tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-376586722024-03-05T19:42:31.845-08:00Friends of GodA Discussion Group that used to be run with E-Mails, centred on Julian of Norwich and other women and men contemplativesJulia Bolton Hollowayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17815712145337889572noreply@blogger.comBlogger34125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37658672.post-69850688921050566392013-06-07T12:06:00.002-07:002013-06-30T23:09:29.854-07:00WHAT IS EVIL?<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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I am cataloguing books for our libray, a library in which Roma learn the alphabet and write the Lord's Prayer. And a section of it is on discrimination, the 'demonizing ' of the Other, who is a mirroring of ourselves, onto whom we project our evil. Two books I catalogue in that section are Terry Eagleton's <i>On Evil</i> and Paul Ricoeur's <i>Il male</i>, a translation into Italian of his <i>Le mal: Un défie à la philosophie e ò la théologie</i>. Already on this website I have Don Divo Barsotti's 'Why Evil?' These remind me of Boethius' discussion of evil in the <i>Consolation of Philosophy</i>, reflected in Julian of Norwich's <i>Showing of Love</i> and in Aquinas' <i>Summa Theologiae</i>, the evil is nought, is the tending to non-being. That God is at the centre, all Being, all Good, all Time; while absenting oneself from that - or absenting another from that - is the tending toward non-being, the dispersal into time, into less and less time, less being, lessness. A bomb is evil because it causes the less-being, the non-being, of the Other. Likewise is a gun. Likewise all weapons of violence. This is the section in the library which is for the Outsiders, those 'lessened' by us, Women, Jews, Roma, Blacks, Native Americans, Aborigine. This is the section of the library on Trauma, that which damages us, which alters our brains and its chemistry, which makes us more fearful of the Other, more punitive, more rigid. We lessen the 'Other' when we deny them land, work, shelter, food, water, clothing, a blanket. We cause the evil that is their poverty. All this is done by Florence to Roma. <br>
When we study the brain we find the right side is inclusive of the other, merciful, the soul, in contact with Godness, while the left excludes the Other, categorizes, separates, judges, condemns, is the intellectual mind. The two need to be in harmony. I once knew intimately a very ill person whose brain functioning was almost entirely in the left hemisphere, who had to separate himself from wife and sons while stealing all we had. I could not convince him I loved him, because to him I was the 'Other', to be destroyed. It would be evil to stay and be so destroyed, which would be to permit and participate in evil. But I still reached across that abyss to share my research so he could get tenure. His last telephone conversation was to say to me I was the most evil person in the whole cosmos. I was his soul he rejected, our sons' mother. Othello's Desdemona. <br>
Jesus, in ministering to women, mad men, lepers, Samaritans, Syro-Phoenician Palestinians, was right hemisphere dominant. This is Christ's Christianity. But religion binds itself into left hemisphere separations, the word 'Pharisee' meaning 'separate'. Jesus is the Prince of Peace. The separations, the divorces, the schisms, the demonizings, are the seeds of war. During which we project onto our enemy our own evil. Multiplying it into cluster bombs, nuclear warheads, extermination camps, holocausts, Guantanamos. Florence, in reparation for the starvation she inflicted on Pisa, which caused the evil of Ugolino's cannibalism of his sons and grandsons, built Orsanmichele as a granary to feed even the enemy in times of famine. Evil can be undone with love, with communion, with sharing. Trauma can be undone with returning to innocence. Time can be undone with going backwards - or to the centre. God is the absence of evil. Evil is the absence of God. <br>
Let us go backwards in the Lord's Prayer: 'But Deliver us from evil, Lead us not into Temptation, As we forgive those who trespass against us, Forgive us our trespasses, Give us this day our daily bread, On earth as it is in Heaven, Thy will be done, Thy Kingdom come, Hallowed by Thy Name, Who art in Heaven, Our Father'.
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CHE COSA E' IL MALE? <br> <br>
Saturday, June 08, 2013
Sto catalogando dei libri per la nostra biblioteca. Biblioteca in cui i Rom apprendono l’alfabeto e scrivono il ‘Padre Nostro’. Una sezione è dedicata alla discriminazione, che altro non è che la 'demonizzazione’ dell’Altro e la proiezione del male che abita in noi. Due i libri in particolare che sto catalogando per questa sezione: <i>On Evil</i> di Terry Eagleton e <i>Il Male</i> di Paul Ricoeur, traduzione italiana del suo Le mal: Un défi à la philosophie et à la théologie. Ho già in questo stesso sito pubblicato ‘Perché il male?’ di Don Divo Barsotti, che mi richiama alla memoria la discussione dialogica sul male nel <i>De consolatione philosophiae</i> (<i>La Consolazione della filosofia</i>) di Boezio, riflessa in <i>The Showing of Love</i> (<i>Le Rivelazioni dell’Amore</i>) di Giuliana di Norwich e nella <i>Summa Theologiae</i> (<i>La Summa Teologica</i>) di Tommaso d’Aquino. Il male è nulla. Il male è il tendere al non essere. Dio è al centro. L' Essere perfettissimo, il Sommo Bene, l'Essere Eterno. Allontanarsene – o altri allontanare da questo – è tendere al non essere, alla dispersione nel limite del tempo, nel sempre meno tempo, conduce alla non esistenza, alla pochezza. Una bomba è il male perché annienta e distrugge l’Altro. Così come male è un fucile. Male tutte le armi della violenza. È la sezione questa sugli esclusi, su chi riduciamo al rango di inferiori. Donne, Ebrei, Rom, Neri, Nativi americani, Aborigeni. La sezione sul trauma, sui danni subiti da cui originano quelle alterazioni chimiche del cervello che ci rendono più timorosi dell’Altro, più punitivi, più rigidi. Sviliamo l’‘Altro’quando all’altro neghiamo terra, lavoro, un tetto, cibo, acqua, ciò di cui vestirsi, una coperta. Noi siamo la causa prima di questo male. La loro povertà. Questo è ciò che Firenze fa ai Rom. <br>
Studiando il cervello scopriamo che la parte destra è inclusiva, include l’altro. È la parte che mostra misericordia. È l’anima. È la parte in contatto con il divino. La parte sinistra, di contro, esclude l’Altro, categorizza, separa, giudica, condanna. È la mente intellettuale. Le due parti devono essere in armonia. In passato conoscevo intimamente una persona molto ammalata, che quasi del tutto dominata dall’emisfero sinistro del cervello si è separata da moglie e figli, da noi derubando tutto. Non sono riuscita a convincerlo di quanto fosse amato. Per lui io ero l’‘Altro’da distruggere. Il male sarebbe stato rimanere, annientata e partecipe di quello stesso male subito. Eppure ancora ho cercato di raggiungere quell’abisso. Sperando nel condividere le mie ricerche egli potesse acquisire il tenure. La persona più malvagia nell’intero universo, queste le sue parole, nella sua ultima conversazione telefonica con me. Ero la sua anima da rigettare. La madre dei nostri figli. La Desdemona di Otello. <br>Gesù nel suo ministero, con le donne, gli indemoniati, i lebbrosi, i samaritani, i palestinesi, la siro-fenicia agisce mosso dall’emisfero destro. È questa la cristianità di Cristo. La religione si vincola, di contro, alle divisioni dell’emisfero sinistro. La parola ‘Fariseo’ significa ‘separato’. Gesù è il principe della pace. Le separazioni, le divisioni, gli scismi, le demonizzazioni, sono i semi di guerra con cui sul nemico proiettiamo il male che alberga in noi. Guerra che estendiamo e moltiplichiamo con bombe a grappolo, missili a testata nucleare, campi di sterminio, olocausti, nuove Guantanamo. Firenze quale atto di riparazione per l’affamata Pisa - causa dell’orrido cannibalismo di Ugolino che divorò la sua progenie, figli e nipoti - edifica Orsanmichele, loggia del mercato del grano, per nutrire anche i nemici in tempo di carestia. L’amore, la comunione, la condivisione cancellano il male. Il ritorno all’innocenza cancella il trauma. Il procedere a ritroso - o l’andare verso il centro annulla il tempo. Dio è l’assenza di male. Il male è l’assenza di Dio. <br>Se procediamo con il Padre Nostro a ritroso, verso il centro, con il rovesciamento dell'immagine riflessa, non è la parola 'male' a chiudere la nostra preghiera, ma il nostro condiviso essere con Dio, nostro 'Padre': ‘ma liberaci dal male, e non ci indurre in tentazione; come noi li rimettiamo ai nostri debitori, rimetti a noi i nostri debiti; dacci oggi il nostro pane quotidiano; come in cielo e così in terra, sia fatta la tua volontà; venga il Tuo Regno; sia santificato il Tuo nome; che sei nei Cieli, Padre Nostro.’ Julia Bolton Hollowayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17815712145337889572noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37658672.post-22672598811093247552013-01-12T10:43:00.003-08:002013-01-15T22:53:33.054-08:00'FROM GRAVES TO CRADLES': AN APPEAL<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Vandana and Daniel saved Florence's Swiss-owned, so-called 'English' Cemetery in Florence. It had been abandoned. They gardened, restored its ironwork, cleaned its tombs, and earned enough in five years to build their home in Romania, with three rooms and four windows, on land they bought. Vandana, Daniel, their daughters, Alexandra, Elena and Gabriela, and Vandana's mother, Amanda, are Romanian Roma, who were slaves of the nobles and monasteries from the Middle Ages until the nineteenth century when <i>Uncle Tom's Cabin</i> was translated into Romanian, and family members were killed in the Holocaust. We called our project 'From Graves to Cradles', as the two parents also made a cradle for their new born, Gabriela. Then disaster struck. The land and house, registered with the city, was taken from them by the rich owners who had had it before Communism. No compensation. They lost everything. They had to return to living in one room with three daughters and the grandmother, paying rent. Vandana is in hospital, unable to speak as I write. Can we make a home possible for them again in time to give Vandana the hope she has lost, she has earned?
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<p>For the full story see <a href="http://http://www.ringofgold.eu/house.html">http://www.ringofgold.eu/house.html<a></p>
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You can make PayPal payments towards helping make their home possible again at <a href="http://www.florin.ms/pp.html">http://www.florin.ms/pp.html</a>
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Julia Bolton Hollowayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17815712145337889572noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37658672.post-25610273141034107542012-07-08T23:36:00.000-07:002013-06-30T23:12:38.305-07:00APARTHEID/INCLUSION<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<p>The Gospel of Jesus is the Gospel of Inclusion, of women, of Samaritans, of lepers, of thieves, of all those whom male Jews, themselves oppressed and exploited by the Roman Empire, hated and feared. Christ's dream is for right-brain peace, Julian of Norwich's and Bob Marley's 'One Love'.</p>
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEitSCpO0ia0y1ipbSkA9uCOHRVAS4TUDX0JGOaWBYGeNRequgf32BT5TwJCVHxPCY6eYWRm1IXNwDAGfDC2UHiRb50bJM3_4ckTOgz3lHrE16tXsxLoae6fnU9dpltkmizANPOl/s1600/thoreau.gif" imageanchor="1" style=""><img border="0" height="320" width="252" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEitSCpO0ia0y1ipbSkA9uCOHRVAS4TUDX0JGOaWBYGeNRequgf32BT5TwJCVHxPCY6eYWRm1IXNwDAGfDC2UHiRb50bJM3_4ckTOgz3lHrE16tXsxLoae6fnU9dpltkmizANPOl/s320/thoreau.gif" /></a>
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjy0zJ_GEgQA61rbfs-U8JYhtvvSgReDmFGHGew_fw6cnEwIoNLLFJ7Rx-TQ-uHZ0i7qDE_b33WtR7BY1GgCKkq3akQyDTUaXja7Nsyum01oiI9NX9rw2acVEN-6bGIPIenRhSz/s1600/LeonTolstoy.jpg" imageanchor="1" style=""><img border="0" height="320" width="242" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjy0zJ_GEgQA61rbfs-U8JYhtvvSgReDmFGHGew_fw6cnEwIoNLLFJ7Rx-TQ-uHZ0i7qDE_b33WtR7BY1GgCKkq3akQyDTUaXja7Nsyum01oiI9NX9rw2acVEN-6bGIPIenRhSz/s320/LeonTolstoy.jpg" /></a>
<p>In America Thoreau and in Russia Tolstoy wrote on Civil Disobedience and Non Violence against war, against injustice.</p>
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<p>My father, Glorney Bolton, was a journalist for the Times of India in the 1930s. India had been conquered first by the East India Trade Company, then by England, and laws were enacted to the benefit of the powerful, against the Indian people who had lost their sovereignty. Mahatma Gandhi, who revered Tolstoy, used non-violence, enacting to the oppressor a theatre, a mirror, of the oppressor's injustice. Salt was monopolized as in the Roman Empire so also in the copycat British Empire. Gandhi chose to walk to the sea at Dandi, to boil sea water and to illegally produce salt as an act of freedom - for which the police attacked and beat the participants who turned the other cheek and went peacefully to prison. My father was present at that act of freedom - speaking of witnessing Gandhi's simple act of walking to Dandi and boiling sea water as history quietly being made.</p>
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<p>In America cheap labour was provided by slaves brought from Africa, slaves who were forbidden to know how to read or write, who could be bought and sold at will, their families separated, husbands from wives, children from parents. Even after slavery ended African Americans could be lynched, murdered, their bodies mutilated, by the Ku Klux Klan. I remember benches and drinking fountains in parks in the American South with Pharisaical labels saying 'Whites Only'.</p>
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<p>One day a part Black, part Cherokee, part Irish lady, Rosa Parks, sat, not in the back row of seats in a Montgomery, Alabama, bus but too near the front where only Whites would sit. She refused to comply with the unjust rules and laws. Rev. Martin Luther King organized, in Gandhi's manner, a boycott of all the Montgomery buses. The city ground to a halt. Eventually, after many Freedom marches with Black and White participants, some of whom were lynched, King was able to speak in Washington D.C. in front of the Lincoln Memorial, his splendid speech, 'I have a dream'.</p>
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<p>The Roma in Romania were slaves of the nobles and monasteries from the Middle Ages until the nineteenth-century when <i>Uncle Tom's Cabin</i> was translated into Romanian, longer than were Africans in America. Roma have still not achieved Civil Rights. When I first went to America I heard Whites say of Blacks that they could not be trusted, that they are criminals, of sub-normal intelligence. Today, I still hear such comments said of Roma by Italians and by Romanians, that Roma steal, that they steal babies, that they are dirty, that they don't work. My experience of Roma is that the police steal from them their money they need to send to their children looked after by the grandparents in Romania, who are starving, that the police steal their blankets from them in the coldest nights of the year after forcing them to sleep in the open from having bulldozed their shacks with all their belongings, including medicines and documents, that we steal their babies for being adopted into rich Italian families, that Roma are scrupulously clean though allowed no access to water, and that they work extremely well, preserving ancestral skills as blacksmiths, stonemasons, carpenters, gardeners, etc. It is true a Roma camp is surrounded by rubbish, but inside their living space everything is clean, shoes taken off, carpets washed, this because anything spiritually or physically polluting is thrown away from the living space. There is no official rubbish removal given to them. This, I learned from the town government in question, because when I telephoned I was told: 'They do not work, they do not pay taxes, we won't remove their rubbish'. Consequently rats gnaw babies' feet in Florence. But our laws in Italy do not allow Roma to work. Nor can they find work in Romania. For which they must have the diploma and a house. How to break this cycle?</p>
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<p>The Gospel of Jesus is the Gospel of Inclusion, of women, of Samaritans, of lepers, of thieves, of all those whom male Jews, themselves oppressed and exploited by the Roman Empire, hated and feared. Christ's dream is for right-brain peace, Julian of Norwich's and Bob Marley's 'One Love'.</p>Julia Bolton Hollowayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17815712145337889572noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37658672.post-594290704059755002011-10-08T05:08:00.000-07:002012-07-08T23:44:56.422-07:00SAINT PARASCHEVA OF IASI<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEib3Esug6y13jRsZo5UFlRvahxVcgeMpfG8xrsOOpC4IMdJ33gmt2VSOdI4TUjcuYvNN6YatlnGsdWO3AFsQswPrUjUVVmEFlPawlcAQ0WMCWrUlgYzSMD759D4Np9-vqhmkzRr/s1600/zita1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style=""><img border="0" height="320" width="271" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEib3Esug6y13jRsZo5UFlRvahxVcgeMpfG8xrsOOpC4IMdJ33gmt2VSOdI4TUjcuYvNN6YatlnGsdWO3AFsQswPrUjUVVmEFlPawlcAQ0WMCWrUlgYzSMD759D4Np9-vqhmkzRr/s320/zita1.jpg" /></a></div><br />
I love their voices. They are gentle voices, talking in Romani, about a saint they love. My Romanian Roma workers today at lunch were telling the story of Saint Parascheva, the narration tumbling out in a mixture of languages, Romani, Romanian, Italian, English, reverently. She was the daughter of a shepherd and sent out to bring food to her father and to others at work. Instead, she gave their food, their bread and wine, to the poor, so that when she got to her father there was nothing left. I asked 'Was she beautiful?' 'Yes, very', replied Bancuta. I asked when had she lived. 'A hundred and fifty years ago, long ago', he replied. Breteanu Bancuta's son is returning to Romania to be there in time for her feast.<br />
