discovery.”
[Alessandro Manzoni, The Betrothed, page 477]

This coming Sunday, November 1st, in honor of All Saints’ Day, we will begin releasing the videos from the 2020 Festival of Friendship. We will host a watch party for our first two videos, “Like a Boss: Presentation on St. Therese of Lisieux, St. Teresa of Avila, St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, and St. Teresa of Calcutta” and “A Cloud of Witnesses: Gracie Morbitzer’s Icons of Modern Saints.” We hope that by making these videos available through our youtube channel, our friends in other time zones will be able to enjoy the extraordinarily convivial experience of our Festival.

The Prayers:

St. Charles Borromeo
Day Four:

Listen, and I will tell you. If a tiny spark of God’s love already burns within you, do not expose it to the wind, for it may get blown out. Keep the stove tightly shut so that it will not lose its heat and grow cold. In other words, avoid distractions as well as you can. Stay quiet with God. Do not spend your time in useless chatter.
[Charles Borromeo, Homily]

Our Father, Mail Mary, Glory Be

St. Martin de Porres
Day Five:

“Saint Martin, always obedient and inspired by his divine teacher, dealt with his brothers with that profound love which comes from pure faith and humility of spirit. He loved people because he honestly looked on them as God's children and as his own brothers and sisters.”
[St. John XXIII]

Our Father, Mail Mary, Glory Be

Suzanne M. Lewis 10/29/20 Suzanne M. Lewis 10/29/20

St. Charles and St. Martin, Day 4

Martin was able to raise extraordinary sums of money because he was willing to visit the Spanish nobles of Peru in order to beg on behalf of the poor and suffering. Emboldened by his example, we would like to beg that you donate to Revolution of Tenderness.

When he was 15 years old, Martin entered the convent of Nuestra Señora del Rosario, a Dominican priory in Lima, Peru. Because of racist regulations, Martin couldn’t apply to enter as a postulant; instead he asked to be accepted as a servant. He began by cooking, cleaning, and laundering but because of the training he’d received as a barber’s apprentice, he was soon given responsibility for the monastery’s infirmary; later, he was also given the task of almoner; in this role, he raised the astonishing sum of $2,000 per week, enough to feed and support up to 160 poor inhabitants of Lima. He earned the title, “Martin the Charitable” through his constant attention to the poor and needy of Lima. One day a filthy beggar, covered in sores, reached his hand out, and Martin immediately lifted him up and carried him to his own bed. When one of his fellow monks told him that this was going too far, Martin replied, “Compassion, my dear Brother, is preferable to cleanliness. Reflect that with a little soap I can easily clean my bed covers, but even with a torrent of tears I would never wash from my soul the stain that my harshness toward the unfortunate would create.”

The Prayers:

St. Charles Borromeo
Day Three:

Take note of how the apostles awaited the promise of the Holy Spirit with the most ardent desire, and enclosed in the Upper Room for ten days continuously, they all persevered with one soul in their prayers. What do you think the unity of theirs signified, if not charity and concord which are so necessary in your homes? Take care always to maintain peace and tranquility in the house. Come forward, most beloved souls, open the door of your heart to the Spirit; prepare your houses.
[Charles Borromeo, “Booklet of Reminders”]

Our Father, Mail Mary, Glory Be

St. Martin de Porres
Day Four:

“St. Martin did not blame others for their shortcomings. Certain that he deserved more severe punishment for his sins than others did, he would overlook their worst offenses. He was tireless in his efforts to reform the criminal, and he would sit up with the sick to bring them comfort. For the poor he would provide food, clothing and medicine. He did all he could to care for poor farmhands, blacks, and mulattoes who were looked down upon as slaves, the dregs of society in their time. Common people responded by calling him, ‘Martin the charitable.’”
[St. John XXIII]

Our Father, Mail Mary, Glory Be

Suzanne M. Lewis 10/28/20 Suzanne M. Lewis 10/28/20

Double Novena, Day 3

The Revolution of Tenderness needs your help. We are in the final days of our 8th Festival of Friendship, an experience that has enriched and sustained our lives in wholly unexpected and beautiful ways. We are not asking you to sell your furniture, as St. Charles did! But please be generous toward our end of year campaign, through Network for Good. Every donation is tax deductible.

