Thanksgiving, Kartause Style

I can hardly appreciate in one day the blessings that I have received this past year, let alone this past semester. Getting to celebrate Thanksgiving here in Gaming with students and faculty that I’ve gotten to know so well and become so fond of was yet another blessing.

Thanksgiving run down:

Our town celebrated its Thanksgiving months ago, so we at the Kartause were alone in our 4^th-Thursday-of-November-Turkey-roast…so we got to go to class on Thursday morning, since everyone else in Austria does that.

Mid-day was the Thanksgiving mass. We borrowed from Austrian tradition and had an enormous harvest crown brought in holding a bunch of fruits and veggies that Father Brad blessed. After mass everyone was invited to take a blessed fruit or veggie...and I must say blessed apples taste better than regular ones. For some reason nobody wanted the tomatoes, so we had a salsa party in Father Brad's office while he tried to figure out how to play Amazing Grace on his electric guitar. That didn't sound so good.

No Thanksgiving is complete without football. With no TV in sight, a bunch of the guys headed out to the intramural fields and started a pickup game in the afternoon.

Come 1730, it was time for the feast. From the belly of the kitchen came a turkey flaming with sparklers, at the sight of which the entire Mensa broke out in song with The Star Spangled Banner.

Post-dinner was the ball. We all dressed up in Dirndles and Lederhosen and learned Austrian folk dances until the Schuhplattler guys came in and showed us all up.

I can safely say it was no Rhode Island Thanksgiving. We only have 11 more days here (ah!!), and I can't think of a better way to have started wrapping up the semester.

'Tis the Season...in Austria

Today, the kids I babysit here informed me that Krampus was going to come and get me if I didn’t let them have more Milka.

P.S. from Rome...

...the pope says hello.

While I'm at it, I would like to take this opportunity to personally congratulate every member of the Fall 2010 Franciscan Austria program on their astounding round of applause upon being announced at the Wednesday audience. We were the only group to yield a two handed wave from our lovely Pope Benedict XVI when the groups were called. Awww, yeahh.

Assisi!

I'm a fan. Actually, a major fan. Along with Mondsee, Assisi is in my top two favorite towns. Most of being there isn't so much what you see as what you experience. It's a place where you can just be if that makes any sense. Consequently there's not really much to write. I will say, though, that it is beautiful, quiet, scenic...

...and hey, even the trash cans are quite pleasant.

Being with a bunch of Franciscans in the town of St. Francis has its privileges. Like, for example, getting to have mass in front of his tomb. That was pretty sweet. We also visited the San Damiano cross that spoke to him, and the Portiuncula that he rebuilt.


The Portiuncula is surrounded by a Basilica that houses basically the rest of Francis' life: the place where he died, the cave where he prayed, the rose bushes that he threw himself into when he was having lustful thoughts. Get this, to this day the bushes have no thorns.
Also there's a statue of him that is perpetually decked out in doves. Fo' real.





All in all it was a pretty saintly place.

Rome Is Where The Heart Is

Sometimes travelling with such good looking people in Italy is quite burdensome. Especially in the rain.

Indian street vendor: Bella bella bella! I have umbrella for you! Tree euro! Just tree!

Claire: I have one, thank you.

Indian street vendor: I have special price!

Claire: No.

Indian street vendor: You need an umbrella! Special price! Okay two euro!

Claire: No. I have one. Don’t you see it?

Indian street vendor: Your friend need umbrella!

Claire: She doesn’t. She has an umbrella, too.

Indian street vendor: She need two! I have special price! Just for you bella!

Indian guy proceeds to follow us down the street. We duck for safety into a metro station only to find four more umbrella men holding out their umbrellas to us, too.

…bella?

Anyway, after our little excursion to Loreto and the like, I couldn’t see how the trip couldn’t get any better. But it did.

Can I just say St. Peter’s Basilica is great? Serious understatement alert. It’s mind-blowing. It only took standing in St. Peter’s square to feel so incredibly small…like I was a negligible part of something incredible, which is, well, true, but at the same time I felt like I was home! Take that for a paradox.

Then I got a baby thrown at me and some guy pick-pocketed me.

