SAINT PARASCHEVA OF IASI

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.
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.
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.

Then I recorded them retelling her story.
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.
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.
You can read about her at http://www.umilta.net/zita.html with Frances Alexander's lovely engravings, that John Ruskin admired so greatly.

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.

FALSE ECONOMIES AND TRUE

John Kenneth Galbraith, in The Age of Uncertainty, 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Give us this day our daily earned bread
And forgive us our debts
As we forgive those in debt to us.
Amen.

AN APPEAL FOR A FAMILY

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.

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.

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.

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.

If you feel moved to help these 40 persons of all ages there is a PayPal button on the websites, http://www.florin.ms/pp.html, http://www.umilta.net/pp.html

OLIVE LEAVES FOR TRAUMA HEALING

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.

Our Mother Foundress, Agnes Mason, C.H.F., 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.

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.

SANTA UMILTA, SAINT JULIAN


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, http://www.umilta.net on 'Julian of Norwich, Her Showing of Love and Its Contexts'.
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.

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 Man on a Donkey.

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.
For the rest of the Lorenzetti panels and Umilta's complete story, see http://www.umilta.net/umilta.html. For Julian http://www.umilta.net/julian.html

LEARNING TO WRITE, LEARNING TO READ

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 Aurora Leigh, has a gypsy heroine, Marian Erle, teach herself to read and write out of books thrown away in the rubbish.

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.

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.

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.

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


HOLY, SANTO, SANCTUS, KADOSH

For images see http://www.umilta.net/earth.html

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.

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.


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.

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.

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.

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.

Sussex font with Celtic/Scandinavian interlace used for embroidery on a chasuble.

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.

Kenyan Alice Waithera's Rosary


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:

God, to those who have hunger, give bread
and to us who have bread, give the hunger for justice.


Fioretta Mazzei reminds us:

Trova ad avere pazienza: anche per un pezzo di pane
ci vuole un anno di lavoro e molte mani che collaborano.

Be patient: Even for a piece of bread
a year of work and many hands are needed.

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!

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.

Della Robbia, Christ in Prayer


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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 '.


Hildegard of Bingen, in the Twelfth Century, said all of this and the manuscript of her final text, here in Lucca, shows it:

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.


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 .

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.

Della Robbia, Madonna and Child


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



Blessed Olive Branch, Kenyan olive-
wood bowl, William Morris Print

BUDRUS, PALESTINE
There's a film about non-violent passive resistance in a Palestinian village, Budrus, that offers hope in Israel.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-11555031
http://www.justvision.org/budrus

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

MARTIN BUBER, ECSTATIC CONFESSIONS

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.

http://www.amazon.com/Ecstatic-Confessions-Mysticism-Martin-Library/sim/081560422X/2



And another,

http://www.amazon.com/Rainbow-Spirit-Theology-Australian-Aboriginal/dp/1920691804

Rainbow Spirit Theology 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.

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