[Left to right] St. Charles Borromeo, by Luca Giordano; St. Martin de Porres, Giles Priere, 1990 Two great men each died on November 3. Charles Borromeo passed away on that day in 1594, and exactly 45 years later, on a different continent, Martin de… — *[Left to right] St. Charles Borromeo, by Luca Giordano; St. Martin de Porres, Giles Priere, 1990*
Two great men each died on November 3. Charles Borromeo passed away on that day in 1594, and exactly 45 years later, on a different continent, Martin de Porres died in 1639. Their lives overlapped by 15 years, but they never met; most likely neither one ever heard of the other. *You can find the prayers for the first day here.* *And* *here are the prayers for Day Two*. God’s sense of time is different from ours: his ways are not our ways. Don’t worry about beginning a day “late” or if you need to double up the prayers on any given day. God isn’t standing over us with a calendar, ready to scold us if we miss a day. He loves it when we pray. Period. Scroll further down to find today’s novena prayers.

St. Charles Borromeo: When the bubonic plague struck Milan, in August of 1576, the governor and most of the rich inhabitants fled the city. By contrast, Charles Borromeo, who had been out of town for a funeral, hastily returned to Milan. Described by Desmond Seward as “Tall, painfully thin, with piercing eyes, Cardinal Borromeo was one of the sights of Milan, celebrating Mass in gorgeous vestments at the Duomo’s high altar, tramping through the meaner streets to visit the sick and the dying. Accessible to all, he was a father to the city’s poor, selling his furniture to feed them, and an uncompromising ascetic who slept on straw and lived on bread and water…”

Once back in Milan, Cardinal Borromeo dedicated himself to reducing the human costs of the plague. Rev. Prosper Guéranger reported: “In the absence of local authorities, he organized the health service, founded or renewed hospitals, sought money and provisions, decreed preventive measures. Most importantly though, he took steps to ensure spiritual help, assistance to the sick and the burial of the dead. Unafraid of being infected, he paid in person, by visiting hospitals, leading penitential processions, being everything to everyone, like a father and true shepherd” (L’anno liturgico – II. Tempo Pasquale e dopo la Pentecoste, Paoline, Alba 1959, pp. 1245-1248).

Today let’s pray particularly for the shepherds of the Church, and all other religious and secular leaders, that they may seek out and implement wise and effective methods to decrease the human toll of the current pandemic.

The Prayers:

St. Charles Borromeo
Day Two:

Be charitable and prudent with all the members of your household, treating them and making sure they are treated well, with love, and seeing to it that they are not maltreated.

Do not speak injurious language either to your children or to any other person.

Rather make an effort with divine grace to restrain anger and taking offense in adverse circumstances which arise during the day in the house or outside

.
[Charles Borromeo, “Booklet of Reminders”]

Our Father, Mail Mary, Glory Be

St. Martin de Porres
Day Three:

“Rose of Lima, like her friend, Martin de Porres, who lived four blocks away in the Dominican priory, joined forces to make sure that no one would be left out of the banquet hall of God’s love and mercy. God’s heart does not exclude anyone. All that life offers us is a gift. All that God offers us is a gift. Our response is to join hands around the table of God’s infinite love, the table where Jesus breaks open his body and pours out his blood, and give thanks. The Eucharist is not a place of exclusion. In the wedding banquet of God’s Son, all are welcome.”
[Rev. Brian Pierce, OP]

Our Father, Mail Mary, Glory Be

Suzanne M. Lewis 10/27/20 Suzanne M. Lewis 10/27/20

Revised St. Charles and St. Martin Novenas, Day 2

Each year since our founding, we have prayed novenas to ask for Marin’s help in finding donors who will support our revolution of tenderness. And each year, he’s come through for us! This year, as you pray the double novena with us, please prayerfully consider making a tax-deductible donation to support our work.