They bring her body out of the cathedral at Iasi in Romania on 13th October, now keeping it under glass, and a million pilgrims arrive to touch her and pray.<br />
As soon as I had washed the dishes I went looking for her on the Web, finding that she was from the 11th century, and also finding these images, showing them to Bancuta, who immediately, in great excitement, called Daniel to share them with him.<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiFgC4VO1vebKctIelpgjemYm6kE2gHNVSuZHAKfXVjqNR0CLmFDCFoL1GdUHkZgGJOmBzZGrTPcgFkgSCay1sSQSQCyx0ulFkHFhfo8DCB8QTTeROJBFKq2-Nk_L5YThkSE2jc/s1600/parascheva.jpg" imageanchor="1" style=""><img border="0" height="224" width="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiFgC4VO1vebKctIelpgjemYm6kE2gHNVSuZHAKfXVjqNR0CLmFDCFoL1GdUHkZgGJOmBzZGrTPcgFkgSCay1sSQSQCyx0ulFkHFhfo8DCB8QTTeROJBFKq2-Nk_L5YThkSE2jc/s320/parascheva.jpg" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgjSdIVwFSlrTepevZIaDhNdsxIxDsZcfPkGKcEC4zzDSZa24UM4PJLiV87fTDALzUmL0H671OkIUP9zxl4VwgOKotV_0J2ewZubkpLbITyTo_AQ5KUjQDKpgM3tOKpzb7q73SG/s1600/parascheva2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style=""><img border="0" height="320" width="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgjSdIVwFSlrTepevZIaDhNdsxIxDsZcfPkGKcEC4zzDSZa24UM4PJLiV87fTDALzUmL0H671OkIUP9zxl4VwgOKotV_0J2ewZubkpLbITyTo_AQ5KUjQDKpgM3tOKpzb7q73SG/s320/parascheva2.jpg" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiS89P9VIOaXTW8mF8C1FPurylNKwU1anJ28bFKihI8T84yeLHIJYNB7DYwfrp2AoI7CnoZElyrTa9sWuP4H7s2s76MyLZN7-L6Am2y_LOWURlaKKWaVGbLED-a3OxZjfFp_0rJ/s1600/parascheva3.jpg" imageanchor="1" style=""><img border="0" height="201" width="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiS89P9VIOaXTW8mF8C1FPurylNKwU1anJ28bFKihI8T84yeLHIJYNB7DYwfrp2AoI7CnoZElyrTa9sWuP4H7s2s76MyLZN7-L6Am2y_LOWURlaKKWaVGbLED-a3OxZjfFp_0rJ/s320/parascheva3.jpg" /></a></div>Then I recorded them retelling her story.<br />
I said that her story is like our story of Santa Zita of Lucca. She was the servant of a rich family, who gave her master's cloak to a naked beggar outside the cathedral, who then, as an angel, returned it to her Master. She also saved a boy from being taken by the devil by beating the devil with her broom.<br />
On her feast day they bring her out in the church of San Frediano and we can visit her in her glass coffin, laying narcissi against the glass and then walking throughout Lucca's streets, with these fragrant bouquets, celebrating this servant.<br />
You can read about her at <a href="http://www.umilta.net/zita.html">http://www.umilta.net/zita.html</a> with Frances Alexander's lovely engravings, that John Ruskin admired so greatly.<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEib3Esug6y13jRsZo5UFlRvahxVcgeMpfG8xrsOOpC4IMdJ33gmt2VSOdI4TUjcuYvNN6YatlnGsdWO3AFsQswPrUjUVVmEFlPawlcAQ0WMCWrUlgYzSMD759D4Np9-vqhmkzRr/s1600/zita1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style=""><img border="0" height="320" width="271" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEib3Esug6y13jRsZo5UFlRvahxVcgeMpfG8xrsOOpC4IMdJ33gmt2VSOdI4TUjcuYvNN6YatlnGsdWO3AFsQswPrUjUVVmEFlPawlcAQ0WMCWrUlgYzSMD759D4Np9-vqhmkzRr/s320/zita1.jpg" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgdUwxAz3QbSUg6cJXTnbB7bYKjLIdYrHfSA8UEsp7mfQMcY0LWYEc3au3LL8xBkaNY6crI7rXGCBS01pIICgrjHsQFPwmB-rpUJv6ARJXhdaS4J24m778uuEm7DTwVQzdfjn8F/s1600/zita2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style=""><img border="0" height="178" width="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgdUwxAz3QbSUg6cJXTnbB7bYKjLIdYrHfSA8UEsp7mfQMcY0LWYEc3au3LL8xBkaNY6crI7rXGCBS01pIICgrjHsQFPwmB-rpUJv6ARJXhdaS4J24m778uuEm7DTwVQzdfjn8F/s320/zita2.jpg" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEghE1WG8odx7HRrP5N9sklvpxggibCyhcpOPHF_PbX-8-pw8LlnGYKOE99398SxfHFGWYE0XDlkGynxkvzjHkz20tTVCwG7XPenJAnHl2hrhIEZN-cx6T2uY9yz33r4GoO9QRtj/s1600/zita3.jpg" imageanchor="1" style=""><img border="0" height="175" width="260" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEghE1WG8odx7HRrP5N9sklvpxggibCyhcpOPHF_PbX-8-pw8LlnGYKOE99398SxfHFGWYE0XDlkGynxkvzjHkz20tTVCwG7XPenJAnHl2hrhIEZN-cx6T2uY9yz33r4GoO9QRtj/s320/zita3.jpg" /></a></div>I love the way these stories transcend time and space, and give us models for ourselves, how their tellers are simple people who completely believe. Magnificat people. Romanian Roma enter our churches, crossing themselves not once, but three times, and touching the floor. In Advent and in Lent they fast strenuously, the last week with no oil, butter, eggs, milk, meat, sweets. A nursing mother does not drink milk on Fridays, nor on that day will a Roma touch iron because of the nails on the Cross. It is an honour to come to know them.Julia Bolton Hollowayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17815712145337889572noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37658672.post-37718964948814521812011-08-06T22:42:00.000-07:002011-08-06T23:07:28.114-07:00FALSE ECONOMIES AND TRUE<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiOA9yEG_HtClyv-Vqd8Ywhq2QMlCYf58rTPUKo2nFHtmijakMXef5c-cNsCue4zQ-8E0KPfCb6oI01hgTHE0O-JVAiMLjCr8W6uAT-m8l70kuYzoKc6Euidy2tCsRKpfhJPocH/s1600/hand1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style=""><img border="0" height="200" width="205" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiOA9yEG_HtClyv-Vqd8Ywhq2QMlCYf58rTPUKo2nFHtmijakMXef5c-cNsCue4zQ-8E0KPfCb6oI01hgTHE0O-JVAiMLjCr8W6uAT-m8l70kuYzoKc6Euidy2tCsRKpfhJPocH/s320/hand1.jpg" /></a></div>John Kenneth Galbraith, in <i>The Age of Uncertainty</i>, said the way bankers make money is obscene. A true economy is a reciprocity of needs shared and matched. Better than a bank account is a skill, knowing how to build a house, knowing how to tend the land. Today we have become addicted to debt, to food, the consequences being bankruptcy, obesity. We are dependent on cash crops, again through deliberately planned addictions, such as to coffee and to drugs. All these cripple us, rob us of freedom, of happiness, though they seem to offer these enticingly, seductively.<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiOA9yEG_HtClyv-Vqd8Ywhq2QMlCYf58rTPUKo2nFHtmijakMXef5c-cNsCue4zQ-8E0KPfCb6oI01hgTHE0O-JVAiMLjCr8W6uAT-m8l70kuYzoKc6Euidy2tCsRKpfhJPocH/s1600/hand1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style=""><img border="0" height="200" width="205" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiOA9yEG_HtClyv-Vqd8Ywhq2QMlCYf58rTPUKo2nFHtmijakMXef5c-cNsCue4zQ-8E0KPfCb6oI01hgTHE0O-JVAiMLjCr8W6uAT-m8l70kuYzoKc6Euidy2tCsRKpfhJPocH/s320/hand1.jpg" /></a></div>Our education has robbed us of the skills our parents could have taught, how to build a dry wall to terrace land, how to sew with needle and thread, by telling us to despise the work of human hands, once the work of our parents, now the work done in the Third World by underpaid child labour. All this cripples us. Our young people, cheated of the well-paid desk job they were expected to get, today graffiti the walls of Florence with rage, making loveliness ugly.<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiOA9yEG_HtClyv-Vqd8Ywhq2QMlCYf58rTPUKo2nFHtmijakMXef5c-cNsCue4zQ-8E0KPfCb6oI01hgTHE0O-JVAiMLjCr8W6uAT-m8l70kuYzoKc6Euidy2tCsRKpfhJPocH/s1600/hand1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style=""><img border="0" height="200" width="205" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiOA9yEG_HtClyv-Vqd8Ywhq2QMlCYf58rTPUKo2nFHtmijakMXef5c-cNsCue4zQ-8E0KPfCb6oI01hgTHE0O-JVAiMLjCr8W6uAT-m8l70kuYzoKc6Euidy2tCsRKpfhJPocH/s320/hand1.jpg" /></a></div>In Italy, until Berlusconi, savings banks were required by law to use some of their obscene profits for cultural and charitable projects. These laws in the Middle Ages and Renaissance created Florence, before the 'Robber Baron' Medici were even heard of. The Guelf medieval city walls were built out of the stones of the Ghibelline 'towers of pride', the hospital of Santa Maria Nuova, the ambulance and burial service of the Misericordia, the caring for and education of unwanted babies at the Ospedale degli Innocenti, Orsanmichele as a granary to feed even the enemy in time of famine, the caring for the proud poor by the Buonomini di San Martino, as well as the great cathedral and the Palazzo del Popolo (now the Palazzo Vecchio), setting in place a great network of social services in which the citizens themselves participated with their work and their money, their creativity, their energy. These civic laws and organizations worked for the common prosperity of all, their health, their education. No longer.<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiOA9yEG_HtClyv-Vqd8Ywhq2QMlCYf58rTPUKo2nFHtmijakMXef5c-cNsCue4zQ-8E0KPfCb6oI01hgTHE0O-JVAiMLjCr8W6uAT-m8l70kuYzoKc6Euidy2tCsRKpfhJPocH/s1600/hand1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style=""><img border="0" height="200" width="205" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiOA9yEG_HtClyv-Vqd8Ywhq2QMlCYf58rTPUKo2nFHtmijakMXef5c-cNsCue4zQ-8E0KPfCb6oI01hgTHE0O-JVAiMLjCr8W6uAT-m8l70kuYzoKc6Euidy2tCsRKpfhJPocH/s320/hand1.jpg" /></a></div>In the year 2000 we talked of forgiving debts to the Third World, realizing our banks were increasing poverty wherever they made loans to poorer nations who could not afford to pay. So banks turned upon their own citizens, foreclosing their homes with toxic mortgages, shutting down or moving businesses to 'outsource' them, to use the underpaid labour of the Third World, instead of the justly paid labour of the First, thus internalizing the Third World's poverty upon the First World.<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiOA9yEG_HtClyv-Vqd8Ywhq2QMlCYf58rTPUKo2nFHtmijakMXef5c-cNsCue4zQ-8E0KPfCb6oI01hgTHE0O-JVAiMLjCr8W6uAT-m8l70kuYzoKc6Euidy2tCsRKpfhJPocH/s1600/hand1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style=""><img border="0" height="200" width="205" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiOA9yEG_HtClyv-Vqd8Ywhq2QMlCYf58rTPUKo2nFHtmijakMXef5c-cNsCue4zQ-8E0KPfCb6oI01hgTHE0O-JVAiMLjCr8W6uAT-m8l70kuYzoKc6Euidy2tCsRKpfhJPocH/s320/hand1.jpg" /></a></div>We are back in the period of 'cool' Calvin Coolidge and the Robber Baron architecture of Washington, D.C., where the rich get richer and the poor get children in broken homes. The change could come with using the thinking of John Kenneth Galbraith and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, investing in the people, in building the future.<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiOA9yEG_HtClyv-Vqd8Ywhq2QMlCYf58rTPUKo2nFHtmijakMXef5c-cNsCue4zQ-8E0KPfCb6oI01hgTHE0O-JVAiMLjCr8W6uAT-m8l70kuYzoKc6Euidy2tCsRKpfhJPocH/s1600/hand1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style=""><img border="0" height="200" width="205" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiOA9yEG_HtClyv-Vqd8Ywhq2QMlCYf58rTPUKo2nFHtmijakMXef5c-cNsCue4zQ-8E0KPfCb6oI01hgTHE0O-JVAiMLjCr8W6uAT-m8l70kuYzoKc6Euidy2tCsRKpfhJPocH/s320/hand1.jpg" /></a></div>We need to change education holistically, to value the skills fathers and mothers can teach children, to emphasize the work of the body, the mind, and the soul, using the work, study and prayer, of the medieval monastery, not that of the Greco-Arabic university's intellectuality alone. I value being taught during WWII by my foster father how to be a carpenter, which I have taught in turn to my children. My educated parents were writing speeches for Czechoslovakia's President in exile and listening to enemy broadcasts at Evesham. They didn't know how to build the bookcases for their many books. I do. My sons do. My grandchildren do. We know from this, too, how to build solar homes.<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiOA9yEG_HtClyv-Vqd8Ywhq2QMlCYf58rTPUKo2nFHtmijakMXef5c-cNsCue4zQ-8E0KPfCb6oI01hgTHE0O-JVAiMLjCr8W6uAT-m8l70kuYzoKc6Euidy2tCsRKpfhJPocH/s1600/hand1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style=""><img border="0" height="200" width="205" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiOA9yEG_HtClyv-Vqd8Ywhq2QMlCYf58rTPUKo2nFHtmijakMXef5c-cNsCue4zQ-8E0KPfCb6oI01hgTHE0O-JVAiMLjCr8W6uAT-m8l70kuYzoKc6Euidy2tCsRKpfhJPocH/s320/hand1.jpg" /></a></div>We need to change banking, to require banks to devote a handsome part of their obscene profits to providing health care, libraries, rehabilitation centres, museums, skills preserving and training centres. If they do this there will not be global bankruptcy.<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiOA9yEG_HtClyv-Vqd8Ywhq2QMlCYf58rTPUKo2nFHtmijakMXef5c-cNsCue4zQ-8E0KPfCb6oI01hgTHE0O-JVAiMLjCr8W6uAT-m8l70kuYzoKc6Euidy2tCsRKpfhJPocH/s1600/hand1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style=""><img border="0" height="200" width="205" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiOA9yEG_HtClyv-Vqd8Ywhq2QMlCYf58rTPUKo2nFHtmijakMXef5c-cNsCue4zQ-8E0KPfCb6oI01hgTHE0O-JVAiMLjCr8W6uAT-m8l70kuYzoKc6Euidy2tCsRKpfhJPocH/s320/hand1.jpg" /></a></div>We need to have nurturing families where new-born babies are loved, not abandoned with toys and machines, but instead held, rocked, sung to. In such a way we will not have dysfunctional adults addicted to war, drugs, debt, but instead people valued for their contributions in hand work, brain work, caring work, people whole in body, mind and soul, debt free.<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiOA9yEG_HtClyv-Vqd8Ywhq2QMlCYf58rTPUKo2nFHtmijakMXef5c-cNsCue4zQ-8E0KPfCb6oI01hgTHE0O-JVAiMLjCr8W6uAT-m8l70kuYzoKc6Euidy2tCsRKpfhJPocH/s1600/hand1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style=""><img border="0" height="200" width="205" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiOA9yEG_HtClyv-Vqd8Ywhq2QMlCYf58rTPUKo2nFHtmijakMXef5c-cNsCue4zQ-8E0KPfCb6oI01hgTHE0O-JVAiMLjCr8W6uAT-m8l70kuYzoKc6Euidy2tCsRKpfhJPocH/s320/hand1.jpg" /></a></div>Give us this day our daily earned bread<br />
And forgive us our debts <br />
As we forgive those in debt to us.<br />
Amen.Julia Bolton Hollowayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17815712145337889572noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37658672.post-51249080719478347462011-07-14T04:03:00.000-07:002011-07-14T08:54:24.443-07:00AN APPEAL FOR A FAMILY<br />
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If we raise a small amount of funding we can place windows in a house. If we do better we can even buy a new house with water, electricity, rubbish removal. This for a family of now 40 persons living in a condemned house rented to them by the municipality of Constantsa in Romania. Three and a half years ago their electricity was cut off. The two room house lacks windows. Many of the adults and children are ill with TB and leukaemia. I know this family well. The head of the family, Lupascu Copalea is skilled at many things and also morally straight, teaching these concepts to his children. But he has become ill with TB. Their thirteen children (Roma marry young and are faithful) have been unable to find work in post-Communist Romania. So they send some of them here to Florence to beg for the survival of them all.<br />
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In our 'English' Cemetery in Florence is the tomb of Thomas Southwood Smith, a medical doctor, head of a fever hospital in London in the nineteenth century who worked with Lord Ashley against the employment of children in mines and factories. Leigh Hunt's epitaph on his tombstone reads: 'Ages shall honour in their hearts enshrined, Thee, Southwood Smith, Physician of Mankind, Bringer of Air, Light, Health, Into the Home of the Happier Poor of Years to Come'. His granddaughter was Octavia Hill, of slum clearance fame. It was by his tomb's imposing obelisk that we held 'Alphabet School' the summer Lupascu Copalea was with us.<br />
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We say 'gypsies steal babies, they are dirty, they steal'. Yesterday (and not for the first time either), I had to persuade the police and social assistance not to take the new-born baby away from the mother, one of the 40 in this family, but to allow the two shelter together, a roof over their head. Her crime? Since the bulldozing of their camp at Osmannoro, this family sleeps in the piazza of the Santissima Annunziata, in the street. A mother with a new-born baby sleeping in the street through no fault of her own is considered to be criminal toward her child. Then, the same day, I was persuading her sister-in-law to have her baby born with medical care in a hospital. Hoping so much that Social Assistance will place these two Roma mothers with their new-born babies, the first a boy, the second to be a girl, under the same sheltering roof while they wait for the birth certificates, needed for getting the travel documents for returning home. <br />
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Denied a roof, water, rubbish removal, forced to live in shacks, then these bulldozed by the police, and next being forced to live in the streets, these people maintain strict personal hygiene, rules brought from India a thousand years ago. In my experience they do not steal. I have given the two sisters-in-law each a hundred euro which they are sending home for their other children's food as they were starving. Diamante now has three small children, Daniela has three and another to be born within two weeks and another who had died. They were frantic with worry, not for themselves but for all their children. They thanked me, kissed me, with dignity and joy.<br />
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If you feel moved to help these 40 persons of all ages there is a PayPal button on the websites, <a href="http://www.florin.ms/pp.html">http://www.florin.ms/pp.html</a>, <a href="http://www.umilta.net/pp.html">http://www.umilta.net/pp.html</a>Julia Bolton Hollowayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17815712145337889572noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37658672.post-78048327269574970322011-06-05T21:47:00.000-07:002011-07-14T02:03:57.857-07:00OLIVE LEAVES FOR TRAUMA HEALING<br />