Just kidding, that didn’t really happen. But had it happened, I would have been prepared. Thanks to warnings from previous Rome-goers about the baby-throwing diversion tactic utilized by Rome’s petty criminals, my friends and I prepared our defense strategy well before the trip. It may or may not have been inspired by Miss Congeniality.

But I digress once again. On to Rome!

Cognitive dissonance might be a good way of describing it…a city rich in ruins of the Roman Empire, the very foundations of Christendom, and…gelato shops, street vendors, and United Colors of Benetton. They all jumbled up together. Like the new Rome was built right around the old. Crazy.

Sunday morning before going into St. Peter’s, a few of us went up to the cupola to say morning prayer with the nuns. You could say it was both literally and spiritually ascetical. I mean, please, we were looking out at Rome while standing just over 150 meters above the bones of St. Peter. After prayer, I was privileged enough to be able to contemplate the plethora of gardens on Roman rooftops with my philosophy professor who, I am excited to admit, is ten times funnier on top of St. Peter’s than he is in class.

Afterward the cupola adventure we descended the 2-foot-wide, sideways, and claustrophobia-inducing stairwell to make it to mass inside….can I say that again? Mass inside St. Peter’s! In Latin! Contrary to whatever you may believe, Latin is not dead.

[Further proof: ATMs in Vatican City have a Latin option]

Being in St. Peter’s is, well, awesome. Just a word of advice? Take care not to get so totally overwhelmed when walking into St. Peter’s as to miss the Pieta, which is just inside to the right. I admit…I had to go back in because I completely missed it the first time I walked in. Anyway, no matter how long you’re there there’s always more to see and more to know. It was phenomenal to be surrounded by just endless holiness, history and symbolism…and humor.

Here we have the monument to Pope Gregory XIV. Pope for less than a year, Gregory XIV was rather unpopular for naming an inept family member as Secretary of State. The church so fondly remembers him with an empty niche set into the wall and a sarcophagus below bearing the inscription “Gregory XIIII.” The tombstone was supposedly recycled from a monument that had been rejected the year that commemorated his predecessor, Gregory XIII.

Well, I found it humorous anyway.

That…among many other quirky design stories made our tour not so much a monotonous explanation of every bishop dressed in white as it was a tangible journey through the history of the church. The early Christians were real people, too. Many thanks to the seminarians at the North American College who walked us through that history.

Sometime during the week we made it to Santa Scala, where we got to ascend the stairs that Jesus climbed to meet Pilate. Imagine a tiny little building just big enough to hold some stairs and a little chapel…mobbed by 170 Frannies trying to ascend the stairs on their knees. The security guard finally came out and had to tell everybody to hurry up because we were spending too long on each stair. The line out the door was getting to be incredibly long…and incredibly restless. Aside from that entertaining anecdote, being on those stairs, well, it makes you think about a lot of things.

Rome has a few other cool things too…you know, like the Coliseum, the Pantheon, the Spanish steps, more relics than I can conceive at any given moment…and a church here and there…and there and there....Not to mention Swiss guards, Scavi Tours, the Basilica of Our Lady of Perpetual Help (!) and much, much much much more.

Did I forget to mention the time we had mass in the Basilica of St. Paul Outside the walls? Probably, but then again I forgot to mention a lot of things.

Have you been to Rome? I think you should go. Take me with you! I will go back!!

If on Monday evening someone’s pedometer read 37 miles since arriving in Rome, I can’t even imagine how much we had walked by Thursday morning when we made our bittersweet departure for Assisi…

Which, God willing, I will document at some point.

Peace and blessings,

Mary

10-Day: The Road Trip Part

Once again I find myself back at the Kartause after an amazing experience in another country. This time it was Italy! This past Sunday I returned from a 10-day pilgrimage to Rome and Assisi. It definitely packed full of holy things and lots of pasta. People who come back from a semester here often say they came and “got their face blessed off.” Never has that felt so true.

