Wimple-winked

I must face the Sisters of Poverty today and do not want to face the Sisters of Poverty, though don’t know precisely why I am avoiding them.

They came to me on a wave of light the self-same afternoon that Michael Grosso wrote me that it was time for us to begin work on a book about Padre Pio.   Both emails arrived in my Inbox at more or less the same minute:  the email from Michael Grosso; the email from the Fondazione Voce di Padre Pio, or Foundation for the Voice of Padre Pio. I felt chills. I felt the calling.  How amazing that “the voice of Padre Pio” should arrive as an echo of Michael Grosso’s own voice suggesting we write about Padre Pio.  The Fondazione was writing to ask would I be willing to translate three books for the Foundation. I assumed they meant books by or about Padre Pio.  YES OF COURSE, I wrote back, so blasted by light that I was beside myself, quite literally, my energy body standing somewhere outside the one that touches ground in the earthly dimension. How amazing is this: Michael wanting to write about Padre Pio and needing me to translate Padre Pio while the Foundation for Padre Pio was writing in the same instant to provide the opportunity! I believed this is what was happening, but it was not what was happening. I was hoodwinked!  I agreed to translate the three books, but when they arrived in the mail a few days later, instead of finding Padre Pio in glowing raiment there at my threshold, I discovered a gaggle of nuns, the oppressed Sisters of Poverty, choking in their wimples.  

“Of course you must face the Sisters of Poverty,” Anna Bossi even chuckled when I described my most recent crisis. “Don’t you see the beautiful irony?  Don’t you see what this means? You need to heal your money issues, all the dualism you carry around money, all that bullshit about rich men not getting into the kingdom of heaven, the camel through the eye of the needle, the opposition of God and Mammon. You need to heal all that and what better way than for the Sisters of Poverty to rescue you from Poverty? Irony is one way we reconcile dualities. I absolutely love it that you are now depending on the Sisters of Poverty for your livelihood.”

I argued that I did not believe in the Rule, in the way the Sisters had to kneel before a Mother Superior and kiss the ground and say Ave Marias to even beg for a Kotex. I had that very morning translated the words:  “A sister must not own even a straight pin.”  A straight pin!! I balked before that line and gave up the ghost. How could I in good conscience perpetuate that kind of mentality by rendering the Italian into English so the Rule could reach India, Africa, the U.S. and all the other countries this kind of oppression was trying to reach. I refused. Yes, there were certain things about the “spirituality and carisms” of this order of nuns that made sense. I could read through the lines to a kind of truth, but the words themselves were coercive and violent and I did not want to translate them.

“That voice you hear between the lines,” Anna Bossi interrupted my bullheaded tirade. “I think that voice is St. Francis. Channel his voice. Don’t translate the words.  You must understand better what a vow of poverty is. It’s not supposed to be about deprivation. It’s supposed to be about abundance and God providing everything one needs. It’s about our not needing to cling or hoard or covet or own, but about trusting Providence. Somewhere along the way, this truth got skewed. It’s your job—via St. Francis—to set the sisters straight. I’m counting on you to do this.”

The first crisis in facing the sisters was my fear of channeling St. Francis. Right! Like I can do that!  Like I can channel first of all, and channel Him most of all. Who am I kidding?  And of course writing what I’d rather read instead of what is there violates some kind of Hippocratic oath of translating. It was tantamount to hoodwinking my hoodwinkers:  their entrusting me to write one thing while I snuck in another text.  At the same time, certainly Anna was right about all of it:  irony healing duality; our needing to correct scarcity beliefs and return the world to abundance-thinking; hearing a voice that I really should learn to listen better to and trust . But still:  facing the books, I felt mostly bungled. 

I re-started with the biography of the Founder, because lives are simply lives and are conveyed through narrative instead of Rules.  Of course the things that most interested me about this life were missing:  the crises alluded to and not described.  But it was do-able and for awhile the work went on in a pedestrian, non-supernatural way.

Then one day I found myself translating the chapter on the Risorgimento and the Fall of the Kingdom of Naples, which Fall had something to do with the rise of the order of nuns my Founder founded in a small province near Naples. As I was translating the very paragraph about the Kingdom of Naples and its ruling family, the Pignatelli, Daniela sent me a text message that she was bringing Giulia Pignatelli by the house to see our puppies.  Giulia is also known as “La Principessa” because she is a bona fide princess of the defunct line of Pignatelli royalty who once reigned over Naples. I like Giulia well enough, though I have problems with the way people bow and scrape before her, especially the way Daniela bows and scrapes before her, and calls her “La Principessa” as though she prevailed over something Real. I also have problems with Daniela deferring to her in judgments that Daniela herself was quite competent to make on her own before she fell under the fantasy-princess’s royal spell.  Giulia, a dachshund breeder, was coming to judge the value of our six-week old puppies.  I bristled before this.  But must confess that I was instantly awed and a bit delighted by the irony that I was writing about the fall of her kingdom just as she was crossing my humble threshold for the very first time.  ("Yes this all makes sense, Cinzia", Anna Bossi would later remark to me, rather amazed that I had mustered a bona fide princess to go along with the Sisters of poverty to heal my money-split).