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It was a wonderful occasion, a gathering of my old convent school. Greatly daring, I bought the tickets for flying from Florence to Gatwick, arriving at St Leonards-on-Sea, to the television cameras zooming in on Joanna Lumley's arrival, for she too is an Old Girl of our school, why our English is so 'posh', so 'Queen's English'. I was coming back, the professed veiled hermit, too, of our Community of the Holy Family, the most learned community once in the Church of England, whose nuns at Profession were required to have New Testament Greek and encouraged to have Old Testament Hebrew, and who tutored the Lambeth Diploma. I became their librarian, book-binder, floor scrubber and dish washer for four years, caring for my dying teachers, Mother Gwendolyn, Sisters Joan and Eileen, and having visited Sister Barbara. My own learning had come from them, from tall, kind, brilliant Sister Veronica, who knew Greek and Hebrew, and who had taught me at six years old in the midst of flying bombs. I took that schooling to America at sixteen, gaining a doctorate in medieval literature at Berkeley, teaching there and at Princeton, coming to Florence during the summers to study manuscripts in the Laurentian Library and elsewhere.<br />
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Our Mother Foundress, <a href="http://www.umilta.net/agnes.html">Agnes Mason, C.H.F.</a>, dreamed of founding the Community of the Holy Family while sitting in an olive tree above Florence, a setting to which I had come fleeing from trauma in the Community. So I brought copies of Mother Agnes' prayer for the teachers of her Community, and also her motto, taken from the Epistle to the Hebrews, 'Let us be borne along by the Spirit', 'Pherometha'. I also brought blessed olive leaves, and many Old Girls thanked me for them though I did not explain they were for trauma healing. This is not needed. Though healing is. Then I visited the little graveyard with its simple iron crosses, each with a Sister's name, remembering the time I had fled, sobbing, to lie beside Mother Agnes' grave, then to find myself actually between hers and that of Sister Faith, whose death I remembered as a school girl, Sister Faith herself an Old Girl of the school, who became its nurse and who rebelled against the corruption that began with Mother Mildred, Mother Agnes' successor. It was as if the arms of both of them enfolded me, telling me that all would be well.<br />
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Sussex is so very beautiful. The next day I went to Hasting's Quaker Meeting and Harry Underhill then showed me the lovely view from his house, all healing and such kindness everwhere, particularly from Ember Wilcock and Daphne Hughes.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEis9XJxeSBfymhfb92qGeOa3bfLi-ZqbhW5fgESvNrXJnym8KFPdC-c1h9dqtTX5pUhuhefVLAA0dN6lIetRirlxjGdAKQ1HuLkjejyPRCP1je845mBCf4J5j_BbWtCi9Kncn33/s1600/agneschf1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style=""><img border="0" height="109" width="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEis9XJxeSBfymhfb92qGeOa3bfLi-ZqbhW5fgESvNrXJnym8KFPdC-c1h9dqtTX5pUhuhefVLAA0dN6lIetRirlxjGdAKQ1HuLkjejyPRCP1je845mBCf4J5j_BbWtCi9Kncn33/s320/agneschf1.jpg" /></a></div>Julia Bolton Hollowayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17815712145337889572noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37658672.post-18909346216917212642010-10-30T11:45:00.000-07:002010-10-30T12:45:21.744-07:00SANTA UMILTA, SAINT JULIAN<br />
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<img src="http://www.umilta.net/umilta.JPG" height="400" width="400"/><br />
Saint Umilta has come to town. She's in a glass coffin, like Sleeping Beauty, in her nun's garb, her crozier as Abbess. She rests in state at the church of San Michele e San Salvi, before going on to Faenza. Then returning to her sleepy convent in Bagni a Ripoli in the Tuscan countryside. I named our website for her, <a href="http://www.umilta.net">http://www.umilta.net</a> on 'Julian of Norwich, Her <i>Showing of Love</i> and Its Contexts'.<br />
Like myself, Santa Umilta was married with children, then became a nun, then fled from her convent dedicated to St Perpetua in Faenza because they teased her - she was illiterate - but could preach magnificent sermons from pretend-reading in refectory, then became an anchoress. Unlike me, she then founded an order, the Vallombrosan nuns, physically building her new convent in Florence with the aid of a donkey carrying the stones for it in panniers, raising a child from the dead, and being revered by all. Her nuns carefully preserved her sermons. She lived here in the time of Dante, dying in 1310. Above her tomb in marble porphyry hung Lorenzetti's panels of her life and miracles, and beside it, Orcagna's sculpture. Then the Medici bulldozed her convent to build their military fortress against the Florentines and her nuns fled with the tomb, the painting and the statue to San Michele in San Salvi. Then later to Bagni a Ripoli with just her body, the paintings being sold off to the Uffizi and Berlin, the statue remaining at San Salvi.<br />
<img src="http://www.umilta.net/jul1.jpg" height="150" width="100"/><br />
At least we have Julian's Church, rebuilt after its bombing, though we have no portraits of her from her time, no statues from the Middle Ages, just her marvellous manuscripts, treasured and preserved by generations of Catholic nuns, Brigittines, Benedictines, copying her out in exile, under persecution and censorship in her own land. Read H.F.M Prescott's <i>Man on a Donkey</i>.<br />
<img src="http://www.umilta.net/UMILTA05.jpg" height="400" width="350"/><br />
They are both women who dared to do theology. And such magnificent theology. Lorenzetti's panel of Umilta in her anchorhold where she heals a Vallombrosan monk perfectly fits Julian. And Julian's century.<br />
For the rest of the Lorenzetti panels and Umilta's complete story, see <a href="http://www.umilta.net/umilta.html">http://www.umilta.net/umilta.html</a>. For Julian <a href="http://www.umilta.net/julian.html">http://www.umilta.net/julian.html</a>Julia Bolton Hollowayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17815712145337889572noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37658672.post-18791987004809164062010-10-24T21:03:00.000-07:002011-08-07T07:50:26.831-07:00LEARNING TO WRITE, LEARNING TO READ<br />
<img src="http://www.umilta.net/treebook.gif" height="100" width="100"/><br />
Explosion! A sixteen-year-old who could not even write his name is now joying in copying the Latin on the plaques in the Santissima Annunziata, the English on the plaques in the Swiss-owned so-called 'English' Cemetery. Our Alphabetization School works! He read out to me the other day a poster on 'Santa Umilta'. I was in tears for she is the saint for whom I have named my Umilta website. Illiterate, she dictated marvellous sermons of most profound theology to her nuns. Yesterday he was reading Elizabeth Barrett Browning's stanza on Lily Cottrell. EBB, in <i>Aurora Leigh</i>, has a gypsy heroine, Marian Erle, teach herself to read and write out of books thrown away in the rubbish.<br />
<img src="http://www.umilta.net/treebook.gif" height="100" width="100"/><br />
Mihai is from Romania, a Roma, a gypsy, his family too poor for them to afford his schooling, who beg in the streets, their miserable shacks in Osmannoro bulldozed by the police, and who are forced to sleep at night in the open in the streets in groups of no more than three.<br />
<img src="http://www.umilta.net/treebook.gif" height="100" width="100"/><br />
They come each Sunday after Mass, sitting under the great column and cross at the centre of the Cemetery, learning their letters and how to write their names, teaching each other in Romani, the letters being the Romanian ones, having painted laptop blackboards for white chalk out of left-over library shelving. They get sandwiches of blessed bread and ground chicken livers and apples and water and used clothing. Sometimes as many as twelve of them, all ages, both genders. It's so easy to do and yet no church, no government seems to see this is a need for beggars in the street to rise up out of their poverty. It costs so little. It can achieve so much.<br />
<img src="http://www.umilta.net/treebook.gif" height="100" width="100"/><br />
We are using the ideas of Lancaster, Montessori, Piaget, Freire and Don Lorenzo Milani. They work! When I ask them which language they are happiest in they say Romani. It is from Sanskrit, from India, it is their language, in the home, in the family. Excellent linguists, we find classes being in a mixture of Romani, Romanian, Italian and English. And now Latin, too! With laughter and with self-worth.<br />
<img src="http://www.umilta.net/treebook.gif" height="100" width="100"/>Julia Bolton Hollowayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17815712145337889572noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37658672.post-31328483778100641412010-10-21T12:22:00.000-07:002010-10-27T12:12:07.580-07:00UMILTA WEBSITE || OLIVELEAF WEBSITE || JULIAN OF NORWICH, TEXT AND CONTEXTS || BIRGITTA OF SWEDEN, REVELATIONES, WEBSITE || CATALOGUE AND PORTFOLIO (HANDCRAFTS, BOOKS ) || BOOK REVIEWS || BIBLIOGRAPHY || FLORIN WEBSITE ©1997-2010 JULIA BOLTON HOLLOWAY<br />
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HOLY, SANTO, SANCTUS, KADOSH<br />
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For images see <a href="http://www.umilta.net/earth.html">http://www.umilta.net/earth.html<br />
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My generation finds it hard explaining to the next our joy at discovering the beauty of our earth seen from space. We had thought it would be large, ugly, wrinkled, brown; not this delicacy of Della Robbia blue and white, this delightful fragile blue marble, with all the wonder that there is in the body of a living, breathing baby held in our arms; the marvel of holding a hazel nut , an olive leaf, the Consecrated Host, in the palm of our hand; sharing God's delight in Creation.<br />
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Christ met the Samaritan woman outdoors, at Jacob's Well. She asked if she should worship God in the Jews' Temple. He replied that God is here, where we are, in our midst, in this world. Later, seeing a widow giving all she had, the few poor coins, amidst the great stones, stumbling blocks, the great scandal, like millstones about their necks, lying all about them for building that Temple, he said the Herodian Temple would be thrown down, not one stone standing on another, but that he would raise it in three days. He spoke of his risen body.<br />
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In Australia a nun said to me that the Aborigine are worthless, they built no cities. Moved by the Spirit, I replied 'But Cain, the first murderer, was the first city builder, Abel instead a pilgrim, who built none'. European culture with its cities transposed, York, a Viking village in Sweden, becoming the new name of formerly Roman Eboracum, the city of York in England, becoming the megalopolis of New York in the United States, is a culture of emigration, of conquest, of displacement, of trauma. But the Native Peoples left almost no trace, no scar, upon the face of the blue marble, living harmoniously with it. <br />
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The Aborigine Elders , discussing Christian theology and studying the Bible to do so in its original languages, observed that the pattern of Joshua, conquering the Promised Land with violence, trauma, bloodshed, is incorrect; while that of Melchisadek and Abraham, the one, the indigenous Priest King with the Blessing of Bread and Wine, the other, the outsider, celebrating together the Eucharist, from Canaan through Israel to all Christendom, is the Blessing of the Earth, its fruitfulness together with the labour of our human hands, in thankfulness to God's Creation, God's gift, sharing this in turn with each other, is the Peaceable Kingdom of Heaven.<br />
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Counterclockwise: white ochre for spiritual protection from Australia, blessed olive leaves from Montebeni, one small wild English hazel nut, one large Australian hazel nut, clapper stick, one of two, made by Annette Zerberis in Melbourne, Australia, of two women working at the mill, carved from oak. Compare with the Hopi Message for Humanity.<br />
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In the umilta website, created itself in prayer, is much prayer. Here we can find the Shema , here we can find the Lord's Prayer , here we can find the Beatitudes , here we can find Consecration of the Eucharist , here we can find St Francis' Lauds of God . The Shema would be said both indoors and out, and itself placed on the limen, the doorpost of the house, the house become Temple of God, the place where God is loved with all one's being. The Lord's Prayer and the Beatitudes are said on mountains around the lake of Galilee, outdoors, in the presence of blue water. The Eucharist is said in an Upper Room in a widow's home, and following it Christ and the Disciples walk to the Mount of Olives, to Gethsemani, singing and praying beneath the stars. When Fra Angelico paints the Betrayal in that Garden he carefully shows the branches of his own Tuscan olive trees. St Francis prays his Lauds of God outdoors on Mont Averna in Umbria. And I go walking about the Italian countryside amongst the olive trees, in starlight and sunlight, singing St Patrick's Lorica , which is a Christian Shema. In binding upon ourselves the sacred name of God we become ourselves part of the holiness of all.<br />
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Sussex font with Celtic/Scandinavian interlace used for embroidery on a chasuble.<br />
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We need the Rosary, the Angelus. The Rosary with images from Fra Angelico and Della Robbia, filling prayer with humanity, with beauty. The Angelus, perhaps, though this is now impossible, with the sound of my convent's chapel bell I rang three times each day, the three, the three, the three, then the nine, the Sybil prophesying Christ in nine books, Dante's Beatrice as a Nine, Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh in nine books, my pulling the rope twice, the momentum giving the third, at six, at noon, at eight. And remembering once in Advent that I had been then as was the Virgin , in the ninth month with Child. Indeed this Website includes the two series of prayers that would have been known to Julian of Norwich, the Great O Antiphons of Advent, and the XV O's of the Crucifixion, upon which she structures her web of the Showing of Love . Binding our lives together with God into holiness.<br />
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Kenyan Alice Waithera's Rosary<br />
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In Kenya now there is famine. Think of our prayer. The Lord's Prayer, the Beatitude, the Consecration at the Eucharist, all about hunger and about bread, the staff of life, our hunger for God. A Latin American Grace we can say at our meals:<br />
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God, to those who have hunger, give bread<br />
and to us who have bread, give the hunger for justice. <br />
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Fioretta Mazzei reminds us:<br />
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Trova ad avere pazienza: anche per un pezzo di pane<br />
ci vuole un anno di lavoro e molte mani che collaborano.<br />
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Be patient: Even for a piece of bread<br />
a year of work and many hands are needed.<br />
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In the Eucharist the priest and the people together bless the bread and wine, the fruit of the earth and of the vine and the work of human hands. Words said by Canaanites, Jews, Christians, the Royal Priesthood . Blessed be God forever! <br />
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The greatest Sacraments are the simplest, not needing Temples or Cathedrals of cut stone or marble, but water from a river, bread from wheat in fields, wine from vines, oil from olive trees, the gifts of God for the People of God. It was with water from the Jordan John baptised Jesus. It was with wine and oil the Samaritan tended to the Traveller's wounds. It was with oil the Sinning Woman anointed Christ the Christ, he saying what she had done would be the Gospel to the ends of the earth forever. It was with water Christ washed his Disciples' feet in humility, copying her, and then blessed, like Melchisadek, the bread and the wine, next prayed amidst the olives that night. Divinity become Humanity. Ben-Adam. One of us.<br />
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Della Robbia, Christ in Prayer<br />
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The Della Robbia family took the simplest material, earth, clay, terra cotta, the stuff from which bricks and tiles are made, from which God made Adam and Eve, Everyman and Everywoman, Adam in Hebrew meaning also men and women, earth and red, Christ's naming himself so as 'Son of Man', 'Ben-Adam'. Then they added to it glazes from sand of blue and white and green, creating, before we knew it, the colours of our delicate blue marble. Prayer is to take our clay, our mortal, finite flesh and bone and blood, and make it not only of earth, but also of heaven's eternity, to change its carnal red to priestly blue. The colour of the High Priest Aaron's robes in the Temple; the colour of Mary's robes in humble Nazareth. <br />
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Jesus' first prayer taught him by his Mother, said each night, 'Into thy hands [yadikah] , O Lord, King of the Universe, I commend my Spirit [ruah]'. He says it on the Cross. God breathes his spirit [ruah] upon the waters in Genesis, his spirit is upon Christ at his Baptism, it is upon us at Pentecost in Jerusalem. The image of the hand in Judaism signifies God who has made us with his.<br />
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Julian speaks of seeing in the palm of her hand something the size of a hazel nut and is told by God, 'It is all that is made'. And that because God despises nothing that he has made he loves and protects and saves it and us.<br />