*[Left to right] St. Charles Borromeo, by Luca Giordano; St. Martin de Porres, Giles Priere, 1990*

Two great men each died on November 3. Charles Borromeo passed away on that day in 1594, and exactly 45 years later, on a different continent, Martin de Porres died in 1639. Their lives overlapped by 15 years, but they never met; most likely neither one ever heard of the other. You can find the prayers for the first day here. God’s sense of time is as different from ours as his ways are not our ways. Don’t worry about beginning a day “late” or if you need to double up the prayers on any given day. God isn’t standing over us with a calendar, ready to scold us if we miss a day. He loves it when we pray. Period. Scroll further down to find today’s novena prayers.

From the founding of Revolution of Tenderness, a 501(c)3 nonprofit that organizes and supports many educational and cultural initiatives, including the Festival of Friendship, we named St. Martin de Porres as our Director of Development. We hired him for the job because, in 16th Century Peru, Martin founded a children’s hospital and an orphanage in Lima, thanks to his ability to interest wealthy patrons in these projects. Each year since our founding, we have prayed novenas to ask for this saint’s help in finding donors who will support our revolution of tenderness. And each year, St. Martin has come through for us! This year, as you pray the double novena with us, please prayerfully consider making a tax-deductible donation to support our work.

The Prayers:

St. Charles Borromeo
Day One:

When you are sitting by the fire with your family, standing and walking about the house, rising in the morning and retiring at night, and in a word always and everywhere, you must by good observance of God’s precepts and rule of Christian life have at heart Christ’s teaching and example from the Gospels.
[Charles Borromeo, “Booklet of Reminders”]

Our Father, Mail Mary, Glory Be

St. Martin de Porres
Day Two:

“When Martin became a Dominican lay brother, he soon became a one-man charity agency in the city of Lima. This dark skinned friar in his black and white habit traveled the streets of a cruel and indifferent city, to bring healing and compassion to the Indian outcast, the abandoned slave, and the forgotten child. During the day St. Martin de Porres was a man of action, during the night he was a man of prayer, a mystic. For more than 40 years he lived out his calling as ‘Father of the Poor.’”
[Rev. Cyprian Davis, OSB]

Our Father, Mail Mary, Glory Be

Suzanne M. Lewis 10/27/20 Suzanne M. Lewis 10/27/20

Your One Wild and Precious Life

Join us on this adventure. Share your ideas, your help, your ardent prayers, your particular talents, your resources, and your energy as together we prepare our 9th annual Festival of Friendship. Your one wild and precious life cannot be substituted or duplicated.

Photo courtesy of: Sister Thea Bowman Cause for Canonization — *Photo courtesy of:* *Sister Thea Bowman Cause for Canonization*

We are overjoyed to announce the theme for Festival of Friendship 2021: Your One Wild and Precious Life.

You meet certain people along the path of life: people who seem more alive, more human, more original. They stop you in your tracks. They make you ask yourself: What is the secret to their fascination? How did they find their intensity? Where can I pick some of that up for myself?

Sister Thea Bowman is one of those people. Next year, we’ll examine her life for clues to the source of her ardor and joy. If we want to fully inhabit our lives as Sister Thea did, we need the courage to stop wasting our own time, and to mean something luminous, grand, wild, exceptional, and precious when we use the word “I.”

Join us on this adventure. Share your ideas, your help, your prayers, your particular talents, your resources, and your energy as together we prepare our 9th annual Festival of Friendship. Your one wild and precious life cannot be substituted or duplicated. St. Catherine of Sienna wrote, be who you were meant to be, and you will set the world on fire. Let’s create a conflagration together!

Contact me at suzanne [@] revolutionoftenderness [dot] net in order to join the Revolution of Tenderness!

Suzanne M. Lewis 10/26/20 Suzanne M. Lewis 10/26/20

The Enormous Room

First among the conditions needed for finding and generating novel, creative, and ingenious human responses – in any and all circumstances – is an “enormous room.” We want this blog, and indeed all the work of Revolution of Tenderness, to open up this enormous space of possibility.