A few days before meeting up in with Franciscan in Rome, I flew down with a few friends and one of our chaplains. We rented a car and road tripped around Italy to see some saintly sites (yeah, there are a few of those). Holding our breath (and sometimes closing our eyes….“Father Brad! What are you doing!?”) through Italian traffic…and countless hours of bonding time in our “5-seater” rental car (Italians must be very small people) was an experience I won’t forget so easily.

Our road trip itinerary included Loreto, San Giovanni-Rotondo, and Lanciano.

(The “unlimited mileage” option in the rental car package has its perks).

Needless to say, it was incredible. The entire trip was just one blessing after the next. You could say things started off with a bang when our first stop was the house of Mary, the Immaculate Mary…Our Lady herself! in Loreto. We sat and prayed where the Annunciation happened! Where God became man! The Word was made flesh! How else can I express myself!? I am blessed beyond belief!

If that weren’t enough, the next day we visited the tomb of St. Padre Pio, prayed in the cave where St. Michael appeared, and have a private mass right in front of the Eucharistic miracle in Lanciano.

There’s a line from Genesis about God “opening the floodgates of heaven” when it was time to flood the earth. It felt like the floodgates opened again, and the heavens just poured down grace.

Anyway, many thanks go out to everyone who made the first couple of the days so incredible…the Vietnamese Sisters of St. Joseph who let us crash at their convent in Rome, the sacristan, Phillipe, at the Church of Purgatory in Lanciano who showered us with prayer cards, rosaries, saint bracelets, 200-year-old church documents, and unceasing words of affirmation, the sacristan at the church in Lanciano who asked us if we wanted to have mass there, and Father Brad, our chaplain, who [not only successfully maneuvered through Italian traffic, but also] said the mass.

Come Saturday afternoon, when it was time to meet up with the school, the five of us decided that we could have just returned to Austria without seeing Rome sans regrets after those first few of days.

God is so good.

Peace and blessings,
Mary

Chocolate. Belgian Chocolate.

You know back in AP History when we had to write all those papers citing primary sources? Yeah, primary sources were the best.

Well, going to Belgium and eating Belgian chocolate was like going and eating a primary source.

And Belgian chocolate get's a second post because it was that good.

Belgi(YUM!)

How did I ever think I'd have time to keep up a blog? I wish I had more time to write about all the crazy things that happened this weekend. But I don't! Summary: We had four days off to travel so we did! We went to Belgium!

A few worth-mentionables:

• Got to hitchhike for the first time. It was so amazing. I wish it weren't so sketchy in the states. It's such an adrenaline rush. I'm sure that'll wear off, but playing damsels in distress trying to walk to and from the train station really does wonders. We got to meet prince charming in an Audi. Too bad he didn't speak English.
• Passport check on the night train was a treat, given the police officers were speaking dutch and we were all half-asleep. Someone muttered something along the lines of "What are they doing? Robbing us?" after which we got to hear them make fun of us in dutch. Another treat.
• We had the most incredible hospitality ever at the American College in Leuven. Fr. Mahar, you rock.
• The waffles don't disappoint. Neither does the Chocolate. Oh! The chocolate. We went from chocolatier to chocolatier and decided which to buy from based on the quality of their chocolate fountain. I'm pretty sure I'd do that again.
• Then there were churches! And palaces! And gardens! We all had a moment while sitting in the palace gardens when we realized we were...in Belgium, which was pretty crazy. I mean, we were sitting in a garden in Belgium. I'm just so blessed and so thankful to be here. My life is really pretty awesome.
• I'm pretty sure I witnessed a series miracles on the way home, given that we shouldn't have even made it home. Trains were running late every which way, and we all had philosophy homework that needed to be finished today looming over our heads. But all the trains were just the perfect amount of late so that we could get on them if we ran, and all the conductors were just the perfect amount of saintly...holding entire trains just for us and not minding our chilling out in the luggage compartment when all the seats were full. I'm telling you, we had some serious Guardian Angels looking out for us. It was really quite incredible.

And next week we have our 10-day Rome/Assisi pilgrimage, which I know will be incredible. I'm flying down a day early with some friends and one of our campus chaplains to see some saintly sights in southern Italy before we meet up with our group in Rome. I'm so looking forward to this.

You're in my prayers and again, I love you all.