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Quakers and Amish eschew churches as steeple houses, the stuff of pride. Often we meet in homes, or we build and use the simplest Meeting Houses. My children and I became Members of the Society of Friends. There is no hierarchy. Though one can be on the Overseers' Bench (this would correspond to 'Episcopus', 'bishop' which means 'looking about one'). And one can be an Elder (this would correspond to 'Presbyter', from which comes the word, 'priest'). Women and men have been in equality since the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers)' founding in the Seventeenth Century through to this our present Twenty-First Century. Likewise children were recognized as equal with adults from the start when their parents were goaled for religious dissent and the children, though flogged, continued the silent Meetings in Worship.<br />
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It was once in Meeting for Worship, where we speak only when the Spirit moves us, I found myself on my feet speaking of the sacredness of matter. That we have been wrongly taught by the Platonists to despise matter. Rather we should consider it sacred, to be altered and distorted as little as possible. It is God's heritage to us and to our children's children. For this reason we should not split atoms for quick energy, instant gratification, leaving nuclear radiation about for future generations' harm. For this reason we should walk through God's landscape, rather than burn fuel in internal combustion machines. For this reason we should be like indigenous peoples, leaving the least scarring, the least trauma, to the earth. For matter is energy, that Trinity moment, that Upanishad moment, Openheimer and I have experienced, in which God as Light is unlawfully unleashed upon our Universe.<br />
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Best to let matter unwind into energy, as Buckminster Fuller said, like the log gradually becoming instead firelight, both light and warmth, as slowly, rather than as rapidly, as possible. It is a gift, which like bread and wine and water and oil, needs to be blessed for right use and cherished as a sacred, not a profane, thing. Alcoholics come not to bless but curse the wine they drink. Energholics find it hard to breathe. Yet life is breath and Spirit, our ruah brooding upon the waters at Creation in Genesis, the first prayer Mary teaching Jesus, being the prayer he says on the cross in her presence, 'Into thy hands, yadika , O Lord, I commend my spirit, ruah'. Light and air about our cosmos need to be kept clean and free from the poison we indulge in. There is no quick fix. Best is conservation. My first son wrote his Senior Thesis at his Quaker School on St Francis . My second son named his teepee, 'Gentle Strength'. My third son had a t-shirt worn into holes and tatters from Quaker Annual Gathering, that said ' Every Person is a Holy Place '.<br />
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Hildegard of Bingen, in the Twelfth Century, said all of this and the manuscript of her final text, here in Lucca, shows it:<br />
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Hildegard shows imbalance causing disease and death, prophesying the polluting and poisoning of the earth's ecology, but also fruitful labour and right sharing of the earth's resources for all.<br />
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We are human. Before Christ a freed African slave, who wrote the purest Latin, in a play had one character proclaim, 'Homo sum: humani nichil a me alienum puto', 'I am human; therefore I consider nothing of humanity alien to me'. Montaigne painted that line from Terence's play on his study ceiling. John Donne wrote it in English as 'No man is an island'. We live on this blue marble in a delicate symbiosis, the one with the other, breathing the same air, sharing the same earth, joying in the energy of sunlight. The earth is sacred, is God's truest Temple, as Christ said to the Samaritan woman. Our bodies, too, are sacred, and are Temples of the Spirit, Paul his Apostle, tells us. Our bodies, minds, souls, are as delicate a balance as is earth, air and energy. Neither the earth nor ourselves should be wounded. Nor should we wound the earth or another. There should be no trauma , no abuse, no crucifixion, no scapegoat, no holocaust .<br />
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And where there has been harm it is our task to heal. Why we give blessed olive leaves worldwide as Godfriends' ministry,for healing and for consecration,of ourselves through each others', in our shared love of God and neighbour ~ ~ ~ . In this Della Robbia of simple glazed clay we see a Jewish/Florentine maiden as mother hold up to us her small child who blesses you.<br />
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Della Robbia, Madonna and Child<br />
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UMILTA WEBSITE || OLIVELEAF WEBSITE || JULIAN OF NORWICH, TEXT AND CONTEXTS || BIRGITTA OF SWEDEN, REVELATIONES, WEBSITE || CATALOGUE AND PORTFOLIO (HANDCRAFTS, BOOKS ) || BOOK REVIEWS || BIBLIOGRAPHY || FLORIN WEBSITE ©1997-2010 JULIA BOLTON HOLLOWAY<br />
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Blessed Olive Branch, Kenyan olive-<br />
wood bowl, William Morris PrintJulia Bolton Hollowayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17815712145337889572noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37658672.post-67949466608059124532010-10-17T06:23:00.000-07:002010-10-17T06:51:30.563-07:00BUDRUS, PALESTINE<br />
There's a film about non-violent passive resistance in a Palestinian village, Budrus, that offers hope in Israel.<br />
<a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-11555031">http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-11555031</a><br />
<a href="http://www.justvision.org/budrus">http://www.justvision.org/budrus</a><br />
<img src="http://www.umilta.net/hand1.jpg" height="100" width="100"/><br />
I have seen the Palestinian people. Who are poor. Who have been UN Refugees in camps since WWII. Who were displaced from their land, from their homes, walled up into enclaves, now the most densely populated area in the world, systematically shut off from water, food and medicine, their wells destroyed, their homes bombed, now even their UN schools bombed. These are the people who still live the pages of the Bible, with olive trees, camels, donkeys. Many are Christian. Some are Samaritan. It was amongst them, the Syro-Phoenicians, that our writing began.<br />
<img src="http://www.umilta.net/treebook.gif" height="100" width="100"/><br />
I have seen the Israelis. Who have all western technology at their fingertips. Who once came to that land as cattle-herding nomads from Iraq. And who then returned to Palestine/Israel in atonement for genocide practiced against them. Who could return because they had learned from the Phoenicians their writing and had written their history of their conquest of this land, a book, the Bible, shared and known world-wide. Yet the State of Israel is atheist. It has been given back its land because of suffering genocide. It may lose its right to that land if it, in turn, practices genocide. It is destroying that land with cars, roads, buildings, military hardware, a globalized non-identity that mars its pages of the Bible.<br />
<img src="http://www.umilta.net/hand1.jpg" height="100" width="100"/><br />
In a family where a child is acting out psychiatrists know the family etiology lies elsewhere. Oppressed peoples act out against their oppressors a theatre of the violence they themselves endure. They are then labeled 'Terrorists'. But they are mirroring back to the States the violence, the injustice, practiced against them. Gandhi, starving, was telling England she was starving India, economically and politically. Irish prisoners fasting were telling England she starved Ireland. Suicide bombers are telling States that their violence is annihilating the individual and collective right to life. An anorexic daughter is attempting to liberate herself from parental oppression by the only means left to her. An 'acting out' child is saying something is going terribly wrong in his home.<br />
<img src="http://www.umilta.net/treebook.gif" height="100" width="100"/><br />
When Abraham came to semitic Palestine he was greeted by its priest-king Melchisadec with the gifts of bread and wine, gifts produced by the labour of human hands working in harmony with the earth. Australian Aborigines taught me this story in the context of their desire to coexist with the Whites in Australia, to share their expertise of living with their land and its harshness, rather than rob its life-giving aquifers of water pressure.<br />
<img src="http://www.umilta.net/hand1.jpg" height="100" width="100"/><br />
When I see the poverty of the Roma in Italy and learn of the bulldozing of their poor shelters made of materials no one else wants, this being justified because people must not live that way, I remember the Palestinians' homes bulldozed by the Israelis, I remember the homes of the Blacks in South Africa bulldozed by the Whites, I remember the housing of Blacks in San Francisco bulldozed by the Whites, always those with power against those without power with no alternative provision made for housing or work that can raise their standard of living. I saw in Israel a camp in the desert, a concentration camp, within it Black Jews, families in poverty baking in the hot sun surrounded by barbed wire. I have seen in America the poverty and despair of Native Americans on the reservations. A war waged with high technology against the poor in the face of violence is terrorism. There are mourners at funerals on both sides. <br />
<img src="http://www.umilta.net/treebook.gif" height="100" width="100"/><br />
Instead, let there be weddings. Without bombings. My friend, Karen Graffeo, has a splendid project. She, Christian, makes chuppas for Jewish weddings, where the Moslem Roma, refugees from former Yugoslavia in Italy, embroider the names in gold thread on white silk of the Jewish ancestors. <a href="http://www.umilta.net/chuppa.html">http://www.umilta.net/chuppa.html</a><br />
<img src="http://www.umilta.net/hand1.jpg" height="100" width="100"/><br />
The solutions lie here. In the sharing of bread and wine. In the planting of olive trees. In the open access to wells and to land. And to good schools of learning where the book of Isaiah is read.<br />
<img src="http://www.umilta.net/treebook.gif" height="100" width="100"/><br />
Blessings and olive leaves of healing against violence,<br />
Julia Bolton Holloway<br />
Florence<br />
ItalyJulia Bolton Hollowayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17815712145337889572noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37658672.post-34911980194260384072010-10-15T01:06:00.000-07:002010-10-15T22:12:02.477-07:00MARTIN BUBER, <i>ECSTATIC CONFESSIONS</i><br />
<br />
It's a book I deeply love. Where Buber, as a young man, gathered together writings from Hassidism, from the Sufi, from the Friends of God. Many women among the men. Among them Julian of Norwich.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Ecstratic-Confessions-Mysticism-Martin-Library/sim/081560422X/2">http://www.amazon.com/Ecstatic-Confessions-Mysticism-Martin-Library/sim/081560422X/2</a><br />
<br />
<img src="http://www.umilta.net/koran.jpg" height="170" width="250"/><br />
<br />
And another,<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Rainbow-Spirit-Theology-Australian-Aboriginal/dp/1920691804">http://www.amazon.com/Rainbow-Spirit-Theology-Australian-Aboriginal/dp/1920691804</a><br />
<br />
<i>Rainbow Spirit Theology</i> in which Aborigine Elders in Australia make sense of the white man's Christianity through advocating the model of Melchisadek to Abraham, the indigenous person sharing his culture with the invading nomad.<br />
<br />
<img src="http://www.umilta.net/koran.jpg" height="170" width="250"/>Julia Bolton Hollowayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17815712145337889572noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37658672.post-62031867372405622842010-09-11T01:25:00.000-07:002010-10-15T22:00:50.019-07:00THE KORAN<br />
<br />
<img src="http://www.umilta.net/koran.jpg" height="170" width="250"/><br />
Trans N.J Dawood. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1956, 1994. Pp. 53-55.<br />
<br />
Remember the words of Imran’s wife [Anne]. ‘Lord’, she said, ‘I dedicate to Your service that which is in my womb. Accept it from me. You alone hear all and know all’.<br />
And when she was delivered of the child, she said, ‘Lord, I have given birth to a daughter’. God well knew of what she was delivered: the male is not like the female. ‘and have called her Mary. Protect her and all her descendants from Satan, the Accursed One.’<br />
Her Lord graciously accepted her. He made her grow a goodly child and entrusted her to the care of Zacharias.<br />
Whenever Zacharias visited her in the Shrine he found that she had food with her, ‘Mary’, he said, ‘where is this food from?’<br />
‘It is from God,’ she answered. ‘God gives without stint to whom He will’.<br />
Thereupon Zacharias prayed to his Lord, saying: ‘Lord, grant me upright descendants. You hear all prayers’.<br />
And as he stood praying at the Shrine, the angels called out to him, saying ‘God bids you rejoice in the birth of John, who shall confirm the Word of God. He shall be princely and chaste, a prophet and a righteous man.’<br />
‘Lord,’ said Zacharias, ‘how shall I have a son when I am now overtaken by old age and my wife is barren?’<br />
‘Such is the will of God’, He replied. ‘He does what He pleases’.<br />
‘Lord’, he said, ‘vouchsafe me a sign’.<br />
‘For three days and three nights,’ He replied, ‘you shall not speak to any man except by signs. Remember your Lord always, give glory to Him evening and morning’.<br />
And remember the angels’ words to Mary. They said ‘God has chosen you. He has made you pure and exalted you above womankind. Mary, be obedient to your Lord; bow down and worship with the worshippers.’<br />
This is an account of a divine secret. We reveal it to you. You were not present when they cast lots to see which of them should have charge of Mary, nor where you present when they argued about her.<br />
The angels said to Mary: ‘God bids you rejoice in a word from Him. His name is the Messiah, Jesus the son of Mary. He shall be noble in this world and in the hereafter, and shall be one of those who are favoured.<br />
He shall preach to men in his cradle and in the prime of manhood, and shall lead a righteous life’.<br />
‘Lord’, she said, ‘how can I bear a child when no man has touched me?’<br />
He replied: ‘Even thus. God creates whom He will. When he decrees a thing He need only say: ‘Be,’ and it is. He will instruct him in the Scriptures and in wisdom, in the Torah and in the Gospel, and send him forth as an apostle to the Israelites. He will say: ‘I bring you a sign from your Lord. From clay I will make for you the likeness of a bird. I shall breathe into it and, by God’s leave, it shall become a living bird. By God’s leave I shall heal the blind man and the leper, and raise the dead to life. I shall tell you what to eat and what to store up in your houses. Surely that will be a sign for you, if you are true believers. I come to confirm the Torah which preceded me and to make lawful to some of the things you are forbidden. I bring you a sign from your Lord: therefore fear God and obey me. God is my Lord and your Lord: therefore serve Him. That is a straight path.’<br />
<br />
<img src="http://www.umilta.net/koran.jpg" height="170" width="250"/><br />
<br />
P. 118<br />
If the People of the Book accept the true faith and keep from evil, We will pardon their sins and admit them to the garden of delight. If they observe the Torah and the Gospel and what is revealed in them from their Lord, they shall enjoy abundance from above and from beneath.<br />
. . .<br />
Say, 'People of the Book, you will attain nothing until you observe the Torah and the Gospel and that which is revealed to you from your Lord'.<br />
. . .<br />
Believers, Jews and Christians - whoever believes in God and the Last Day and does what is right - shall have nothing to fear or to regret.<br />
<br />
<img src="http://www.umilta.net/koran.jpg" height="170" width="250"/>Julia Bolton Hollowayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17815712145337889572noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37658672.post-29282316651519384112010-08-06T08:52:00.001-07:002010-08-06T09:11:56.704-07:00AN OPEN LETTER TO WYCLEF JEAN<br />
<br />
<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.ringofgold.eu/romwave.gif"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 205px; height: 136px;" src="http://www.ringofgold.eu/romwave.gif" border="0" alt="" /></a><br />
<br />
HAITI AND ROMANIA: SLAVERY AND FREEDOM<br />
<br />
<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.florin.ms/slaveshackle.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 205px; height: 136px;" src="http://www.florin.ms/slaveshackle.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a><br />
<br />
<br />
Haiti and Romania seem far apart yet are not. One is black, the other white. But in Romania, as in Haiti, much of the population were enslaved, in Romania these being the Roma, the 'gypsies' who had come from India a thousand years ago with their ancestral skills. The duration of enslavement of the Roma to nobles and monasteries was from the Middle Ages until the nineteenth century when Uncle Tom's Cabin was translated into Romanian. In both countries the slaves, even when freed, were denied decent housing, work with dignity, education. The two far-apart countries run a very close parallel to each other.<br />
<br />
<http://www.ringofgold.eu/Shatram.jpg><br />
<img alt="" src="http://www.ringofgold.eu/Shatram.jpg" style="height: 310px; width: 380px;" /><br />
<br />
These are suggestions for Wyclef Jean, learned from the Roma of Romania begging in the streets of Florence.<br />
<br />
I. The most important unit is the family.<br />
<br />
II. Be sure that each family can have land to build on and on which to grow food.<br />
<br />
III. Immediately import tents, wood house kits, and other earthquake-proof building materials not available within the country for Haitian families. Create work building these as well as Buckminster Fuller domes for schools and hospitals.<br />
.<br />