First among the conditions needed for finding and generating novel, creative, and ingenious human responses – in any and all circumstances – is an “enormous room.” We want this blog, and indeed all the work of Revolution of Tenderness, to open up this enormous space of possibility.

Our blog title alludes to a book by E. E. Cummings called, The Enormous Room, published in 1922. This autobiographical work describes Cummings’ imprisonment in France during World War I, and the “Room” the title describes is the barracks where Cummings was incarcerated along with about 30 other prisoners. While the “enormous room” that we want to build and that is crucial for fostering human flourishing and creativity, need not be a prison, it’s fascinating to note that Cummings’ confinement opened up a space in him where he could find and develop his poetic gift.

Two other secondary conditions for developing a richly creative and truer humanity are food and music. But not just any food (for example, not “bread alone”); and not all music will suffice for this purpose.

Cummings’ Enormous Room

E.E. Cummings was no ordinary prisoner, and the way that he experienced and narrated his involuntary detainment helps us understand the importance of cultivating our own enormous rooms. For Cummings, the space of his incarceration became a symbol for memory, for the space where he could keep the companionship of his fellow inmates alive. This “room” contained Cummings’ likewise enormous affection for all those with whom he shared it. The quality of the friendships formed within that communal cell also provides an insight into the needs of inventors, innovators, and all those whose daily work, no matter how hidden or “small,” can rebuild and unveil our humanity.

Each of us carries multitudes within. These throngs could become, over time, a faceless and colorless mob; sometimes it’s less painful to allow this degradation to happen, where memory breaks down the sharp edges of detail and leaves only a melted, vague mass of humanity. For a person to remain fully alive to her work and her environment, however, decomposition is worse than death. Distinguishing between one face and another, even between one subtle expression on a particular face and the mere flicker of a muscle that alters its meaning, could transform the essence of a relationship from ordinary to sublime. As Cummings’ notes, when describing his fellow prisoner, The Schoolmaster, in The Enormous Room: “Lessons hide in his wrinkles…” All creative contributors to a more human culture need the enormous room in order to keep track of every lesson that hides in each wrinkle.

Even more than lessons, though, the enormous room preserves and enlarges the affections among those who inhabit it. Cummings’ genius with words comes in second to his particular gift of tenderness for the subjects he writes about, even his captors. For example, during his entrance interview, he describes the petty official who interrogated him:

[He] looked as if he was trying very hard, with the aid of his beribboned glasses and librarian’s jacket (not to mention a very ponderous gold watch-chain and locket that were supported by his copious equator), to appear possessed of the solemnity necessarily emanating from his lofty and responsible office. This solemnity, however, met its Waterloo in his frank and stupid eyes, not to say his trilogy of cheerful chins–so much so that I felt like crying ‘Wie gehts!’ and cracking him on his huge back. Such an animal! A contented animal, a bulbous animal; the only living hippopotamus in captivity, fresh from the Nile.
He contemplated me with a natural, under the circumstances, curiosity. He even naively contemplated me. As if I were hay. My hay-colored head perhaps pleased him, as a hippopotamus. He would perhaps eat me. He grunted, exposing tobacco-yellow tusks, and his tiny eyes twittered. – from The Enormous Room, by E.E. Cummings

The impulse to “crack him on the back” and cry out, “How are you?” in German brings silliness into a humiliating situation. Cummings gives us burlesque, even as he dances in the arena of his own prison. When Cummings turns his attention to his fellow prisoners, his affection deepens:

And I wondered that France should have a use for Monsieur Auguste, who had been arrested (because he was a Russian) when his fellow munition workers made la grève [a strike], and whose wife wanted him in Paris because she was hungry and because their child was getting to look queer and white. Monsieur Auguste, that desperate ruffian exactly five feet tall who—when he could not keep from crying (one must think about one’s wife or even one’s child once or twice, I merely presume, if one loves them) … -used to, start up and cry out, taking B. by one arm and me by the other:
‘Al-lons, mes amis! Chantons “Quackquackquack.”‘ [Come, my friends, let’s sing the “Quackquackquack”] Whereupon we would join in the following song, which Monsieur Auguste had taught us with great care, and whose renditions gave him unspeakable delight:
…’finirons nos desseins,
…………………………Quack.
……………………………….Quack.
……………………………………Quack.
………………………………………….Qua-
…………………………………………………ck.’
I suppose I will always puzzle over the ecstasies of That Wonderful Duck. And how Monsieur Auguste, the merest gnome of a man, would bend backwards in absolute laughter at this song’s spirited conclusion upon a note so low as to wither us all.

