Your One Wild and Precious Life

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!

The Enormous Room

Cover design for E. E. Cummings’ The Enormous Room, a memoir that details his experiences as a WWI POW in France

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.

A Free Abundance of Great Things at the Rimini Meeting

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.

Revolutionary of Tenderness: Padre Pio

Padre Pio of Pietrelcina

By guest writer, Ian Richard Shaefer

Growing up, when we’d visit my Italian-American mother’s relatives, a photo of Padre Pio was like a refrigerator to me: every house had one, but I never gave it much thought. At the same time, my very German paternal grandmother has kept a Padre Pio prayer book under her well-used rosary for as long as I remember. I never was particularly drawn to the charming smile of the sweet old Capuchin. His famous quote, “Pray, hope, and don’t worry,” seemed to me more like an inspirational bumper sticker than the deeply powerful truth I now understand it to be.

            Frankly, I was too comfortable. Fourteen-year-old me had his struggles and moments of suffering but was never really forced to face them as much as I would ten years later. Returning from one of the most beautiful years of my life as a student in Milan, Italy, and about to start a career in the United Nations in Rome, my life hit a hard brick wall when my doctors found a rare sort of tumor in my heart. My heart, the most vulnerable part of me that there is!

            From this devastating low, something – rather, someone – helped me up, put my nervously shaking hand in his bloody one, pointed to an empty tomb, and smiled at me with his charming smile. I don’t mean that Padre Pio visited in some mystical apparition, though. Rather, he kept visiting in the reality around me, and I simply began to pay attention. Little things prompted me to learn more about him: a painting at my parish by one of Padre Pio’s cousins; a chapel established in a nearby town; cards mailed from friends and family.

            All of these things increasingly felt like calls from a friend that I had been ignoring. Finally, in my need, I did answer; over time, I began to build a relationship with Padre Pio. Watching movies, reading about him online and in books, and going to pray at his chapel inspired my parents and I to make a pilgrimage to San Giovanni Rotondo after my chemotherapy treatments finished. There, I met the physical Padre Pio – not only in his relics, but also in the community that to this day carries on his simple, hopeful, and concrete works of love.

            I am now in the midst of a second battle with cancer, and while I’m grateful that things seem less threatening than the first time, my same fears remain. I’m consoled by the novena I’ve been praying, in anticipation of Padre Pio’s feast day, because I know he won’t withhold his help. I keep close to Padre Pio, who in his suffering with the stigmata has helped me see that God sometimes chooses to show His love with wounds. I remember that quote, “Pray, hope, and don’t worry,” and I try my best to live it. And I’d definitely put it on a bumper sticker on my car.