IV. Make sure that each family can conserve water with drainpipes and cisterns.<br />
<br />
V. China now fabricates inexpensive solar kits that can run a light and recharge telephones and even a small laptop. Give each family independence from centralized power.<br />
<br />
VI. Pay the older more infirm members of families who do know how to read and write to teach all those who do not.<br />
<br />
VII. Have the families create their textbooks, publishing these on the Web with their drawings that can be downloaded for use. Have these textbooks share information on how to build houses, how to conserve water, how to grow food, how to prevent illness. Have teaching be in their dialect paired with globally dominant languages using colour-coded bilingual/multilingual texts. See <a href="http://www.ringofgold.eu/Romany.html">http://www.ringofgold.eu/Romany.html</a>, <a href="http://www.ringofgold.eu/roofs.html">http://www.ringofgold.eu/roofs.html</a>, <a href="http://www.ringofgold.eu/panourisolare.html">http://www.ringofgold.eu/panourisolare.html</a>, <a href="http://www.ringofgold.eu/doctorvisit.html">http://www.ringofgold.eu/doctorvisit.html</a><br />
<br />
VIII. In the midst of the earthquake, despite their poverty, Haitians were beautifully dressed. Encourage local dressmakers to produce clothing in cottage industries so they can care, at the same time, for the children, rather than working in factories, 50% being for fellow Haitians, 50% for export.<br />
<br />
I & II are true for Haiti and the Roma.<br />
<br />
III, IV, V, VI, VIII are needful for Haiti and for the Roma.<br />
<br />
Always combine work and study. Education, especially of women, is the cheapest and best investment a nation can make towards its development and well-being. At the same time the education in the home of building, farming, sewing and other skills needs equal respect and is of equal value to the formal education acquired in schools.<br />
<br />
<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.ringofgold.eu/romwave.gif"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 205px; height: 136px;" src="http://www.ringofgold.eu/romwave.gif" border="0" alt="" /></a><br />
<br />
<br />
Our project for the Roma in Romania, submitted to the 'Decade of Roma Inclusion' of the Open Society Institute in Budapest, is called 'Home Building, Home Schooling,' and is suggested as the foundation for obtaining work in the European Union of which the Romanian Roma are citizens. It uses the concepts of Pestalozzi, Montessori, Fanon, Freire and Milani. Switzerland was a poor country which became rich through educating its citizens.Julia Bolton Hollowayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17815712145337889572noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37658672.post-10449481096788950452009-01-07T23:17:00.000-08:002009-01-09T07:09:10.685-08:00STOP<br /><img src="http://www.umilta.net/hand1.jpg" height="100" width="100"/><br />I cannot bear war. I love the Jewish people. I do not love the State of Israel. It is morally bankrupting itself. <br /><img src="http://www.umilta.net/treebook.gif" height="100" width="100"/><br />I have visited Israel. <br /><img src="http://www.umilta.net/hand1.jpg" height="100" width="100"/><br />I have seen the Palestinian people. Who are poor. Who have been UN Refugees in camps since WWII. Who were displaced from their land, from their homes, walled up into enclaves, now the most densely populated area in the world, systematically shut off from water, food and medicine, their wells destroyed, their homes bombed, now even their UN schools bombed. These are the people who still live the pages of the Bible, with olive trees, camels, donkeys. Many are Christian. Some are Samaritan. It was amongst them, the Syro-Phoenicians, that our writing began.<br /><img src="http://www.umilta.net/treebook.gif" height="100" width="100"/><br />I have seen the Israelis. Who have all western technology at their fingertips. Who once came to that land as cattle-herding nomads from Iraq. And who then returned to Palestine/Israel in atonement for genocide practiced against them. Who could return because they had learned from the Phoenicians their writing and had written their history of their conquest of this land, a book, the Bible, shared and known world-wide. Yet the State of Israel is atheist. It has been given back its land because of suffering genocide. It may lose its right to that land if it, in turn, practices genocide. It is destroying that land with cars, roads, buildings, military hardware, a globalized non-identity that mars its pages of the Bible.<br /><img src="http://www.umilta.net/hand1.jpg" height="100" width="100"/><br />In a family where a child is acting out psychiatrists know the family etiology lies elsewhere. Oppressed peoples act out against their oppressors a theatre of the violence they themselves endure. They are then labeled 'Terrorists'. But they are mirroring back to the States the violence, the injustice, practiced against them. Gandhi, starving, was telling England she was starving India, economically and politically. Irish prisoners fasting were telling England she starved Ireland. Suicide bombers are telling States that their violence is annihilating the individual and collective right to life. An anorexic daughter is attempting to liberate herself from parental oppression by the only means left to her. An 'acting out' child is saying something is going terribly wrong in his home.<br /><img src="http://www.umilta.net/treebook.gif" height="100" width="100"/><br />When Abraham came to semitic Palestine he was greeted by its priest-king Melchisadec with the gifts of bread and wine, gifts produced by the labour of human hands working in harmony with the earth. Australian Aborigines taught me this story in the context of their desire to coexist with the Whites in Australia, to share their expertise of living with their land and its harshness, rather than rob its life-giving aquifers of water pressure.<br /><img src="http://www.umilta.net/hand1.jpg" height="100" width="100"/><br />When I see the poverty of the Roma in Italy and learn of the bulldozing of their poor shelters made of materials no one else wants, this being justified because people must not live that way, I remember the Palestinians' homes bulldozed by the Israelis, I remember the homes of the Blacks in South Africa bulldozed by the Whites, I remember the housing of Blacks in San Francisco bulldozed by the Whites, always those with power against those without power with no alternative provision made for housing or work that can raise their standard of living. I saw in Israel a camp in the desert, a concentration camp, within it Black Jews, families in poverty baking in the hot sun surrounded by barbed wire. I have seen in America the poverty and despair of Native Americans on the reservations. A war waged with high technology against the poor in the face of violence is terrorism. There are mourners at funerals on both sides. <br /><img src="http://www.umilta.net/treebook.gif" height="100" width="100"/><br />Instead, let there be weddings. Without bombings. My friend, Karen Graffeo, has a splendid project. She, Christian, makes chuppas for Jewish weddings, where the Moslem Roma, refugees from former Yugoslavia in Italy, embroider the names in gold thread on white silk of the Jewish ancestors. <a href="http://www.umilta.net/chuppa.html">http://www.umilta.net/chuppa.html</a><br /><img src="http://www.umilta.net/hand1.jpg" height="100" width="100"/><br />The solutions lie here. In the sharing of bread and wine. In the planting of olive trees. In the open access to wells and to land. And to good schools of learning where the book of Isaiah is read.<br /><img src="http://www.umilta.net/treebook.gif" height="100" width="100"/><br />Blessings and olive leaves of healing against violence,<br />Julia Bolton Holloway<br />Florence<br />ItalyJulia Bolton Hollowayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17815712145337889572noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37658672.post-45255102167454394482008-10-25T05:03:00.000-07:002008-10-25T06:52:57.877-07:00WHOLE BOOKS, WHOLESOME BOOKS:<br />MORE 'FROM GRAVES TO CRADLES'<br /><br />Books are Books of the Dead, are Books of Life. We have joyously been working in this 'English' Cemetery with a Roma family with their writing of a book in four languages. You can read it on-line at <a href="http://www.umilta.net/Romany.html">http://www.umilta.net/Romany.html</a>. And with their building their cradle for their coming child while also conserving all the beautiful iron work in this 'English' Cemetery.<br /> <br />Daniel Dumitrescu and Vandana Culea making their cradle for their baby who will be called Gabriela.<br /><br /><img src="http://www.umilta.net/DSCN3413.JPG" height="170" width="250"/><br /><br /><img src="http://www.umilta.net/DSCN3408.JPG" height="170" width="250"/><br /><br /><img src="http://www.umilta.net/dscn3405.jpg" height="170" width="250"/><br /><br />And this is the new cradle:<br /><br /><img src="http://www.umilta.net/cradle6.jpg" height="170" width="100"/><br /><br />Then I went to Romania, where I found they lived twelve to one room next to the horse's stall. They are now building their house in a flower-filled meadow I also saw when there.<br /><br />Today they have sent pictures of Gabriela as she now is <br /><br /><img src="http://www.umilta.net/gabriela5.jpg" height="100" width="150"/><br /><br />and of the house-building. <br /><br /><img src="http://www.umilta.net/casarom.jpg" height="170" width="250"/><br /><br />Only its roof is lacking. Can we help with this most essential part by paying Daniel to do further restoration in the Cemetery? Pray that this be allowed.<br /><br /><img src="http://www.umilta.net/nonnarom1.jpg" height="170" width="250"/><br /><br />Look at the courage of the grandmother. How empowering she is. <br /><br />Two of Christopher Alexander's beautiful volumes, <span style="font-style:italic;">The Nature of Order: An Essay on the Art of Building and the Nature of the Universe</span>, have been lent to me. He is saying much the same. that the hut on water in the Mekong Delta of a poor family has more beauty and utility than has a cold modern architect's fantasy. Look him up on the web. I like his story, teaching at Berkeley he has retired to Sussex; it's rather like mine.<br /><br />Our library is the Mediatheca 'Fioretta Mazzei'. I think you will see why when you read her little book: <a href="http://www.umilta.net/bluegreen.html">http://www.umilta.net/bluegreen.html</a><br /><br />Fai attenzione alle persone e alla natura:<br />E` molto più importante che leggere un libro.<br /><br /><img src="http://www.umilta.net/treebook.gif" height="130" width="130"/><br /><br />Paying attention to people and nature<br />Is far more important than reading a book. <br /><br />Creating a book from beginning to end. That is what I have always done. And now more than ever. All my many published books have been researched, written, typeset and many of them even hand-bound by myself. I think it is important teaching even very small children the art of the book. I used to bring wooden blocks and show children how the letters came out backward/forwards when they were inked and pressed on paper. Then let them do paintings and collages and tell me their stories which I typed up so they could place them with their drawings. These three and four-year olds, knowing their own stories, then could read them to their mothers and fathers! I used to so want such programs for the Head Start schools. Which instead said: 'No, we can't do that. We must keep these children away from books. They must first learn socializing skills. So deprived they are'. Not understanding their very teachers were enforcing deprivation and illiteracy. All you need for a young girl to become a writer, a scholar, is a library she can explore. She doesn't need schooling apart from that.<br />Think of Christine de Pizan, of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, of Mary Somerville. Mary, with no university education, only six months of schooling in an iron cage to straighten her back, discovered two planets, wrote scientific books that were used as text books at the University of Cambridge, and taught Ada Lovelace mathematics, who then with Charles Babbage invented the computer, she suggesting to him using the Jacquard loom cards with holes punched in them and the binomial theorem.<br /><br />We have a friend born in the Mugello, where Giotto was born. He comes many Sundays and recites Dante's Cantos, many by heart, while we record him, our Roma families often listening, too, while looking at Botticelli's drawings for the poem. He is better than Robert Benigni! Most recently, our American scholars at the conference on the City and the Book V found his performance the most moving of their stay in Florence. You can find him at <a href="http://www.florin.ms">http://www.florin.ms</a>. and the conference Proceedings at <a href="http://www.florin.ms/CBV.html">http://www.florin.ms/CBV.html</a><br /><br />Now that lovely design on Gabriela's cradle. It comes from the house in the midst of a garden in Rome of the Cardinal Bessarione. I fell in love with it when I first saw it, at 21, with my first baby, Robin, in my arms. I sketched it then in situ, and many times afterwards from memory, when that lovely house was shut up and abandoned. A Paradise to which I always yearned to return. The Cardinal at the 1439 Council of Florence reconciled Greece and Rome, the Orthodox with the Catholic, though for so brief a while, bringing so many Greek classics into the Latin West. Why I paint the design on the cradles of Roma babies, whose ancestors had already reached Romania by that date and become themselves such devout Orthodox Christians, though never accepted by either Church, indeed being the slaves of Romanian monasteries from the Middle Ages to the nineteenth century. The design is everything William Morris and Christopher Alexander espouse, the use of natural forms, here the pomegranate of poets, of natural colour, of spheres, not harsh man-made, machine-made boxes.<br /><br /><img src="http://www.umilta.net/bessarion.jpg" height="200" width="200"/> <br /><br />There are wrong books and right books. Wrong books are for power and against people, David Ricardo and Milton Friedman's laissez-faire economics that caused Ireland's genocide and our present disasters, Machiavelli's <span style="font-style:italic;">Prince</span> and Dean Swift's <span style="font-style:italic;">Modest Proposal</span>, written sarcastically but taken straight, leading again to corporate greed and the Irish genocide of the Potato Famine. Behind these the figures of the Medici. Before them and again under Savonarola Florence was a Republic where Christ was King and where beauty reigned, skilled crafts being prized and the entry into government by the people, of the people, for the people, of great creative energy. Recall those early rooms in the Uffizi filled with saints and gold leaf, not the later ones filled with the Medici, bitumen backgrounds, pornography. About self, not the whole; about greed, not the charity of the Misericordia, the Ospedale degli Innocenti, the Buon'uomini di San Martino; about power, not prosperity; about lust, not love.<br /><br />There are right books. Most of the Bible, certainly Isaiah, the Gospels. The Egyptian Book of the Dead describing how married couples shall have a garden they will tend and reap if they have been kind to their slaves and done no ill, but individuals who have been for themselves, who have murdered or stolen or worse. shall be devoured by a monster. The Koran where it speaks of Mary's Annunciation and of how good Jews obeying the Torah, good Christians obeying the Gospels, good Moslems obeying the Koran, shall be saved. And Julian of Norwich's <span style="font-style:italic;">Showing of Love</span>.<br /><br />My Bibles. Their covers had broken off from their much travelling. I took them to my book-binding <span style="font-style:italic;">maestro</span>, Enrico Giannini, whose family have been binding books for five generations, and who has taught me and my Roma families how to marble paper, how to bind books. Together we discussed how best to save them and all the genealogical notes I had written on the end-papers, my family in Ireland, my family in England, my family in Portugal, my husband's slave-owning family in America. I told Enrico the story of how my sandals had become too old, too odorous, in Dallas. How I went to a shoe store and was so ashamed that the salesman was Black and knelt before me placing new sandals on my feet. And I apologized, explaining I hated changing old shoes for new, the old so comfortable but far too smelly. And he agreed. It's just like that with his Bibles, he said. When he completely knows his way around them their covers are falling off and he must buy new ones. Leather-covered Bibles, leather sandals, Christ's feet. And now Enrico has telephoned and they are ready. So I cycle across the beautiful Ponte Santa Trinita and come to his workshop and they are splendid. I have the money to pay for the work. No, he says. But what he would like are two packets of Irish moss for marbling paper. The Carageen moss coming to me in packets, because in Ireland it is for human consumption, for breakfast, and not expensive, and these packets always arriving exactly when they are needed from a great Irish scholar in Cork, Maire Herbert. Who had come to the first and second City and Book conferences in Florence we organized, giving marvellous papers at them.