If only we could reprint Cummings’ depictions of all his fellow inmates: the Schoolmaster, Orange Cap, the Zulu, Emile the Bum, the Silent Man, the seeker of cigarette ends, the Turk, the Bear, and many others, who all received similar, loving treatment from Cummings’ pen, but you can read them here.

We’re all, more or less, thrown together with a raft of characters, most of whom we would not have chosen for company. Out of these personalities, we can either make beauty or a living hell. Out of the hell of his confinement, Cummings made a love poem for a good number of men he would never see again. His is the room where memory sharpens affection’s focus and gives back art.

Food

Not just any food, no matter how exquisitely prepared or how locally-sourced and organic the ingredients, will satisfy the deepest needs of the human heart. In The Hiding Place, an autobiographical account, this time by concentration camp survivor Corrie Ten Boom, Corrie and her sister Betsie arrive at Ravensbrück camp and are able, against steep odds, to hang on to their Bible and a bottle of precious vitamin drops:

My instinct was always to hoard [the vitamin drops] – Betsie was growing so very weak! But others were ill as well. It was hard to say no to eyes that burned with fever, hands that shook with chill. I tried to save it for the very weakest – but even these soon numbered fifteen, twenty, twenty-five…
And still, every time I tilted the little bottle, a drop appeared at the top of the glass stopper. It just couldn’t be! I held it up to the light, trying to see how much was left, but the dark brown glass was too thick to see through.

The vitamin drops from this episode in The Hiding Place represent what nourishes an abundant life. These drops must be rare, needed by the owners, and yet freely shared, in love, all the same.

Why take examples from a prison and a concentration camp?

If something is true under great duress, then it can also be true in any circumstance. So to validate the need for memory, for affection, and for sharing a stranger’s precious, life-giving drops, we must see whether these things have value in the harshest circumstances.

Music

The “Quackquackquack” song provided a kind of oxygen, without which the enormous room’s inhabitants would have asphyxiated from lack of joy. Likewise, without Betsie’s hymns, which she sang despite the ugliest of circumstances, those vitamin drops would have dried up.

The impulse to song – including when music takes the form of a lyrical novel, or a well-mopped floor, or a dialogue that leads to deeper friendship – must rise up in us, or even the best memory, the most playful description of one’s tormentors, or the most noble impulse to share will fall flat.

Love needs to be set to music before we can play it. Let’s form a band. We’ll call it Saxifrage.

Suzanne M. Lewis 10/26/20 Suzanne M. Lewis 10/26/20

A Free Abundance of Great Things at the Rimini Meeting

The heart, unimpeded by calculation and not distracted by the dream of personal gain, can and does open out toward whatever is true, and beautiful, and just. The Meeting is the fruit of this discovery and its consequence: an embrace for every aspect of reality, because all is a gift, all has been given by Another.

*Disabled Turnstiles at the Rimini Meeting*

by Suzanne M. Lewis

This article first appear on ilsussidiario.net, in 2010

Entry into the enormous conference center, where the Meeting for the Friendship Among Peoples is held, is free. Indeed, for each of the past 31 years that this extraordinary cultural festival has been held at the Italian seaside resort town of Rimini, entrance to the exhibits and talks has been free.We often think of “free entry” in negative terms: there is no charge, one does not pay; however, the gratuitousness of the Meeting in Rimini does not represent a lack, but rather a fullness.

Immediately upon arriving at the Fiera of Rimini, one can see that the turnstiles, with their rotating metal arms, have been disabled; the metal spokes all hang down to allow free passage into the gigantic space that is completely filled: with fascinating exhibits and lectures given in halls filled to capacity, with concerts and dramatic readings and theater performances and film presentations, with sporting events, with shops, with signs, with restaurants, and with thousands of people (800,000 visitors and 40,000 volunteers during the week-long annual event).

