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

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.

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

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], and Day Eight.
Scroll further down to find today’s novena prayers.

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]

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
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]

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