<br /><br />Medieval monasteries, obeying Benedict's Rule, knew that for physical, mental and spiritual health a balance was needed, of work, study, prayer, the use of the body, the mind and the soul. Our modern education, forgetting this, now has the young rebelling with the ugliest graffiti even on the beautiful convent where St Therese of Lisieux stayed as a young child in Florence. Perhaps because there is no healthful recreation. We recall the beauty of her sister's photography, the play-acting they did of Therese as Joan of Arc, and the loveliness of her theology written by one so young. This is what our library is about in this cemetery, a place where we weed and garden with Roma families, build with them cradles for their babies, share with them Dante and Botticelli, and where photographs of them are honoured on its walls and they are welcomed. In seven years they have stolen nothing. The dry walling has been repaired, saving the cemetery, the beautiful cast and wrought iron conserved, the garden planted and weeded, and soon -- we hope -- the tombs cleaned. The first family came to us with the mother, who is illiterate, singing this as her lullaby to her baby and which I recorded seven years ago: http://www.umilta.net/alleluiawhole.mp3 [cut and paste this in the URL line to listen, then reduce that page and return to this one). And now over seven years our Aureo Anello Association has made possible first the buying of a house for this family, the re-building of a flood-destroyed house for another family, the rebuilding of a roof of a third family headed by a widow and the sending of her 18-year old adopted son who was first in his class the one year he had had in school to study in a six month program for his diploma, and now the building of this house by our fourth family, these extended families living in one room, around twelve people each. We have done this through listening to the women begging in Florence's streets, learning their greatest need is the roof over their family in Romania to be intact, and next the education of their children. A cemetery restored. Fifty Romanian Roma of all ages - many lacking schooling - helped to become European Citizens. Done through a library in a cemetery. 'From Graves to Cradles'. Of which we have now built ten. Nine of them with babies in them. The tenth for our library. Flouting Heloise and Abelard!<br /><br />Blessings,<br /><br />Julia Bolton Holloway<br />Hermit of the Holy Family<br /><br /><br />President Aureo Anello Association Mediatheca 'Fioretta Mazzei' and Friends of the 'English' Cemetery<br />P.le Donatello, 38<br />50132 FIRENZE<br />ITALY<br /><br /><br /><br />We are now at 1498 signatures on the web at <a href="http://www.thepetitionsite.com/takeaction/471134975">http://www.thepetitionsite.com/takeaction/471134975</a>,<br />'That the Swiss-owned, so-called 'English' Cemetery in Florence be kept open, be restored and be declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site', and with 4190 signatures in-house from our visitors, for a total of 5688 signatures. We have decided to keep them coming. <br /><br />If you wish to donate to the Aureo Anello Association for the restoration of the 'English' Cemetery you can do so by a cheque made out to 'Aureo Anello' and posted to 'English' Cemetery, Piazzale Donatello 38, 50132 Florence, Italy; or through the Pay Pal 'Donate' button below, which can also be used for the CDs, for the hand-bound limited edition books or for the sculptures of Elizabeth and Robert's <a href="http://www.florin.ms/claspedhands.html">'Clasped Hands'</a> or tondos with their portraits (Amalia Ciardi Duprè's sculpture can also be found at <a href="http://www.florin.ms/amaliadupre.html">http://www.florin.ms/amaliadupre.html</a>), or some or all of these.<br /><br /><form action="https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr" method="post"><br /><input type="hidden" name="cmd" value="_xclick"><br /><input type="hidden" name="business" value="juliananchoress@gmail.com"><br /><input type="hidden" name="no_note" value="1"><br /><input type="hidden" name="currency_code" value="EUR"><br /><input type="hidden" name="tax" value="0"><br /><input type="hidden" name="bn" value="PP-DonationsBF"><br /><input type="image" src="https://www.paypal.com/en_US/i/btn/x-click-but04.gif" border="0" name="submit"><br /><input name="lc" value="US" type="hidden"></form><br /><br /><a href="http://www.significantcemeteries.net/"><img src="http://www.florin.ms/ASCE_logo_piccolo.jpg" height="100" width="220"/></a>Julia Bolton Hollowayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17815712145337889572noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37658672.post-15945906091241542872008-08-05T03:59:00.000-07:002008-10-25T06:51:09.503-07:00OLIVELEAF WEBSITE || UMILTA WEBSITE || OLIVELEAF WEBSITE || JULIAN OF NORWICH, TEXT AND CONTEXTS, WEBSITE || BIRGITTA OF SWEDEN, REVELATIONES, WEBSITE || CATALOGUE AND PORTFOLIO (HANDCRAFTS, BOOKS ) || BOOK REVIEWS || BIBLIOGRAPHY || FLORIN WEBSITE ©1997-2008 JULIA BOLTON HOLLOWAY<br /><br />AN APPEAL TO ITALY'S CONSCIENCE<br /><br />We are in the grips of control by 'shock'. For which see Naomi Klein: http://books.guardian.co.uk/video/2007/sep/07/naomiklein.<br /><br />We are returning to the partnered tactics of Hitler and Mussolini. The use of a scapegoat.<br /><br />I speak for the Human - and the European - Rights of the Roma. And in particular for the European Rights of the Roma from Romania.<br /><br />The Roma from Romania are Christian, Romanian Orthodox. They were the slaves of the monasteries from the Middle Ages to the nineteenth century.<br /><br />For seven years, 2001-2008, I have worked with families of Romanian Roma who attend the Mass for the Poor established by Giorgio La Pira, the saintly Mayor of Florence, and continued by his saintly friend Fioretta Mazzei in the Badia of Florence. I visited these families I have come to know and love in Romania at the end of July 2008. I met there also with Gruia Bumbu, President, and his Roma associates, of the Romanian Government's National Agency for the Roma in Bucharest. They spoke of the need for housing, education, medical care for their people.<br /><br />I believe our fear of the Roma, and especially of those of Romania, is because we have not understood their culture. And that we are afraid that their poverty might be our own future.<br /><br />The Roma are matriarchal, based on the family. They have no country, no army. Their criminality is the same as for other groups, but they are at the margins of society, their children starving. They are not allowed an official address. A baracca they build in an open field outside the city limits of Florence from scrap no one else wants and which costs nothing is bulldozed over and over again. It does not count as an official address. Without an official address they are not allowed to work. Without work, though they are European Citizens, they are considered criminal. To survive, they can only beg. Or worse, steal.<br /><br />The Romanian Roma leave their children with their grandparents while trying to seek work in Italy. From which they are blocked and forced into the undesired begging. But I have found that the women tell of what they most need, roofs over their houses that are not leaking letting in the snow and rain, education for their children, medical care, and that they then organize their families into work groups, men and women together, their sons and their daughters, their husbands, their in-laws, even their friends and acquaintances. And that they work together admirably as families. Our laws do not allow this.<br /><br />The Romanian Roma have saved the Swiss-owned so-called 'English' Cemetery in Florence. First by rebuilding the dry walls that had collapsed in the rains of 1966. They built these walls expertly, the women holding their babies sitting at the iron railing, telling their husbands and brothers where to place the stones, the men first cleaning out the earth, then throwing and catching the stones and putting them in place, in two hours building many metres of wall expertly. That was seven years ago and I next was told it was illegal for them to work to finish the job and had to send them away. In return for it though I bought that family a house in Romania. Since their work no tomb has slid downhill. Then, last year, a young Roma woman organized her mother, her brothers, her sister, her sister-in-law into restoring the garden the Cemetery had once had. Everything had been put to weed killer for many years and the Cemetery was grey and ugly and dead. We forbade the weed-killer. They weeded, planted bulbs, separated irisis and the Cemetery became again the dream landscape it had been. This year Vandana returned with her husband, asking that he work in the Cemetery. They are both 23. She became pregnant with their third child. They were living in a baracca they had built outside of Florence. They had already bought land in Romania on which they hope to build their house. They came every day at 8:00 a.m., even on May 1st when they walked for four hours to be here on time and returned to their baracca on my bicycle, there being no bus service that holiday. Later, Vandana was taken by the Carabinieri in their car and threatened with expulsion if she did not leave their baracca. That night she lost her waters and Daniel had to call the ambulance. Their baby Gabriela was born after a week, premature by two months, weighing 1 kilo 200 grammes. We took them in under our roof, denounced them to the police as living with us as required by Italian law. With that legal address (they already had their 'codice fiscale' numbers) we were able to write a work contract for Daniel and pay his contributions to the state. Daniel in these two months, waking at dawn each day, conserved the iron, brass and copper of 87 tombs in the English Cemetery. The difference is tremendous and appreciated by all, by experts in restoration, by international visitors, by our neighbours. I hired Daniel as my domestic, but he worked as a volunteer member of our Aureo Anello Association through the writing, together with Vandana, of a book he also illustrated, a vocabulary, a dictionary, in four languages, Romany, Romanian, Italian and English: http://www.umilta.net/Romany.html, and in return we donated to them the funds for them to build their house on their land in Romania. In Romania, if the Roma have a registered decent house and a diploma they can legally work, not otherwise.<br /><br />Both Romanian Roma families who stayed under our roof were the cleanest house guests we have ever had, conscientious, courteous, with dignity, and grateful. They observe strict ancestral hygienic precepts (which go back beyond their arrival in Europe in the Middle Ages, for they are from north India and are Aryan, their Romany language Indo-European), seeing us as unclean. In seven years nothing has ever been stolen by them from us. We give them and other Roma families used clothing and share meals. We invite them to our library. We build wooden rocking cradles together: http://www.umilta.net/cradle.html. We have taught parents who cannot read or write to write their names to get their baby back from the hospital where it was born, instead of being placed for adoption by an Italian family. (I quoted in this case to the judge Roman Polanski's statement that it was worse to be an orphan than to be poor). When I have visited Muslim Roma families in Poderaccio I have observed the same cleanliness, the same courtesy. Outside there is rubbish. But, inside, the houses are spotless and beautiful. Often I have seen the only piece of furniture is the ancestral wooden rocking cradle, with colourful carpets and hangings, the family sleeping and sitting on the floor, after taking their shoes off on entering. The carpets are constantly washed.<br /><br />It is crucial in dealings with the Roma to centre on the women, on the family, remembering they are a matriarchy. At the same time taking away from the men that despair that commonly drives oppressed males in minorities to selfish anodynes like cigarettes and drink (Native Americans, Blacks, Aborigine, Irish, etc.). The Roma want to work. But are forbidden by law to have work unless they have a legal address and sufficient literacy. The Roma marry very young in arranged marriages and are faithful to their spouses. That faithfulness is enforced by internal tribunals among their people. I have seen excellent, loving marriages among them and the joint caring for their babies who never cry, being always held and nursed, rocked in their cradles and swaddled, therefore beginning their lives with a sense of great security and of being loved. Our first Roma mother's ninna nana, her lullaby to her baby, was 'Alleluia'. I recorded it and it was played during the RAI 1 2008 Easter Sunday broadcast on hermits as background to the Mass for the Poor at the Florentine Badia this mother attended. Our own children no longer receive that child-rearing. We can learn from them and they can teach us.<br /><br />In the midst of Daniel's work in our 'English' Cemetery I visited the Roma families that we know in Florence in Romania. I discovered that Vandana and Daniel sleep with other members of their family in one small room, twelve people all told, children and grown ups together next to a stall with a horse in it. This is why this couple works so hard here to build their own house there for their three daughters. Another family is headed by a widow with her four children, one adopted, their three spouses, and her four grandchildren, their house having a leaking roof with holes in it. We are helping them repair their roof and the adopted eighteen-year-old is studying in a six-month programme for his diploma. He had been first in his class the one year he had in school, his family being too poor to continue his schooling. The family that restored the dry walls seven years ago is now prosperous from having earned the house to replace their baracca where twelve had been sleeping. Schooling is said by the government to be free but the parents are billed for heating, books, and must buy clothing which they cannot afford. Medical care must be paid for after 18 by those who do not have work, particularly the grandparents caring for grandchildren. Relatives visiting hospitals must pay to enter. Water even from a tap a distance down the road is billed highly, failure to pay carrying a prison sentence. The families go hungry and lack clothing. I saw our family cook in a pot on an open fire outdoors their lunch of just potatoes. We have found that when we pay money it is immediately sent back to Romania to feed the children. I found in these families that despite their great poverty they generously adopt orphaned Roma babies or unwanted Romanian babies.<br /><br />My first Romanian Roma mother, who is illiterate, one day told the story of 'Cristos who was so poor he was born in a baracca with the animals, the horses. And the people were hungry so he gave them bread and fish and potatoes. And then the envious killed him'. I came to understood her telling more truly when I saw the animals' rooms beside the humans' room and the cooking of a pot of potatoes over an open fire outdoors in Romania. Families cannot afford to send their daughters to school when everyone is hungry. They can barely send the boys and for a few years only, not to the level of the diploma which is needed for work.<br /><br />We suggest to our families that they work together in solidarity, helping each other rebuild their roofs. When they help each other in Romania we are more willing to reward them with seasonal work in Florence. We suggest these families come together as a building and learning association, the families together thus strengthening each family within it. The name in Romany for the Association, 'Agrustic Somnacuni', is the same as ours, 'Golden Ring', 'Aureo Anello'. This is a part of our project to be submitted to the European Union called 'From Graves to Cradles'.<br /><br />The answer to the problem of the poverty of the Roma is to permit them a legal address so they can have legal work. Italian Roma, Romanian Roma all should have this right to exist. The Romanian Roma only ask for seasonal work here in Italy, for labour-intensive work Italians no longer want. Then the poverty, the begging, the stealing, and our fear of them would be alleviated. The Romanian Roma want to return to their own most beautiful country. Its agriculture is splendid, the land fertile, no petroleum fertilizers or pesticides being used. They are skilled workers in metal, agriculture, gardening, dry-walling, carpentry, sewing and their poverty has them be resourceful and not wasteful. They are the florists in the streets of Bucharest. They make the farm tools of wood and iron used by the Romanians. They often work for Romanians and then often are not paid. They are intelligent and love beauty. Victims of the Holocaust, they received no reparations. The least we can do in reparation is allow them and their families to survive. They are not nomads. They are not dirty. They are no more criminal than are others. They are under greater provocation to resort to illegal behaviour because they are illegally treated as being outside the laws of the land. Instead, they are most truly Citizens of Europe, gifted in its many languages as well as their own. They are not rubbish. They are a great treasure we are rubbishing.Julia Bolton Hollowayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17815712145337889572noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37658672.post-54591425070005889242008-07-28T08:43:00.000-07:002008-10-24T11:41:40.910-07:00ROMANIA AND FLORENCE<br /><br />Dearworthiest Godfriends,<br />Wednesday I flew to Bucharest, Karen Graffeo, my American photographer friend, meeting me at the airport. Bucharest is most beautiful with Roma florists everywhere. <br />Thursday we went together to Buzau meeting her friend Stefan who is Romanian and who came with us to visit our two Roma families, Hedera's and Vandana's. Hedera with our help has become a rich gypsy. But it was lovely seeing Leonardo and Robert. I had baptised eight-day old Leonardo because it was the only way his mother could shelter her baby with us in a cemetery in the midst of a tremendous storm, when the police had thrown them out of an abandoned warehouse. The women in her family are so beautiful, colourful pleated skirts, gay scarves, long black braids.<br />Then Vandana's family all living together in one small room, many children, many grown-ups, the horse stall next door with a fine white horse, their cooking potatoes in a pot on the ground over a wood fire, Maria's baby, like Vandana's Gabriela, born prematurely, both of them from their mothers being menaced by the police in Florence, Maria being forced to return to Buzau, a bus journey of two days, and her oldest child in hospital in Bucharest, her mother just out of hospital in Buzau.