Each year the Meeting has a theme around which the exhibits and talks are built. This year’s theme was, “That nature which pushes us to desire great things is the heart,” and at the Meeting, there were eight large exhibits: 1) “A Use for Everyone. Each to His Work. Within the Crisis, Beyond the Crisis,” concerning the recent ongoing economic crisis; 2) “From One to Infinity. At the Heart of Mathematics,” created by the Euresis Association, an international group of scientists that has created many stunning exhibits for the Meeting in past years; 3) “Flannery O’Connor. A Limit with Infinite Measure,” concerning the life and work of the great 20th Century American author; 4) “At the End of the Road Someone Is Waiting For You. The Splendor of Hope in the Portico of Glory,” an art historical meditation on the beautiful arch at the pilgrimage destination of Compostela, in Spain; 5) “Stephen of Hungary. Founder of the State and Apostle to the Nations;” 6) “‘But I Put Forth on the High Seas’. Ulysses: When Dante Sang of the Stature of Man,” concerning a passage from Dante’s “Inferno”; 7) “A Heaven on Earth. The Samba of the Hill,” about the birth of the Brazilian samba music in the favelas; and 8) “Gdansk 1980. Solidarity,” tracing the events that led to Polish independence from the Soviet Union.

If the Meeting in Rimini were only to include these eight exhibits, it would be a great cultural event; but in addition to these larger exhibits, there were many smaller exhibits, presenting various diverse subjects including: the frescoes within the Palazzo Pubblico in Siena, Italy; education as something belonging to the human heart; the life of St. Gianna Beretta Molla; the relationship between love and literature; the work of particular missionaries in Africa; the Russian pianist Marija Judina and her relationship to Stalin; and more.

Each of these exhibits, large and small, was created by groups of individuals with an intense passion for their subject matter and a desire to communicate their fascination to others. Many of the curators provide guided tours within the exhibits. They also train additional volunteers to give guided tours that are then offered in many different languages. It is incredible that passion is the only reason for the huge expenditure of time and work that each exhibit requires; no one receives a financial gain from mounting these exhibits and there is no governing body that awards prizes to the best exhibit; thus neither money, nor glory, nor professional advancement, nor even a spirit of competition is involved in the decision to begin work on an exhibit or in seeing the project through to completion. In fact, there is no evaluation process (questionnaires, exit interviews, etc.) in order to provide market analysis or to assure attendance at future Meetings.

And the curators and guides are not the only people with a passionate interest in the subject explored in any given exhibit. Close observation of the thousands of visitors who file through the exhibits reveals faces in deep concentration, hungry to soak in every detail, whether communicated by the guides or present on the many panels covered in texts and images. All this effort and work is, moreover, for something that most people consider ephemeral and unnecessary for daily survival: cultural study.

