Twenty years ago today the Wizard of Mecosta passed away on the Feast of St. Catherine of Siena. Today his grandson Joseph and I prayed at her tomb in the Domenican gothic church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva. The tomb may be touched by pilgrims only on this day each year so little Joseph and I joined the line and said a prayer for the wizard's soul while touching St. Catherine's stone likeness. Coincidentally, Santa Maria sopra Minerva was my Dad's favorite church in Rome, located next to the Albergo Minerva, which he stayed in when in Rome. He has written about his affection for the places in the scene captured in today's photo on the left in his autobiography, The Sword of Imagination. Circles upon circles...

To the north of Rome, in the city of Milan, Dad was the subject of much writing and reminiscing by Marco Respinti, journalist, blogger, and founder of the Centro Studi Russell Kirk.  For those who read Italian, here and here are the links to those pieces.

Below is a re-post from my Remus and Rome blog two years ago, when we made a pilgrimage to Siena:

 "April is the cruelest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with spring rain." So begins "The Burial of the Dead", the first section of T.S. Eliot's poem The Waste Land. The first line of that quote was permanently emblazoned into my memory eighteen years ago on April 29, the feast of St. Catherine of Siena, the morning my father died when I was eighteen years old. The next day, the final day of April, snow fell. Hope for the long-awaited return of Spring wilted, along with the budding lilacs that abound at Piety Hill, and I recalled those lines from Eliot my Dad often quoted. On this last day of April I'm noting the truth of Eliot's characterization of this cathartic month, and how growth towards wisdom and change for the better- though much hoped for- often comes at the cost of sacrificing complacent comfort, as Eliot describes in the next line:"Winter kept us warm, covering Earth in forgetful snow, feeding A little life with dried tubers."

My Dad's tombstone bears another quote from Eliot that became particularly relevant during this cathartic April: "The communication of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living." 

From Eliot's poem "Little Gidding" in his work, The Four Quartets, the full sentence is this: 

"And what the dead had no speech for, when living,

They can tell you, being dead: the communication

Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living."

I've often wondered over that quote in the last eighteen years, but now it speaks more clearly to me with the accumulation of everyday allegories and minor miracles that provide me with evidence that the dead continue to communicate with the living in this mystical and invisible community we all belong to. Though I cannot claim to understand it fully, there is something to be said for Jung's theory of the collective unconscious that is not bound by constraints of past, present and future. Or, as Eliot more eloquently puts it:  

"Time present and time past

Are both perhaps present in time future

And time future contained in time past."

Once a young nephew innocently asked me at what point in history did miracles stop occurring. I should not have been surprised by the question as we live in a materialist age but it did cause me to stop and reflect that these everyday minor miracles are today mostly seen as somehow taboo and not discussed. But perhaps it was always this way; even famous mystics like St. Catherine of Siena were a cause of embarrassment at first, by her own parents no less, until her vocation could no longer be denied and she was given free reign to change history.

My father was fond of mystics like St. Catherine, and mystical writers like Eliot, Flannery O'Connor, and Chesterton. It is probably no wonder, then, that this month I have run into them at every turn, my father no doubt urging me to take up their books and read, in order to better guide me along the path of life.

It was Flannery O'Connor, in fact, who first taught me to view everyday life through an allegorical lens. Though she never traveled far from home, she captured profound, disturbing, and humorous truths about human nature in the rural setting of the South. Rural Michigan was my father's favorite setting for his own tales as well, and he found as much allegorical material in the lives and deaths of our multi-generational local farming families as he did in the cultural and artistic wealth of Rome.

As an eighteen-year-old, I knew little of St. Catherine of Siena. Eighteen years later, as Providence would have it, I found myself on a pilgrimage bus to her home to attend a Mass on the vigil of her feast day. Afterward, I explored Siena's stunningly beautiful cathedral where St. Catherine was baptized. Just before leaving, I happened to notice a handwritten sign next to the chapel of "Madonna of the Vow" that informed visitors that the chapel was reserved for Masses for the dead. Having promised my mother that I would obtain something special for her in Siena, I fulfilled that vow by entering the sacristy and arranging for a Mass to be said for my father on October 19, his birthday.

On the three hour bus ride on the way back to Rome my head was throbbing from the amount of visual, intellectual, and spiritual richness I had just absorbed in that one church alone. But that was not to be the end of the "messages from the other side", as I discovered today. This morning I put a CD by Mars Hill Audio (Journal 73) into the stereo to play without looking at the subject, to distract me from the tediousness of cleaning. I was amused, and only slightly surprised, to hear that the topic was Flannery O'Connor. Without exaggeration, every interviewee seemed to be speaking directly to something on my heart. 

Here's one example from author Susan Srigley: "I think that for her (Flannery O'Connor), what the artist is trying to do is to look at that intersection between time and eternity- where time and eternity meet- and what human beings do in the midst of that intersection." Host Ken Myers continues, "Artists like Flannery O'Connor insist on seeing the spiritual reality in the physical fact."

These are the type of minor miracles that have made up the month of April, not so cruel this year.


"We shall not cease from exploration


And the end of all our exploring


Will be to arrive where we started


And know the place for the first time."


-T.S. Eliot, "Little Gidding" in The Four Quartets

"Carnelevarium" is Latin for "removal of meat" and is the origin of the English word "carnival" or "carnevale" in Italian. As with so many other religious feasts, the carnival tradition arose from practical necessity during the changing of the seasons and from overlapping cultural customs over the centuries.  It marks the end of the winter season in the Kirkos Caravan calendar, as it is immediately followed by the Liturgical season of Lent, which means "spring" (more on that in the next post). 