The visit was fine, the puppies behaved well and were judged by Giulia to be fine; she even made the call that I should keep both of them and defended her position well before the dubious Daniela.  The magic happened at the end of the visit, precisely as Daniela and Giulia were saying their goodbyes. “Cinzia,” Giulia called out to me, stooping toward the floor to pick up something.  What she held between thumb and forefinger as she looked at me accusingly was a straight pin.  “Be careful.  A puppy could die if he swallowed one of these,” she proclaimed, dropping the pin in my palm.

Of course I heard the Sisters of Poverty crying out to me the line that had caught me up in the first of the books I’d begun translating:  "You may not own even a straight pin".   I had no idea what Giulia’s finding the Sisters of Poverty’s staight pin on the floor of my house had to do with healing my money split, but surely something.

 The gust of light that the Princess’s visit brought to me that afternoon helped me finish translating the biography.  Of course I had no idea what any of it meant, but the translating gained momentum as though the text before me would somehow reveal new clues to the mystery I was living.

At this point, I had not even spoken to a Sister of Poverty. All the transactions about the translation had happened through a boy-sounding man named Enrico who worked for the Fondazione Padre Pio.  I finished the biography and wondered how to get it to the sisters. Enrico gave me an email address for a Suor Elsa and I wrote her; within minutes of my writing her she called my cell phone.  She had a wee little Mickey-Mouse voice and I imagined her to be about three feet tall and tried to recall the origin of the cartoon image that arose in my mind of a nun who was all wimple and habit, no face.  She was all kindness and gratitude and told me to email the book to the order’s email address with her name in the subject space; she also wanted my bank information included in the email so she could pay me what I was counting on for my survival the rest of the summer.

I set out to work on the earlier book, the one that kept reminding me that a sister could not own even a straight pin.  My first excuse for not continuing with it was that I didn’t have a working printer and this interfered with my process:  translating quickly, printing and editing, then rewriting off the cleaned up hard-copy. The day I congratulated myself for coming up with this excuse, I received a Facebook message from Vimi Bauer who used to run a screenwriting workshop in Spoleto with her husband Irv. She was writing to tell me that they would not be returning to do the workshop again, so she had left their printer with Suor Chiara at the Istituto Bambin’ Gesu, the convent in which they had held their workshop. I knew the convent well and the sister who ran it because I’d participated several times in another workshop that had been held at the convent and had returned again and again for even month-long visits in the years leading up to my moving to Spoleto. The convent is just behind my house. I see Suor Chiara all the time. I had even seen Suor Chiara the day I went to Mass feeling called to Catholicism by all the hoodwinking Padre Pio coincidences.  I had even confessed to Suor Chiara that I was almost ready to convert. She had told me to come to Mass at the convent at 7:00 a.m. the following Thursday so she could introduce me to Father Edouardo.  I agreed to this, but didn’t wake up on time and so had spent a chunk of the summer avoiding her. Now the want of a printer and the gift of a printer were calling me to confront a Sister of Poverty who was ALL FACE and knew me all to well.  I resisted, I postponed, I felt pushed and bullheadedly resistant. But finally I sucked in my breath and went to get the printer from Suor Chiara who welcomed me as the proverbial lost sheep, listened to my story about the translation, the printer, and finally claimed that the hound of heaven was truly gaining on me.  Just you wait and see, she chuckled. One of these days you’re going to find yourself as wimpled as I am.

I felt chills as she said this to me, and showed her the goose-bumps on my arms.

That’s the Holy Spirit moving through you, Cinzia. “Dammi retta”—pay attention.

It’s called “psychomachia” what the Latin poet Prudentius called the “battle for man’s soul” –this deadlock I find myself in as I continue to resist the work before me.  I may have healed my money split, but as one of my friends recently pointed out to me,  now I am living my own personal Armageddon, nuns pulling me one way, channeling energy-healers the other.  “You know how to resolve dualities. Hold the tension of both poles,” the shaman Anna Bossi wrote before going off to meditate with Franciscan nuns in a convent in California. 

Today I pick up where I left off, wherever that was—the part about the straight pin, the phrase I dropped like a needle in a haystack and must now re-find and thread.