THE KORAN


Trans N.J Dawood. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1956, 1994. Pp. 53-55.

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’.
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.’
Her Lord graciously accepted her. He made her grow a goodly child and entrusted her to the care of Zacharias.
Whenever Zacharias visited her in the Shrine he found that she had food with her, ‘Mary’, he said, ‘where is this food from?’
‘It is from God,’ she answered. ‘God gives without stint to whom He will’.
Thereupon Zacharias prayed to his Lord, saying: ‘Lord, grant me upright descendants. You hear all prayers’.
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.’
‘Lord,’ said Zacharias, ‘how shall I have a son when I am now overtaken by old age and my wife is barren?’
‘Such is the will of God’, He replied. ‘He does what He pleases’.
‘Lord’, he said, ‘vouchsafe me a sign’.
‘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’.
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.’
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.
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.
He shall preach to men in his cradle and in the prime of manhood, and shall lead a righteous life’.
‘Lord’, she said, ‘how can I bear a child when no man has touched me?’
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.’



P. 118
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.
. . .
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'.
. . .
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.

AN OPEN LETTER TO WYCLEF JEAN



HAITI AND ROMANIA: SLAVERY AND FREEDOM




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.




These are suggestions for Wyclef Jean, learned from the Roma of Romania begging in the streets of Florence.

I. The most important unit is the family.

II. Be sure that each family can have land to build on and on which to grow food.

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.
.
IV. Make sure that each family can conserve water with drainpipes and cisterns.

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.

VI. Pay the older more infirm members of families who do know how to read and write to teach all those who do not.

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 http://www.ringofgold.eu/Romany.html, http://www.ringofgold.eu/roofs.html, http://www.ringofgold.eu/panourisolare.html, http://www.ringofgold.eu/doctorvisit.html

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.

I & II are true for Haiti and the Roma.

III, IV, V, VI, VIII are needful for Haiti and for the Roma.

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.




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.

STOP

I cannot bear war. I love the Jewish people. I do not love the State of Israel. It is morally bankrupting itself.

I have visited Israel.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. http://www.umilta.net/chuppa.html

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.

Blessings and olive leaves of healing against violence,
Julia Bolton Holloway
Florence
Italy

WHOLE BOOKS, WHOLESOME BOOKS:
MORE 'FROM GRAVES TO CRADLES'

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 http://www.umilta.net/Romany.html. And with their building their cradle for their coming child while also conserving all the beautiful iron work in this 'English' Cemetery.

Daniel Dumitrescu and Vandana Culea making their cradle for their baby who will be called Gabriela.







And this is the new cradle:



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.

Today they have sent pictures of Gabriela as she now is



and of the house-building.



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.



Look at the courage of the grandmother. How empowering she is.

Two of Christopher Alexander's beautiful volumes, The Nature of Order: An Essay on the Art of Building and the Nature of the Universe, 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.

Our library is the Mediatheca 'Fioretta Mazzei'. I think you will see why when you read her little book: http://www.umilta.net/bluegreen.html

Fai attenzione alle persone e alla natura:
E` molto più importante che leggere un libro.



Paying attention to people and nature
Is far more important than reading a book.

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.
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.

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 http://www.florin.ms. and the conference Proceedings at http://www.florin.ms/CBV.html

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.



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 Prince and Dean Swift's Modest Proposal, 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.

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 Showing of Love.

My Bibles. Their covers had broken off from their much travelling. I took them to my book-binding maestro, 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.

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!

Blessings,

Julia Bolton Holloway
Hermit of the Holy Family


President Aureo Anello Association Mediatheca 'Fioretta Mazzei' and Friends of the 'English' Cemetery
P.le Donatello, 38
50132 FIRENZE
ITALY



We are now at 1498 signatures on the web at http://www.thepetitionsite.com/takeaction/471134975,
'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.

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 'Clasped Hands' or tondos with their portraits (Amalia Ciardi Duprè's sculpture can also be found at http://www.florin.ms/amaliadupre.html), or some or all of these.