"Fat Tuesday", or "Martedi Grasso" in Italian, was the last day to consume all the foods that were off-limits during the forty days of Lent. Without refrigerators to preserve these foods during that time, parties were held in homes and among neighbors and special recipes and traditions arose in different regions of the Catholic world (pancakes, frappe, castagnole...the list goes on).

Masquerade balls and costume parades, like the spectacular tradition that is still going strong in Venice and several other cities and towns in Italy, reflect a continuation of Roman pagan festivals around the vernal equinox in which the established order was turned on its head. Agricultural societies (which were virtually every society up to the Industrial Revolution) recognized a natural symbolism in this revelry that was not lost on Christians (more on this until the next post!). On a practical level, the impending season of sobriety, Lent, gave rise to a last rush of revelry that over time grew to be a tradition. Catholic Customs and Traditions by Greg Dues is a resourceful guide to this and other traditions associated with the Liturgical calendar.

As explained on the Ringmistress' other blog, romeandremus.blogspot.it, the Roman city coffer's were empty this year for Carnevale funding after extravagant productions in years past and the current economic situation in Italy and the many other countries around the world. However, at the last minute a less expensive public initiative was organized: "Fori in Maschera". The Via dei Fori Imperiali, which runs through (and over) the Roman Forum, was closed to traffic so that it could be filled with costumed pedestrians and street performers. Alas, due to non-festive obligations such as work and homework, the Kirkos Caravan only arrived at the tail end of these festivities and caught just a few photos of the masquerading stragglers. 

The previous evening we did celebrate the season in a traditional way, however, by going to the theater to see an unique production of "Pinocchio", that classic Italian tale about a puppet, human nature, and redemption. Author and University of  Virginia professor Vigen Guroian has spoken and written about the symbolism of Pinocchio at the Kirk Center- beautiful commentary that I will have to share with you in a separate post. 

The carnevale season is a time not just to dress up in costumes and masks but also to see live performances of professional masked and costumed performers--puppet shows, Commedia dell' Arte, and wandering minstrels all magically appear throughout the city at this time of year. The Pinocchio show we took in was at the Teatro Ghione near the Vatican. A famous Italian actor, Pino Ammendola, played the part of a father recounting the story of Pinocchio to his son as a bedtime story with the surprise ending that the father himself had been the wooden puppet redeemed by the Blue Fairy and transformed into a human being (thereby making it possible for him to later become the father whose son was hearing the story for the first time). Magical Maya will debut as the Blue Fairy in her Italian school's production of Pinocchio later this year, so the outing was undertaken not only for entertainment, but also for a bit of Kirkos Caravan research!

Finally, in a last-ditch effort to squeeze out every last drop of the Carnevale Romano season before Lent, we went to a parish party at Regina Pacis church in our neighborhood. After surviving that sugar-fueled chaos, the Kirkos Caravan welcomes the sober season of Lent with welcome arms. May the journey toward renewal, Easter, and Spring begin!

Buon Onomastico! That means "Happy Name Day" in Italian and today we heard it frequently when celebrating wee Valentina's first "onomastico" in Rome. In honor of her namesake, we took her to light a candle in front of the skull of St. Valentine in the church of Santa Maria in Cosmedin. It may sound macabre, but paying visits to holy relics is quite commonplace in Rome- in fact, it is one of the reasons Rome is such a pilgrimage destination. Santa Maria in Cosmedin (which means "ornamented" or "adorned with beauty") is a Greek Melkite Catholic church built atop an intact tiny temple of Herucles. Despite its impressive history and beauty, the church is best known for a huge stone face on a wall of its portico dubbed "The Mouth of Truth". Made popular by the film "Roman Holiday", tourists line up to tentatively put their hand inside its open mouth. According to a medieval legend, liars get their hands bitten off. We bought a tiny replica to test our children's honesty when necessary...

Here is a post on the Roman origins of the Feast of St. Valentine from my blog Rome and Remus in 2012, before Valentina was even a glimmer in her father's eye. 

St. Ambrose, the honey-tongued doctor of the Church, has a fun story for tellers. Credited with converting the great St. Augustine, overcoming the Arian heresy in Milan, and inspiring the Ambrosian rite of Milan, St. Ambrose nearly escaped this legacy by running away- literally. When Ambrose, then the governor of the city, was popularly elected to succeed the Arian bishop of Milan (even though he was not yet baptised) he attempted to run away and hid in a senator's home. He appealed to the emperor to overturn his election but the emperor too was impressed with his character and believed Ambrose was just what the Church needed. Ambrose resigned himself to his fate and then embraced his new mission with passion. He studied Scripture with St. Simplician, gave up all his property, and became such an eloquent theologian and peace-maker that legends arose that honeybees would gather at his lips when he preached.

As one of the proud founders and owners of the AA Honey Farm, I couldn't let this honey-themed day pass without a bit of praise for the liquid gold. In honor of St. Ambrose, here is a simple recipe for Ancient Roman Honey Cake. 

Beekeeping is major part of the Kirkos Caravan's homesteading studies curriculum, not only because it's our business, but also because it's such an interdisciplinary subject. One-third of the produce we all eat is pollinated by bees- just one example of how bees are a crucial part of ecology. Here's a fascinating documentary on life in the hive from Nova, and here's one on the plight of the honeybee and the need for an increase in the number of small scale beekeepers around the globe.

Back to storytelling and bees-- during the KC Autumnal studies, our favorite story to emerge was that of "The Beekeeper and the Bewitched Hare", a Scottish story illustrating the special relationship between beekeepers and their bees. It was passed on to us by the same storyteller who passed on "The Baker's Dozen", and we in turn passed it on to students at a bonfire this Autumn. Here's a video of a Scottish storyteller relaying the tale.