This passion alone holds the key to the meaning of the Meeting. It generates the exhibits and also finds expression in the many talks and panel discussions offered in several large lecture halls simultaneously throughout each day of the Meeting. Often there is not enough room in auditoriums that hold thousands of people and the crowds spill outside the doors, onto the floor in order to watch the proceedings on large video screens. Imagine a talk about mathematics by a professor from Princeton University (and no one’s grade depends on it), where hundreds of people cannot fit into the lecture hall and must sit on the floor, watching on a screen! These discussions and talks are given by exhibit curators and experts in many fields. Among the many speakers at the Meeting in Rimini this year were Rose Busingye, a nurse and the Coordinator of Meeting Point of Kampala, a center for Ugandans with AIDS; Mary McAleese, the President of Ireland; Gerhard Ludwig Müller, Bishop of Ratisbona; Miguel Diaz, the US Ambassador to the Vatican; Joshua Dubois, Director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnership; Diarmuid Martin, Archbiship of Dublin and Primate of Ireland; John Milbank, Lecturer in Religion, Politics and Ethics at Nottingham University; Edward Nelson, Lecturer in Mathematics at Princeton University; Mario Livio, Senior Astrophysicist at the Hubble Space Telescope Science Institute; William McGurn, Journalist with the Wall Street Journal; Chen-Hsin Wang, Lecturer in German Language in the Departments of Music and Psychology at Fu Jen Catholic University in Taipei, Taiwan; Angelo Scola, Patriarch of Venice; Angelino Alfano, Italian Minister of Justice; David Maurice Frank, Native American from the Ahousat Reserve, Vancouver Island, Canada; Aliyu Idi Hong, Minister of State for Foreign Affairs of the Federal Republic of Nigeria; Shah Mehmood Quereshi, Minister of Foreigners for the Islamic Republic of Pakistan; Shōdō Habukawa, Buddhist Monk and Lecturer at Koyasan University; Tareq Oubrou, Rector of the Mosque of Bordeaux; Joseph H. H. Weiler, Director of the Straus Institute for the Advanced Study of Law and Justice and Co-Director of the Tikvah Centre for Law & Jewish Civilization at the New York University; and many leaders in Italian government and business — to name only a few!How is it that so many professionals from diverse fields find the passion to offer their work as a free gift to anyone who approaches? And what is it that draws these crowds, year after year, to a fascinated engagement with the cultural exhibits and lectures at the Meeting? Where does this passion come from? The theme of the 2010 Meeting offers a clue: the human heart. The heart, unimpeded by calculation and not distracted by the dream of personal gain, can and does open out toward whatever is true, and beautiful, and just. The Meeting is the fruit of this discovery and its consequence: an embrace for every aspect of reality, because all is a gift, all has been given by Another.

Suzanne M. Lewis 10/26/20 Suzanne M. Lewis 10/26/20

Revised St. Charles and St. Martin Novenas

We will post biographical notes and daily novena prayers each day for ten days. We hope you will take this double journey with us!

Why does the Catholic liturgical calendar honor holy people on the anniversary of their deaths? The usual human practice is to commemorate a person’s life on the day it began – not when it ended. In fact, the Church only marks the births of three figures in sacred history: Jesus Christ; his mother, Mary; and John the Baptist; moreover, their deaths or passings receive greater consideration than their births. Think, for example, about how the three-day solemnity of Easter overshadows our observation of Christmas. On the other hand, the liturgical calendar is brimming with celebrations to mark the deaths of numerous holy men and women. Attention to the anniversary of a saint’s death does not mean we somehow relish death. Rather, we appreciate that in the life of a saint, the moment of death is not a defeat but an immense victory. We glorify the passing of a holy person because we recognize it as a greater birth: his or her entrance into a mysterious, luminous, and eternal life that we’ve each been promised.

How fascinating it would be to see the world from God’s perspective: panning out so far that we could take in the vast reaches of the cosmos all at once while simultaneously zooming in on the particular details of each person’s life, no matter what time period she inhabits! Imagine one eye as a telescope powerful enough to observe the whole of reality and the other equipped with an infinite number of microscopes, trained everywhere, in all times at once. And everything God sees receives an unimaginably attentive and unwaveringly absorbed gaze of tenderness, of love.

God would have thus been watching Charles and Martin at the same time and with the same sense of divine, parental delight. In Italy, Charles (or Carlo) grew up the scion of a family so wealthy that it owned two islands – each with a castle on it! – in Lake Maggiore, near Milan. Martin’s (or Juan Martín) single mother, a freed Black slave, raised him in Peru, where they suffered extreme poverty. In some sense, we could say that Charles had to overcome the inconvenience of his wealth in order to follow the path that could bring him fully to life. Perhaps we could even call Martin’s poverty, and the evils of racism he suffered, a strange “advantage;” these objectively harmful circumstances increased his capacity for compassion and strengthened his humanity.

Over the next nine days we will journey with each of these men, training our gaze on each of their lives at once, in order to get some small taste of God’s view of our human drama.