<br />Friday morning we saw Gruia Bumbu, President of the National Agency for Roma in the Romanian government, and his two assistants, all of them Roma. They loved the book Vandana and Daniel had created, which you can find when my website is on-line again at <a href="http://www.umilta.net/Romany.html">http://www.umilta.net/Romany.html</a> and would like them to create another on hygiene and medical care, a vocabulary with drawings for these needed terms and concepts in Romany and Romanian. And they have invited Karen to exhibit her photographs of the Roma with theirs in Bucharest 2 August. <br />Friday afternoon we visited Romanian Stefan's family and saw the houses he was building for them. He would like to work with our Roma families as he is a builder and has the right documents that could make this possible. He, too, came from great poverty. Everywhere we went were long carts heaped with hay, farmers sitting or lying on top, drawn by beautiful horses, great scythes and rakes made by the Roma. Then Stefan took us to the village in a valley of nine churches and many houses where a married Orthodox priest has brought together children, who were to have been aborted, who were abandoned on the streets of Bucharest, who live in houses with the villagers. The church was beautiful. Father Nicolae Tanase had built it at night, paying the fine each day, as building a church was not allowed under the Communists, the children painting fine frescoes of saints and prophets on all its walls. We struggled to get back to Bucharest in time before the Metro closed down. But Father insisted we stay to dinner - in silence - delicious - with his children. On the train, as it was too late for the Metro, a young couple offered us a ride to where we were staying.<br />The next morning was by train to Rimnicu Sarat to see Costanza's family and their house with leaking roofs, her four baby grandchildren and her adopted son Cristi, whose schooling we had paid for for getting his diploma. Cristi had only one year in school and had to leave because of their poverty but had been head of his class and won a prize. Now he is so happy to be studying. They had started rebuilding the roof with the money we gave them but ran out of materials, so instead Costanza had painted its walls the most joyous colours.<br />From the train so much beauty, great fields with many strips of crops using no fertilizer because the soil is so rich, nor pesticides because they were not uni-cropping, but instead multi-cropping, all fringed by mountains. It was like Italy in the sixties, simplicity and beauty all together.<br />Then on to Buzau again to spend more time with Vandana's family, Karen taking photographs of everything everywhere, especially all the children and adults in that one small dark room. We went to see Maria's newborn baby in its incubator in the hospital - and we couldn't get in until we had paid to enter the hospital! Poor Romanians have to keep paying for everything. Then we went to see Vandana's land. Which is beautiful, wild flowers growing everywhere, and a horse in the field. Daniel's plan for it will surround it with fruit trees.<br />Everywhere I examined roofs and roofing material, in Father's village, in Bucharest, from the trains. And saw that the best were all made with sheets of shining long-lasting zinc brought from Sweden. We dreamed of our families forming a building association and having Rotary, for instance, buy a container of zinc roofing so its price would remain stable while the economy changed and using this in their Roma projects with Romanian Stefan to rebuild leaking roofs.<br />And now I have come home to little Gabriela sleeping in the cradle we have made, Vandana caring for her and Daniel finishing the work of restoring the cast and wrought iron in the Cemetery. With the money they earn they shall build their house, bringing all three of their children under its roof. They are just 23 years old. Cristi being 18. None of this would have been possible without Assunta's caring, her victories over Italian bureaucracy, her generosity. And to top it all off Guthrun Asmundsdottir arrived with a generous sum given by the Sisters of Mother Teresa in Iceland for this family. Guthrun is the actress who had come to the lecture I gave on Dante in the year 2000 on Iceland, and a most faithful Godfriend ever since. And she came with her family. So now we plot how to acquire enough powdered milk for premature babies and a system for the boiling of water for these two little ones, also cloth diapers. <br />The choices these families face is whether to eat or to roof their houses against leaks or to send their children to school or pay for life-saving surgery or medical care. So we are together writing the proposal to the European Union for a project called 'From Graves to Cradles', where these families seasonally come here and restore the 'English' Cemetery and form there a building association for repairing roofs and home-schooling their children and legally entering the Romanian labour market as well as the Italian one through having the required address and decent housing. Vandana in her long and full and graceful skirt and her long black braids has just now taken her little Gabriela out into the Cemetery to watch Daniel at work. Thus we build Paradise.<br />A thousand blessings,<br />JuliaJulia Bolton Hollowayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17815712145337889572noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37658672.post-69057765111074491082008-06-07T23:23:00.001-07:002008-07-28T11:35:28.110-07:00ROSES AND LAVENDER<br /><br />It is a splendid June morning after thunderstorms yesterday, perfect for weeding the cemetery, the dandelions and stinging nettles coming out with their roots intact from the damp earth so easily and filling our wheelbarrow to the brim, blackbirds singing their hearts out, swallows darting about the sky. Daniel, Rom from Romania, is treating the beautiful but long-neglected nineteenth-century wrought iron work, scraping off its rust, then two coats of anti-rust and two coats of enamel. Assunta is still weeding. I have harvested much lavender to join our drying rose petals for pot pourri. Vandana has sewn the bags for these. Soon it will be the hour for the Mass for the Poor at the Badia.<br />Vandana and their prematurely-born Gabriela are still at Careggi, Gabriela's vbirth weight, 1 kilo 200 grams. A long story. We have made them legal. They never were illegal, being European citizens but have been harassed by the police, why Vandana went into premature labour. Collectively our dream is that Daniel earn the money for building their house on land they already have in Romania. It has a well nearby. They build their houses by making blocks of earth and cement. Roofing materials are difficult to obtain and gypsy roofs are in ill-repair because of lack of materials or money for these. If a gypsy house is not up to standard a Rom is forbidden legal work in Romania. The same in Italy. If a Rom does not have an address which is not a shack (built by himself from thrown-away scrap at the end of a bus line in an open field, costing nothing to others) he is forbidden to work. If he has no work in Italy he risks imprisonment. If he has no work in Romania his family starve, his children cannot go to school, they cannot afford medical care. Why they came here, begging, now no longer allowed. So they are starving also in Italy.<br />Last night we finished the book Daniel and Vandana are writing, a Vocabulary in four languages, Romany, Romanian, Italian and English, with Daniel's wonderful drawings, a splendid introduction to gypsy life. <a href="http://www.umilta.net/Romany.html">http://www.umilta.net/Romany.html</a>. Then, talking about his drawing of a sheep that we were scanning we spoke of Cimabue discovering Giotto drawing a sheep, so Daniel plunged into a book of Giotto's paintings, next an illuminated Dante, <span style="font-style:italic;">Commedia</span>. This is my dream for this Mediatheca 'Fioretta Mazzei' as we now call our library, that it is open to all, finding the poorest can work at the deepest level in it. <br />Plus we have been building cradles: <a href="http://www.umilta.net/cradle.html">http://www.umilta.net/cradle.html</a>. Now we have done 10! The first seven already are in use with babies in them in Romania and in England. We will keep one in the library, the other two being for Vandana and her sister Maria, both pregnant at the same time, Maria's baby not yet born. <br /><br />Daniel Dumitrescu and Vandana Culea making their cradle for their baby<br /><br /><img src="http://www.umilta.net/DSCN3413.JPG" height="170" width="250"/><br /><br /><img src="http://www.umilta.net/DSCN3408.JPG" height="170" width="250"/><br /><br /><img src="http://www.umilta.net/dscn3405.jpg" height="170" width="250"/><br /><br />And this is the new cradle:<br /><br /><img src="http://www.umilta.net/cradle6.jpg" height="170" width="100"/><br /><br />Blessings,<br />Julia<br />Hermit of the Holy FamilyJulia Bolton Hollowayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17815712145337889572noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37658672.post-74560566600071831412007-09-28T04:35:00.000-07:002007-09-28T05:10:03.145-07:00honour corruption villainy holiness<br />riding in fragrance of sunlight (side by side<br />all in a singing wonder of blossoming yes<br />riding) to him who died that death should be dead<br /><br />humblest and proudest eaderly wandering<br />(equally all alive in miraculous day)<br />merrily moving through sweet forgiveness of spring<br />(over the under the gift of the sky<br /><br />knight and ploughman pardoner wife and nun<br />merchant frere clerk somnour miller and reve<br />and geoffrey and all) come up from the never of when<br />come into the now of forever come riding alive<br /><br />down while crylessly drifting through vast most<br />nothing's own nothing children go of dust<br /> e.e.cummings<br /><br />It's a splendid poem on Chaucer's <span style="font-style:italic;">Canterbury Tales</span>. I came across it again when being asked how I taught Chaucer. For it had shaped my Chaucer courses during those many years of teaching, at Berkeley, Quincy, Princeton, Boulder. For books are Ezekiel's bones, libraries being that great valley, into which life can be breathed by reading.<br /><br />But there is also that wisdom of 'honour corruption villainy holiness' riding together in sunlight and shadow. A medieval poem had it 'Fas et nefas ambulans'.<br /><br />Our gypsies! We love them dearly. And they confessed they lied. Their mother did not need the operation. Their house in Buzau is large. Their children are in school. Vandana was not deported but went home. The two, Maria and Vandana, worked to have money to buy land and build their own houses. They had worked so well we told them we would have paid them for the truth. It has put us in a compromising situation. For we had protested to the Assessor for Immigration in Florence about the 'deportation'. We had spoken with the Romanian Government about the school fees and the medical care. We had gone to Foundations to get help for new roofs and for education. So we had 'corruption' and 'villainy' mixed together with 'honour' and 'holiness'.<br /><br />We've decided we will still try to put together the proposal for the European Union, putting this experience into the category of 'formation', of both our guests and ourselves their hosts. I must go to Buzau to see what is needed and write that into the proposal. We keep remembering their great courtesy, intelligence, energy. Eating together at table was enchanting. They are much better behaved than Italians, Assunta saying there was never a spot on the tablecloth. They gardened and carpentered and sewed so well, doing what you needed done before you spoke, continuing long after you asked them to stop and had paid them, and always saying 'Thank you'. And even their confessing is in their favour. And the lie was a white one. But now I am making retribution to all who were generous. And apologising to those whom I innocently misled. It reminds me of Chaucer's Franklin's Tale!<br /><br />Bless you,<br /><br />He drew a circle that shut me out-- <br /> Heretic, a rebel, a thing to flout. <br />But Love and I had the wit to win: <br /> We drew a circle that took him in! <br />Edwin Markham<br /><br />Julia Bolton Holloway, Hermit of the Holy Family<br />Biblioteca e Bottega Fioretta Mazzei, 'English Cemetery'<br />Piazzale Donatello, 38, 50132 FIRENZE, ITALY<br /><a href="mailto:juliana@tin.it">juliana@tin.it</a> <a href="http://www.umilta.net">http://www.umilta.net</a> <a href="http://www.florin.ms">http://www.florin.ms</a><br /><a href="http://piazzakedonatello.blogspot.com">http://piazzaledonatello.blogspot.com</a><br /><a href="http://monatessa.blogspot.com">http://monatessa.blogspot.com</a>Julia Bolton Hollowayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17815712145337889572noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37658672.post-86102436666323312007-08-13T20:08:00.000-07:002007-09-18T23:28:40.328-07:00EMBRACING THE SHADOW<br /><br />On Sunday I was recording Carlo Poli's readings from <a href="http://www.florin.ms/polipurg2.mp3">Dante</a>'s <span style="font-style:italic;">Commedia</span>. You can hear these readings at <a href="http://www.florin.ms">http://www.florin.ms</a>. We were discussing the scenes in Dante where he seeks to embrace friends - who are now shades - and how his arms meet only themselves. I, for ever the teacher, mentioned that these scenes are borrowed from Virgil and from Homer, where heroes embrace dead fathers. With us were also three Rroma (gypsies), two sisters and a husband, listening to Dante in Italian, two being unable to read, but all three looking at Botticelli's drawings of the <span style="font-style:italic;">Commedia</span>. In a library in Florence we were experiencing Dante, himself now only a shade, but who comes alive in pages of books, just as do our dead poets, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Walter Savage Landor, buried in this 'English' Cemetery, come alive again as we read and record their poetry (again, <a href="http://www.florin.ms">http://www.florin.ms</a>). Elizabeth Barrett Browning creates her second heroine, Marian Erle, who mirrors herself with her spaniel hair, in <span style="font-style:italic;">Aurora Leigh</span>, a self-taught gypsy.<br /><br /><img src="http://www.florin.ms/italianflag.gif" height="100" width="150" /><br /><br />Have been doing much thinking - and our library much collecting - on this theme of rejecting or of embracing the shadow. We avoid, hate and dread what we do not know. Particularly poverty. And that very behaviour creates ever more poverty, and then even genocide against it. It takes racist forms. It is behaviour that creates slavery. It is murderously unjust.<br /><br />In recent days visitors to our library or books sent to it have also echoed this theme and its embracing of shadows to find them friends and almost fathers. I recorded a Brazilian Indian reading Elizabeth Barrett Browning's second Sonnet from the Portuguese. Then a Maori chief from New Zealand, blind and deaf, recorded his genealogy and recited a Maori poet on 'Rain', while the rain poured down on Florence. You can hear them on the <a href="http://piazzaledonatello.blogspot.com">Piazzale Donatello</a> blog. Then an Australian sent a study on the discrimination against the Aborigine. And I remembered the book given me by Aborigine in Melbourne, where they had studied theology, including the Bible in its original languages, and decided that what was needed was the acknowledging of the act of Melchisadek, the indigenous priest king of an agricultural Palestinian people, giving bread and wine to the nomadic, cattle herding Abraham, come from Iraq to invade his land. Melchisadek embraced Abraham. Hebrew lay families embraced that ritual, the mother at the Sabbath blessing the candles, the father the bread and wine. Jesus adopted it for the Eucharist where all are One. <br /><br />We are now writing a proposal to the European Union in this year, which is celebrating multiculturalism, where our cemetery and its library shape two simultaneous projects. The first where we reach out to the Italians in diaspora, in Australia, in Canada, in Argentina, in America, where they are forced into 'English Only', and also to others, to give them Dante. Whose name means gift. Observing that in America Jewish and Chinese immigrants study their own language and culture on weekends, attending American schools on weekdays, and thus have two languages and are consequently more intelligent, quickly rising into the professional classes as doctors, lawyers and university professors. While Italian and other Catholic immigrant groups, forbidden their own language, their own culture, largely remain as pizza cooks. If <a href="http://www.florin.ms/dante.html">Dante</a> could be shared on Saturdays and Sundays in churches in the Italian diaspora?<br /><br /><img src="http://www.florin.ms/romwave.gif" height="100" width="150" /><br /><br />Our second project is with the Rroma (gypsies) from Romania, an apprenticeship where we teach the parents how to write their names so they can have their babies back from hospital, where they learn paper marbling, where they garden in the Cemetery and hopefully later help with the restoration of tombs, learning skills they can then use in Romania to support their families. Always we say it is important to have both cultures, to preserve their own with its strong families while entering into ours. The Rom are Europe's largest minority. Every day I listen to their language which I love. But when I began filling out the forms for the European Union proposal I was presented with a list of languages, world languages, and Rom, or Romany, was not included there. In Europe they, as immigrants, have not been allowed to work, only to beg, and in desperation they steal, not much, it's for survival, consequently they are hated murderously. The Romanian Rom in Florence live under plastic in fields at the ends of bus lines. How to break down this poverty-enforcing genocidal prejudice? We have been doing it with building gypsy <a href="http://www.umilta.net/cradle.html">cradles</a> and with <a href="http://www.umilta.net/karengraffeo.html">Karen Graffeo</a>'s splendid photographs. With friendship. With gifts of used clothing, food, work.<br /><br />Karen is American, her own family having been share croppers in James Agee's <span style="font-style:italic;">Now Let us Praise Famous Men</span> published during the Great Depression and its poverty. Karen has taken that understanding from America's poorest to Europe's poorest. At first she traditionally photographed in black and white. But the Rom said 'No'. The photographs should be in full colour. And now they are, showing their love of beauty. These hang now in our library, amidst Bibles and books in many languages, books about indigenous and nomadic peoples and the discrimination they face, in particular the Rom. It is here that our first Rom mother, Hedera, who cannot read, whose baby Leonardo I baptized, told us the Gospel: 'He was so poor he was born in a stable, not even a house, and he was kept warm by the animals there, the cows, the horses. They were so hungry that he gave them bread and fish and potatoes. And then the envious killed him'. Listen to her <a href="http://www.umilta.net/alleluiawhole.mp3">Alleluia</a> she would sing to her new-born child.<br /><br />A note on the flags. I had vowed to show no flags on my websites. Julien Benda in his <span style="font-style:italic;">Betrayal of the Intellectuals</span> showed how nation states and their jingoistic flags and arms race industries caused wars. But Italy's flag is based on Beatrice's garb in Dante's <span style="font-style:italic;">Purgatorio</span> of red, white and green. And the Rom flag is based on India's Wheel of Life. The Rom have no national boundaries, no army, their flag the green of the earth, the blue of the sky, the red wagon wheel.<br /><br />A prayer that our proposal be accepted. That, instead of spurning shadows with annihilating dread, we come to embrace them with joy, finding in them ourselves, as Christ did with lepers, Samaritans, Syro-Phoenician women . . . <br /><br />Bless you,<br /><br />Julia<br /><br />He drew a circle that shut me out-- <br /> Heretic, a rebel, a thing to flout. <br />But Love and I had the wit to win: <br /> We drew a circle that took him in! <br />Edwin Markham<br /><br />Julia Bolton Holloway, Hermit of the Holy Family<br />Biblioteca e Bottega Fioretta Mazzei, 'English Cemetery'<br />Piazzale Donatello, 38, 50132 FIRENZE, ITALY<br /><a href="mailto:juliana@tin.it">juliana@tin.it</a> <a href="http://www.umilta.net">http://www.umilta.net</a> <a href="http://www.florin.ms">http://www.florin.ms</a><br /><a href="http://piazzakedonatello.blogspot.com">http://piazzaledonatello.blogspot.com</a><br /><a href="http://monatessa.blogspot.com">http://monatessa.blogspot.com</a>Julia Bolton Hollowayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17815712145337889572noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37658672.post-4706421246517464592007-07-10T08:10:00.000-07:002007-07-10T19:00:23.374-07:00POEMS PENNYEACH AND MOSAIC<br /><br />Dearworthiest Family, Dearworthiest Godfriends,<br /><br />Many have asked me to write an autobiography. But I did years ago, back in the days of manual typewriters and carbon paper, no photocopiers, no word processors. Remember how one mistake meant you had to retype the entire page! Its unique manuscript never reached my father's agent. So I rewrote it, again manually, with my newest baby beside me in the play pen, back in the 60's. I had promised my husband I would write this novel to get us out of debt. But I had no more energy left to market it.<br /><br />Now I share with you the poems and the novel/autobiography I wrote for my husband and our sons. So much easier these days to include with the poems, with the stories, also the paintings and drawings of so long ago. And to correct mistakes without having to retype whole pages!<br /><br />Poems Pennyeach are at <a href="http://www.umilta.net/poems.html">http://www.umilta.net/poems.html</a> and there is also an audio book of these at <a href="http://www.umilta.net/poemspennyeach.mp3">http://www.umilta.net/poemspennyeach.mp3</a><br />Mosaic is at <a href="http://www.umilta.net/mosaic.html">http://www.umilta.net/mosaic.html</a> and <a href="http://www.umilta.net/mosaic2.html">http://www.umilta.net/mosaic2.html</a><br /><br /><img src="http://www.umilta.net/MosMos.jpg" height="200" width="300" /><br />This mosaic I saw at 21 in Murano on the Venetian Lagoon. The two peacocks at the vase represent the Shekinah, the Eucharist.<br /><br />Bless you,<br />JuliaJulia Bolton Hollowayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17815712145337889572noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37658672.post-91034416195241897042007-06-20T07:53:00.001-07:002007-06-20T08:13:18.559-07:00Wednesday, June 20, 2007<br /><br />TOGETHER LET US SWEETLY LIVE:<br />THE SINGING AND PRAYING BANDS<br />JONATHAN DAVID AND RICHARD HOLLOWAY<br /><br /><img src="http://www.umilta.net/imageRHU.jpg" height="100" width="370"/><br /><br />This book is now published and is wonderful. To order: <a href="http://www.press.uillinois.edu/s07/david.html">http://www.press.uillinois.edu/s07/david.html</a>. Descendants of slaves, with ancestral and present trauma in the form of first servitude, then poverty, these families have kept alive consoling traditions. I am minded that in ancient times, millennia before Christ, kindness was counselled; in the Egyptian Book of the Dead, the selfish criminal being devoured by a monster, the harmoniously married couple who have been generous to the poor, living their afterlife in beautiful gardens. Today, when I travel back to America I do not find kindness amongst the jet set. On planes one meets with coldness, with fear, with isolation. The courtesy, the kindness, the warmth, the humanity, one meets instead on Greyhound buses, now much my favoured form of travel.<br /><br />There are many photographs of these white-garbed Blacks, and, like those by <a href="http://www.umilta.net/karengraffeo.html">Karen Graffeo of the Rom</a>, taken in love. There is the CD of the powerful haunting music, this democracy of music where all the people count, all their sorrows, all their joys. And the words of the hymns are pure poetry, for these had had ancestors who learned their Judaeo-Christianity from clandestine ministers who illegally taught them to read and write. See for this the story by Frances Trollope in Jonathan Jefferson Whitlaw, where the white minister who secretly helps the slaves is himself lynched by the white community.<br /><br />I heard Jesus say<br />I am the way, I am the root and branch of David. I am that I am.<br /><br />You are the same God that heard Daniel when he prayed in the lion's den<br />Heard Rachel when she prayed in the cliffs of the mountain;<br />You heard the three Hebrew boys when they prayed in the fiery furnace.<br /><br />You are the same God<br />That heard me one day<br />When I was lying.<br />Next door to Hell.<br /><br />It is a book about faith, about kindness, about joy, about sacred poetry. It is exactly the book this library has needed for its section on trauma and indigenous and nomadic peoples. Its photographs are taken by my oldest son, Richard Holloway.<br /><br /><img src="http://www.umilta.net/imageRHU.jpg" height="100" width="370"/><br /><br />Posted by Julia Bolton Holloway at 4:40 PMJulia Bolton Hollowayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17815712145337889572noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37658672.post-4750461928802991962007-06-16T03:27:00.001-07:002007-06-16T05:02:48.086-07:00NEW/OLD TECHNOLOGIES<br /><br />Dearworthiest Godfriends,<br /><br />For years I have yearned to combine sound and sight, music and text and image. Writing, after all, is an ancient technology for recording sound, spoken words, sung words. Greatly daring I have bought an IPod and a Mac mini to make all this possible. My PC is absolutely mute! We never could get its sound card to work.<br /><br />If you go to <a href="http://www.umilta.net">http://www.umilta.net</a> and scroll down to:<br /><br />Newest <br />Voice Recording of Westminster Julian Manuscript: <a href="http://www.umilta.net/julian1.mp3">Julian1.mp3</a>, <a href="http://www.umilta.net/julian2.mp3">Julian2.mp3</a>, <a href="http://www.umilta.net/julian3.mp3">Julian3.mp3</a>, <a href="http://www.umilta.net/julian4.mp3">Julian4.mp3</a><br />Martin <a href="http://www.umilta.net/buber.mp3">Buber's Julian</a> of Norwich<br />Song Recording of Lydia McCauley, Sabbath Day's Journey: '<a href="http://www.umilta.net/allshallbewell.mp3">And All Shall Be Well</a>'<br />Voice Recording of Quaker John Woolman, Plea for the Poor: <a href="http://www.umilta.net/woolman1.mp3">Woolman1.mp3</a>, <a href="http://www.umilta.net/woolman2.mp3">Woolman2.mp2</a>, <a href="http://www.umilta.net/woolman3.mp3">Woolman3.mp3</a>, <a href="http://www.umilta.net/woolman4.mp3">Woolman4.mp3</a><br />Voice Recording of <a href="http://www.umilta.net/augustine.mp3">Augustine, Confessions IX</a>, on Time, with Ambrose, '<a href="http://www.umilta.net/aug.mp3">Deus Creator Omnium</a><br />Song and Voice Recording of Hedera, who is Rom from Romania, singing '<a href="http://www.umilta.net/alleluiawhole.mp3">Alleluia</a>'<br /><br />you will find you can even mix and match these voices, all Godfriends, the recordings of Julian done by Julie and Ilya in Oxford, those by Lydia McCauley, Hedera Cjuraru, myself, in motets - which are very medieval! And if anyone can give us suggestions for improvement I should be most grateful. Am still learning the ropes as to how to podcast, etc.<br /><br /><img src="http://www.florin.ms/julialandor.jpg" height="270" width="330"><br /><br />But on a more serious note. Could I have your prayers, perhaps even further help, for a Rom family. Doina is the mother whose baby Stefano was kept in the hospital in Florence because they thought she was too poor to have him. I got them back to Romania by telling the woman judge that Roman Polanski had said it is worse to be an orphan than to be poor. I taught Doina and Luca how to write their names, in our library, which they then repeated in the courtroom, everyone holding their breath as this couple slowly wrote out the letters that said their names. Then Doina and Luca returned here with their fourteen-year-old Walter, leaving Stefano and Cristina with the grandparents. Walter is wonderful, can read and write, speaks Italian extremely well after only three months here, and reads Italian and English. I gave him Alan Mandelbaum's parallel text paperback of Dante's Paradiso and he was ecstatic, took it back to the camp, a field at the end of the bus line where they sleep under plastic and which the police constantly raid, taking everything they own. and he was reading Dante to the grown-ups, all of them loving it. Then he got hit-run while begging at the traffic lights, has his broken ankle in plaster, Assunta finding crutches for him. Doina told me the police, the carabinieri, were on the side of the Italian man in the car who ran over his leg, not on the side of this brilliant, kind, courteous boy on foot begging who can read Dante. At least the ambulance took him to the hospital where they plastered his leg. I looked at the x-rays today. Italy is good about giving free medical care to strangers. But nothing else.<br /><br />By the way they love Karen Graffeo's photographs of the Rom. So do our other Rom Romanian family of Maria, Alexandra her sister-in-law, Aliena her mother, Benoni and Daniel her brothers. And so also do the 'gadgee', the non-gypsies, us, who see these beautiful photographs of these joyous people in our library with their babies in rocking cradles and swaddling bands and learn to appreciate, not despise them. See <a href="http://www.florin.ms/karengraffeo.html">http://www.florin.ms/karengraffeo.html</a>. Also <a href="http://www.umilta.net/chuppa.html">http://www.florin.ms/chuppa.html</a>. Gypsies are Europe's largest minority and have no civil rights, were holocausted in WWII, receive no compensation, everyone is afraid of them, hating them murderously. The Romanian Rom were slaves of the Orthodox monasteries from the Middle Ages to the nineteenth century. I have found them to be courageous, honest, kind, courteous, intelligent, musical, beautiful, clean people, caring more for their families than for anything else. In Hedera's <a href="http://www.umilta.net/alleluiawhole.mp3">'Alleluia'</a> you can hear their voice.<br /><br />Bless you,<br /><br />Julia<br />"You see," writes Catherine of Siena, speaking in the person of the eternal Father, "this sweet and loving Word born in a stable, while Mary was journeying; to show to you, who are travellers, that you must ever be born again in the stable of knowledge of yourselves, where you will find Him born by grace within your souls." <br /><br />Julia Bolton Holloway, Hermit of the Holy Family<br />Biblioteca e Bottega Fioretta Mazzei, 'English Cemetery'<br />Piazzale Donatello, 38, 50132 FIRENZE, ITALY<br />juliana@tin.it http://www.umilta.net http://www.florin.ms<br />http://piazzaledonatello.blogspot.com<br />http://monatessa.blogspot.comJulia Bolton Hollowayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17815712145337889572noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37658672.post-18898324761591188992007-05-18T22:17:00.000-07:002007-06-14T23:26:07.704-07:00FATHER NATHANAEL<br /><br />Dearworthiest Godfriends,<br /><br />I was thinking of how blessed we Godfriends are. Godfriend Father Nathanael's icon of Julian being loved by all, even pirated for book covers and web essays, that he had created in Ohio. Godfriend Lydia McCauley's Sabbath Day's Journey CD with its song from Julian <a href="http://www.lydiamccauley.com">'And All Shall be Well'</a>, recorded in Washington. Godfriends Julie Dresvina and her Ilya in Oxford creating the recording of the reading Julian's Westminster Manuscript text, Godfriend Sister Anna Maria Reynolds in Ireland having first edited that text. Godfriend Petter Sammerud from Norway, but also in Amsterdam, in India, with his Madonna and Child, his three lilies now in bloom. And myself in Florence putting all these together in a CD for you. This combining of Orthodoxy, Anglicism and Catholicism and so much else about the figure of Julian and the medieval - and modern - Friends of God. 'Blessed may we be.'<br /><br />Then, yesterday, came two copies of <span style="font-style:italic;">Reflections on the Human Vocation</span>, published by Providence College, because they had included Father Nathanael's most beautiful icon<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.umilta.net/juln1.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 144px; height: 230px;" src="http://www.umilta.net/jul1.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><br />having written to him and receiving permission to publish it with the caption 'by the hand of the monk Nathanael © 2007 Monastic Brotherhood of St Theodore the Studite, Galion, Ohio' in an essay by Father Joseph J. Guido O.P., 'Five Years After the Towers Fell: Finding God in Difficult Times'. Validating the <a href="http://www.umilta.net/oliveleaf.html">Oliveleaf Website</a> on trauma healing that is an integral part of the <a href="http://www.umilta.net">Julian Website</a><br /><br /><br />Then, this morning, sadly, this, just as I sat down to the computer to write to Father Nathanael:<br /><br /><br />Dear Julia,<br /><br />I know you were much respected by Fr. Nathanael. With sadness I need to inform you that he passed into eternal life this past day, Friday afternooon, May 18 at about 5:45, EST here in Ohio. He was very ill for about a week with what turned out to be a staph infection, and on this past Wednesday suffered a massive stroke. After receiving Holy Anointing and being tonsured to the Great Schema, this morning by our Metropolitan Maximos, he died this afternoon. I recommend him to your prayers. May his memory be eternal! <br /><br />+Fr. Nicholas<br /><br />Our icon of Julian is magnificent, created in fasting and prayer. I placed it on the altar of Norwich Cathedral during my lecture there in 1999. Our prayers for our beloved Father Nathanael, who had brought it to me with its paint still wet where I was giving a paper in Kalamazoo, who came into the room, late, beard flowing, blue Irish eyes, cane and all, knocked over the projector, plunging us into profound darkness, to my greeting 'Welcome, Father Nathanael'. Though I had not before met him, it could only have been him. He and his prayerful icon have sustained me now for many years. <br /><br />It is perfect, this icon. Showing Julian as Benedictine, praying the Advent Antiphon, 'O Sapientia', where the mother prays to her as-yet unborn Child, contemplating on all these things in her heart, Julian mirroring Mary, ourselves, beholding it, mirroring Julian. Father Nathanael told me he took the face of Julian from Fra Angelico's face of Mary in the Cook Tondo in Washington's National Gallery. He told me, too, he had been a jeweller, until arthritis made him change that to painting.<br /><br />And how did I, a hermit in Italy, come to know Father Nathanael in Ohio? It was back in the pioneering days of the Internet, a Discussion List on the Ordination of Women, when I was Anglican, when I believed women could be priests though that vocation was not mine. Father Nathanael on the same list was adversarial. We become Godfriends, I became Catholic, with mutual respect for each other. His fragrant beeswax candles are on our prayer table beside his most beautiful icon. <br /><br />Blessed be his memory for ever.<br /><br />"You see," writes Catherine of Siena, speaking in the person of the eternal Father, "this sweet and loving Word born in a stable, while Mary was journeying; to show to you, who are travellers, that you must ever be born again in the stable of knowledge of yourselves, where you will find Him born by grace within your souls." <br /><br />Julia Bolton Holloway, Hermit of the Holy Family<br />Biblioteca e Bottega Fioretta Mazzei, 'English Cemetery'<br />Piazzale Donatello, 38, 50132 FIRENZE, ITALY<br />juliana@tin.it http://www.umilta.net http://www.florin.ms<br />http://piazzaledonatello.blogspot.com<br />http://monatessa.blogspot.comJulia Bolton Hollowayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17815712145337889572noreply@blogger.com