OLIVELEAF 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

AN APPEAL TO ITALY'S CONSCIENCE

We are in the grips of control by 'shock'. For which see Naomi Klein: http://books.guardian.co.uk/video/2007/sep/07/naomiklein.

We are returning to the partnered tactics of Hitler and Mussolini. The use of a scapegoat.

I speak for the Human - and the European - Rights of the Roma. And in particular for the European Rights of the Roma from Romania.

The Roma from Romania are Christian, Romanian Orthodox. They were the slaves of the monasteries from the Middle Ages to the nineteenth century.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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'.

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.

ROMANIA AND FLORENCE

Dearworthiest Godfriends,
Wednesday I flew to Bucharest, Karen Graffeo, my American photographer friend, meeting me at the airport. Bucharest is most beautiful with Roma florists everywhere.
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.
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.
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 http://www.umilta.net/Romany.html 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
A thousand blessings,
Julia

ROSES AND LAVENDER

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.
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.
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. http://www.umilta.net/Romany.html. 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, Commedia. 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.
Plus we have been building cradles: http://www.umilta.net/cradle.html. 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.

Daniel Dumitrescu and Vandana Culea making their cradle for their baby







And this is the new cradle:



Blessings,
Julia
Hermit of the Holy Family

honour corruption villainy holiness
riding in fragrance of sunlight (side by side
all in a singing wonder of blossoming yes
riding) to him who died that death should be dead

humblest and proudest eaderly wandering
(equally all alive in miraculous day)
merrily moving through sweet forgiveness of spring
(over the under the gift of the sky

knight and ploughman pardoner wife and nun
merchant frere clerk somnour miller and reve
and geoffrey and all) come up from the never of when
come into the now of forever come riding alive

down while crylessly drifting through vast most
nothing's own nothing children go of dust
e.e.cummings

It's a splendid poem on Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. 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.

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'.

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'.

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!

Bless you,

He drew a circle that shut me out--
Heretic, a rebel, a thing to flout.
But Love and I had the wit to win:
We drew a circle that took him in!
Edwin Markham

Julia Bolton Holloway, Hermit of the Holy Family
Biblioteca e Bottega Fioretta Mazzei, 'English Cemetery'
Piazzale Donatello, 38, 50132 FIRENZE, ITALY
juliana@tin.it http://www.umilta.net http://www.florin.ms
http://piazzaledonatello.blogspot.com
http://monatessa.blogspot.com

EMBRACING THE SHADOW

On Sunday I was recording Carlo Poli's readings from Dante's Commedia. You can hear these readings at http://www.florin.ms. 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 Commedia. 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, http://www.florin.ms). Elizabeth Barrett Browning creates her second heroine, Marian Erle, who mirrors herself with her spaniel hair, in Aurora Leigh, a self-taught gypsy.



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.

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 Piazzale Donatello 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.

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 Dante could be shared on Saturdays and Sundays in churches in the Italian diaspora?



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 cradles and with Karen Graffeo's splendid photographs. With friendship. With gifts of used clothing, food, work.

Karen is American, her own family having been share croppers in James Agee's Now Let us Praise Famous Men 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 Alleluia she would sing to her new-born child.

A note on the flags. I had vowed to show no flags on my websites. Julien Benda in his Betrayal of the Intellectuals 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 Purgatorio 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.

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 . . .

Bless you,

Julia

He drew a circle that shut me out--
Heretic, a rebel, a thing to flout.
But Love and I had the wit to win:
We drew a circle that took him in!
Edwin Markham

Julia Bolton Holloway, Hermit of the Holy Family
Biblioteca e Bottega Fioretta Mazzei, 'English Cemetery'
Piazzale Donatello, 38, 50132 FIRENZE, ITALY
juliana@tin.it http://www.umilta.net http://www.florin.ms
http://piazzaledonatello.blogspot.com
http://monatessa.blogspot.com

POEMS PENNYEACH AND MOSAIC

Dearworthiest Family, Dearworthiest Godfriends,

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.

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!

Poems Pennyeach are at http://www.umilta.net/poems.html and there is also an audio book of these at http://www.umilta.net/poemspennyeach.mp3
Mosaic is at http://www.umilta.net/mosaic.html and http://www.umilta.net/mosaic2.html


This mosaic I saw at 21 in Murano on the Venetian Lagoon. The two peacocks at the vase represent the Shekinah, the Eucharist.

Bless you,
Julia

Wednesday, June 20, 2007

TOGETHER LET US SWEETLY LIVE:
THE SINGING AND PRAYING BANDS
JONATHAN DAVID AND RICHARD HOLLOWAY



This book is now published and is wonderful. To order: http://www.press.uillinois.edu/s07/david.html. 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.

There are many photographs of these white-garbed Blacks, and, like those by Karen Graffeo of the Rom, 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.

I heard Jesus say
I am the way, I am the root and branch of David. I am that I am.

You are the same God that heard Daniel when he prayed in the lion's den
Heard Rachel when she prayed in the cliffs of the mountain;
You heard the three Hebrew boys when they prayed in the fiery furnace.

You are the same God
That heard me one day
When I was lying.
Next door to Hell.

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.



Posted by Julia Bolton Holloway at 4:40 PM

NEW/OLD TECHNOLOGIES

Dearworthiest Godfriends,

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.

If you go to http://www.umilta.net and scroll down to:

Newest
Voice Recording of Westminster Julian Manuscript: Julian1.mp3, Julian2.mp3, Julian3.mp3, Julian4.mp3
Martin Buber's Julian of Norwich
Song Recording of Lydia McCauley, Sabbath Day's Journey: 'And All Shall Be Well'
Voice Recording of Quaker John Woolman, Plea for the Poor: Woolman1.mp3, Woolman2.mp2, Woolman3.mp3, Woolman4.mp3
Voice Recording of Augustine, Confessions IX, on Time, with Ambrose, 'Deus Creator Omnium
Song and Voice Recording of Hedera, who is Rom from Romania, singing 'Alleluia'

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.



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.

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 http://www.florin.ms/karengraffeo.html. Also http://www.florin.ms/chuppa.html. 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 'Alleluia' you can hear their voice.

Bless you,

Julia
"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."

Julia Bolton Holloway, Hermit of the Holy Family
Biblioteca e Bottega Fioretta Mazzei, 'English Cemetery'
Piazzale Donatello, 38, 50132 FIRENZE, ITALY
juliana@tin.it http://www.umilta.net http://www.florin.ms
http://piazzaledonatello.blogspot.com
http://monatessa.blogspot.com

FATHER NATHANAEL

Dearworthiest Godfriends,

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 'And All Shall be Well', 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.'

Then, yesterday, came two copies of Reflections on the Human Vocation, published by Providence College, because they had included Father Nathanael's most beautiful icon


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 Oliveleaf Website on trauma healing that is an integral part of the Julian Website


Then, this morning, sadly, this, just as I sat down to the computer to write to Father Nathanael:


Dear Julia,

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!

+Fr. Nicholas

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.

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.

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.

Blessed be his memory for ever.

"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."

Julia Bolton Holloway, Hermit of the Holy Family
Biblioteca e Bottega Fioretta Mazzei, 'English Cemetery'
Piazzale Donatello, 38, 50132 FIRENZE, ITALY
juliana@tin.it http://www.umilta.net http://www.florin.ms
http://piazzaledonatello.blogspot.com
http://monatessa.blogspot.com

SACRED: DISCOVER WHAT WE SHARE

It was my seventieth birthday present to myself. Accepting the British Library's invitation to 'Sacred: Discover What We Share'. In 2001 we had organized an international conference in Florence on The City and the Book, centred on the alphabet and the Bible as the basis of our western culture, neither of them European in origin. Then we had submitted a proposal to the European Union for digitizing the great Bible manuscripts in the major European libraries. We were turned down. It was the year the EU was strongly anti-religion. That was how I first came to know Ilana Tahan of the British Library. It was she who invited me. For one of the earliest surviving Hebrew Bibles is owned by them and needing to be digitized.

The Exhibition is magnificent, Torahs, Gospels, Korans. Present at its opening were all the Peoples of the Book, Jews, Christians, Muslims. Admiring how much beauty there is in these books. And learning how much each owed the other. The Gospels in Arabic, like a Koran. A Hebrew manuscript, for celebrating the Passover within a family, illuminated like a Christian one. It is from Barcelona and Linda and Michael Falter who showed it to me, have created a facsimile edition of it.




The Exhibition presented how each carried out their liturgies, at birth, at marriage, at death. I could not resist telling of Karen Graffeo's marvellous chuppa that we created in Florence for a wedding in Florida, where I, a Christian hermit, pencilled the names of the Jewish ancestors on white silk, these being then embroidered by Muslim gypsies in gold thread, all the Peoples of the Book working together for the Jewish wedding. See http://www.umilta.net/chuppa.html

BUONA PASQUA,
we say in Italy.

Our Swiss-owned so-called 'English' Cemetery in Florence is filled with flowering bulbs, sweet-scented hyacinths, narcissi, daffodils, tulips, and wild strawberries and wild violets, on the tombs, while Petter's lilies are about to flower in their great pot. A New Zealander sending her aunt's ashes there wanted her also remembered here, so my Rom and I planted these bulbs in the Fall to find this 'Winter of Our Discontent, Made Glorious Spring', the Resurrection.

Just down the street, in a cell at San Marco, Fra Angelico painted Mary Magdalene reaching out to Christ as Gardener, and on the monks' dormitory's wall, the Angel and the Virgin, both scenes with spring flowers.



Tonight we shall go to Mass at the Santissima Annunziata, one square before the church and cloister of San Marco, on our bicycles.

In the nineteenth century John Roddam Spencer Stanhope's daughter Mary died, he sculpting her tomb with daffodils on its marble beside those by Lord Leighton for Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Holman Hunt's for his wife, which he shaped like a great ark floating on waves, a dove with olive branch in its beak.



We have planted a blue hyacinth by the tomb of Nadezda, who came at 14, a black slave from Nubia, baptised with the name meaning 'Hope' in a Russian Orthodox family, and who is buried here, her story told in Cyrillic on her tomb.

We plan next to plant a pomegranate by Lord Leighton's tomb for Elizabeth Barrett Browning. And speaking of pomegranates and Easter do read 'The Highland Shepherd'
http://msgr.ca/msgr-6/The_penultimate_WORD_2007_April.htm

We are preparing again to read Dante's Commedia in our library in a cemetery in Florence as we did several years ago, this time recording it. And with the honoraria from lectures given in America, especially those on our writers, sculptors and preachers against slavery, we shall be able to have the Marchese Torrigiani, from whose garden our now lost, chemically-killed, plants had originally come, replant them. We have forbidden the hired gardeners to use any more poison on the soil and are weeding the luscious stinging nettles ourselves, using rubber gloves, trowels and baskets. We would love to cook and eat them but dare not because of all the traffic fumes about us.

BUONA PASQUA, A BLESSED EASTER. And may we heal this earth of all our polluting that there may be life for all, food for all, flowers for all.

Julia and Assunta

AN OLIVE TREE FOR PEACE

Our friend, who is a magnificent Irish scholar, and who regularly sends us Carageen moss for use in our paper marbling, has this Christmas sent a card saying an olive tree is given in our name to a farming family in Palestine. It shows two women harvesting olives, a dove perched in one of the olive trees. And she writes about remembering the beauty of our Tuscan olive groves. And our own four olive trees in this courtyard from which we give so many blessed leaves for the healing of trauma.



OxFam writes of the possibility of giving a camel, a cow, a sheep. Unicef, of giving sachets of water and salts for correcting dehydration in sick children and thus saving their lives. All these, the best Christmas gifts.

As I think on all the trauma today, in Afghanistan, Pakistan and India, in Palestine and Israel, in Iraq and Iran, Africa with its AIDS orphans, its child soldiers, so much terror in so many places in the world, I remember John Kenneth Galbraith saying the sources of conflict and violence are caused by economic desperation. Julian's sense of 'And all shall be well' translates rightly the Hebrew 'Shalom', of a wellness, of a wholeness, of prosperity, the true peace the angels sing to men of good will. Anorexic women despair of freedom, their only freedom being death. Suicide bombers despair of freedom, their only freedom, death, of themselves and others. The Greek sense of peace, 'irene', was merely a cessation, a truce, in ever on-going hostilities. Shalom is different and for all.

One passes through our four olive trees, after braving the roaring traffic about this piazzale, to come to the peace of our library and our tombs. Our library stocked with books on trauma and indigenous and migrant peoples, our cemetery with its many scripts and languages commemorating its many persons who worked tirelessly against slavery in the nineteenth century and for better health for women and children and for freedom from tyranny, statues of 'Hope', and even the black fourteen year-old slave from Nubia, baptised in a Russian Orthodox family with the name of 'Nadezhda', 'Hope'.

And now we have a dream in which many are sharing, of turning this abandoned cemetery in the midst of city traffic into the garden it once had been, with orange and lemon trees and azalea bushes, through digging a cellar into our hill for keeping them in winter, called here a 'limonaia', and of planting daffodils, irises, roses, lavender. Look about us and see how divorced we now are from nature, our clothes all like machines, our cars separating us from greenery. It could be a most peaceable revolution to plant a garden in the midst of a city. To travel on bicycles. And to give olive trees to Palestinians, sheep to Afghans, camels to Ethiopians, cows to Somalians, sachets of life-saving salts to sick babies. We have very little time to turn this earth, this Gaia, back into a garden, a Paradise, for our grandchildren.

Thank you, Maire, for this most lovely of gifts, and a Blessed Christmas to all Godfriends,

Bless you,
Julia

Trocaire, http://www.trocaire.org/globalgift/
OxFam http://www.oxfamunwrapped.com/
UNICEF http://www.unicef.org/childsurvival/index.html

THE CHURCH OF THE BADIA. FLORENCE AND DANTE, 26 November 2006


Signorelli, Dante

Alinari

Augustus Hare

For this year’s Christmas Letter let me share the gist of what I said at the Mass for the Poor in the Florentine Badia’s church two Sundays ago. I began by saying Giovanni Boccaccio lectured on medieval Dante’s Commedia in this very church during the Renaissance. And this was right because Dante grew up beside this church. When he was a child he would have heard the monks singing the liturgy of the Mass and of the Hours, Matins, Lauds, Terce, Sext, None, Vespers and Compline, as they had for centuries before him and as they still do here today. We hear these psalms and hymns in the Purgatorio and the Paradiso of the Commedia. But not in the Inferno, which is only filled with groans, sighs, screams, the discords of despair of those who have chosen to distance themselves from God.

In Dante’s day, this church, which was part of an ancient monastery, was more beautiful. After Dante’s boyhood, but before Boccaccio’s time, it was rebuilt by Arnolfo di Cambio and filled with fine paintings by Giotto, the gold leaf dancing with the light of candles. The church later was completely changed and made shadowy in the baroque style. The beautiful tender Madonna with her Child, which recalls the numerous similes in Dante’s poetry about mothers nursing babies with their milk, was removed from the altar. It is now in the Uffizi; one may still see it but in a cold museum. Of these pictures below the first is by Giotto, the second by our Norwegian artist guest and it shimmers by candlelight in our library, and the third is by a participant in the Mass for the Poor, who would be so grateful if you would buy prints of it. It was Petter who taught Bruno how to print his engravings.


Giotto

Petter Sammerud

Bruno Vivoli

Dante tells us he wrote his Commedia not in Latin but in Italian, so that even women and children could understand it, in Florence and in all of his Italy. Like the Gospel revealed to the lowly. Like St Francis’ Canticles. In his similes we find workmen and farmers, women and children, an old tailor threading his needle, a mother rocking the cradle and singing, pilgrims journeying from afar, workers in foundries and furnaces, and many many others. Dante remembers the good bread of Tuscany, made without salt and which does not mildew. The poem becomes our mirror, reflecting also this city. Dante writes a Comedy, not at all a Tragedy about kings and their hollow power. It is a poem of hope, a Magnificat. It is the most famous poem in the world.

Dante writes the Commedia in exile from Florence, but with the memory of this Badia, of the little and very ancient church of St Martin beside it founded by Irish pilgrims centuries earlier, of the Bargello, of the Palazzio del Popolo (now called ‘Vecchio’, for it is seven hundred years old), of the Duomo, many of these built or planned by Arnolfo di Cambio or his father. All these fine buildings were within the walls and the gates built by Arnolfo di Cambio using the stone first built into the Ghibelline ‘towers of pride’ and within this painting. This wall for the common defense was repaired in the Renaissance, then in the Victorian period torn down to make way for boulevards for traffic. The painting below in the Cathedral, the Duomo, shows Dante outside the walls as an exile, preaching the Commedia to his city, its gate being the same as that for Hell and for Purgatory. The three gates are Arnolfian.


Domenico da Michelino, Dante and Florence, Cathedral

On Hell Gate Dante has God write:

Per me si va nella città dolente,
Per me si va nell’etterno dolore,
Per me si va tra la perduta gente.

Giustizia mosse il mio alto Fattore:
Fecemi la Divina Potestate,
La Somma Sapienza e’l Primo Amore.

Through me you enter the city of sorrow,
Through me you go into eternal pain,
Through me you go amongst the lost people.

Justice moved my High Architect,
I was made by Divine Power,
By Highest Wisdom and by Primal Love.

But when we go the other way through the Arnolfian gate of Purgatorio we leave behind all sorrow to enter into love – as I explained when lecturing on this poem in Attica State Prison.

The Commedia tells us of Dante’s exile become pilgrimage, first through Hell where Dante as sinner meets many mirroring sinners, then Purgatorio where Dante shares in purgation from them with others, finally, in Paradise, where he soars into the hevens with Beatrice Portinari, daughter of Folco Portinari the founder of Santa Maria Nuova Hospital. The Commedia as poem heals the city of Florence and ourselves. In the last canto of the Paradiso, its Canticle of Canticles, we meet Bernard singing his hymn to the Madonna, which Filippino will show in a painting brought to the Badia in 1530, and which Professor Giorgio La Pira, Mayor of Florence, Founder of the Mass for the Poor, so much loved

Alinari

Filippino, Vision of Saint Bernard, Badia

The words of Bernard’s hymn in Dante’s Paradiso are placed on the facade of the Misericordia, words which I read to my visitors. Then we turn to gaze upon the great Cathedral of Florence, its Duomo, Santa Maria del Fiore:

Vergine Madre, figlia del tuo figlio,
umile e alta più che creatura,
termine fisso d’etterno consiglio,

tu se’ colei che l’umana natura
nobilitasti sì, che ’l suo fattore
non disdegnò di farsi sua fattura.

Nel ventre tuo si raccese l’amore,
per lo cui caldo ne l’etterna pace
così è germinato questo fiore.

Virgin Mother, daughter of your son,
humble and higher than any creature,
fixed goal of eternal counsel,

You are she who ennobled human nature
so that the Creator
did not disdain to become your Creation.

In your womb is bound up the love
through whose warmth in eternal peace
is thus germinated this flower.

I left out of my talk in the Badia that often when I shared with gypsy mothers in the street blessed bread and postcards of Dante, like the one above, they would ask ‘Was he a saint?’ and when I said ‘No’, explaining however that he had preached to his city about mercy, they would kiss the postcard as if it were an icon and share it with their children.

All is well here. We have saved the English Cemetery. Now we must restore it. Gypsy Maria and Daniel, from Romania and who come to the Mass for the Poor, today have weeded out all the stinging nettles (I supplied them with gloves and trowels). A month ago they, with their other brother Benoni, planted two enormous boxes filled with daffodil bulbs, which will come up in the Spring. Next, I hope to teach them tomb cleaning and restoration. Unlike Hedera or Luca, they are already literate, in both Roman and Cyrillic alphabets and love reading our polyglot tombstones of English, American, Russian and Swiss burials.

A thousand blessing for Christmas, Epiphany, and 2007.