One note: though both men died on November 3rd, the Church in the United States observes St. Charles’ feast day on November 4th. For our purposes, we have added an additional “preparatory” day to the beginning of St. Charles’ novena so that we can finish in time for his liturgical memorial. Each day of the novenas, we will post new information about our two holy men to this blog. Tomorrow we will tell you why this pair of saints is so meaningful to our work at Revolution of Tenderness.

We will post biographical notes and daily novena prayers each day for ten days. We hope you will take this double journey with us!

We invoke these two holy men’s help as we turn our attention to the upcoming fundraising season. If you find these prayers helpful to you, or if your lives were enriched through participating in the Festival of Friendship, or if you simply want to support our mission, to provide humanities education and free cultural events in Appalachia and beyond, we ask you to please consider supporting us through Network for Good (Network for Good allows you to join the Revolution through either a one-time or regular tax-deductible donation to support the work of Revolution of Tenderness) or Patreon (Patreon offers a three-tiered opportunity for regular, tax-deductible giving. Each tier offers exclusive bonuses — from shout-outs on the Revolution of Tenderness Podcast to free books and Revolution of Tenderness items emblazoned with the colorful Borromean rings).

The Prayers:

St. Charles Borromeo
Preparatory Day:

The hand of God has been so kind to us in the scourge of pestilence with which he has visited us in these times, that we can also well understand how he seeks only our conversion and life, not our death.
[Charles Borromeo, “Booklet of Reminders”]

Our Father, Mail Mary, Glory Be

St. Martin de Porres
Day One:

“What for others could have easily turned into a life of bitterness and anger, for Martin became an opportunity for holiness. Martin entrusted the chaos and the poverty of those early years to God, who took the Spanish and African threads of his heart and wove them into a beautiful tapestry of love. Perhaps Martin’s greatest gift was his capacity to let God turn his suffering into compassion.”
[Rev. Brian Pierce, OP]

Our Father, Mail Mary, Glory Be

TL, DR: The Second Coming is now.

by Lucy Tucker Yates

TL, DR: The Second Coming is now.

by Lucy Tucker Yates

The Prayers:

St. Charles BorromeoDay Nine [Feast of St. Charles Borromeo]:

St. Martin de PorresPostlude:

The Litany of St. Martin de Porres

The Prayers:

St. Charles BorromeoDay Eight:

St. Martin de PorresDay Nine:

The Prayers:

St. Charles BorromeoDay Seven:

St. Martin de PorresDay Eight:

The Prayers:

St. Charles BorromeoDay Six [All Saints]:

St. Martin de PorresDay Seven [All Saints]:

The Prayers:

St. Charles BorromeoDay Five:

St. Martin de PorresDay Six:

Humanities Education

Free Cultural Events

The Prayers:

St. Charles BorromeoDay Four:

St. Martin de PorresDay Five:

The Prayers:

St. Charles BorromeoDay Three:

St. Martin de PorresDay Four:

The Prayers:

St. Charles BorromeoDay Two:

St. Martin de PorresDay Three:

The Prayers:

St. Charles BorromeoDay One:

St. Martin de PorresDay Two:

Cummings’ Enormous Room

Food

Music

The Prayers:

St. Charles BorromeoPreparatory Day:

St. Martin de PorresDay One:

St. Charles Borromeo
Day Nine [Feast of St. Charles Borromeo]:

St. Martin de Porres
Postlude:

St. Charles Borromeo
Day Eight:

St. Martin de Porres
Day Nine:

St. Charles Borromeo
Day Seven:

St. Martin de Porres
Day Eight:

St. Charles Borromeo
Day Six [All Saints]:

St. Martin de Porres
Day Seven [All Saints]:

St. Charles Borromeo
Day Five:

St. Martin de Porres
Day Six:

St. Charles Borromeo
Day Four:

St. Martin de Porres
Day Five:

St. Charles Borromeo
Day Three:

St. Martin de Porres
Day Four:

St. Charles Borromeo
Day Two:

St. Martin de Porres
Day Three:

St. Charles Borromeo
Day One:

St. Martin de Porres
Day Two:

St. Charles Borromeo
Preparatory Day:

St. Martin de Porres
Day One: