Easter

We spent Easter weekend in South Tyrol, also known as Trento/Alto Adige, a semi-autonomous region in northern Italy.  It had been part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire until World War I, when the Allies handed it over to Italy as a thank-you gift for coming to their war.  Later, when the Fascists stepped onto the scene, they attempted a full-on “Italianization” of the region, banning the teaching of German in schools and assigning Latinized (and often goofy-sounding) names onto all of the towns – hence Salthaus, the town where we stayed, is recognized by my GPS as “Saltusio.”  As you might imagine, the locals didn’t (and still don’t) have a lot of love for their Roman landlords, but things have evolved into a sort of equilibrium: the dominant language is now German, but all the signs are in both German and Italian.  Almost all of the tax revenue stays within the region.  According to a guy I know from Siena, jobs in Alto Adige pay very well and are highly coveted, the catch being that you need to speak German to work there.  All that being said, if you ever find yourself in conversation with a Südtirolese, you probably shouldn’t refer to them as “Italian.”

We left Geneva around 2pm on Maundy Thursday.  There are two ways you can get there from here: up and over the Alps, taking a right at Zürich and crossing one of the mountain passes; or down and under the Alps, through the Mont Blanc Tunnel, past Milan and then hanging a left a Lago di Garda.  We opted for the latter, which is less scenic but usually a little faster.   I was on teleconferences for the first two hours of the trip, so time passed in that choppy, disoriented way that happens when you’re on the phone and driving at the same time.  East of Milan we stopped for dinner at an Autogrill, an Italian chain of highway-rest-stop restaurants which are prevalent in this part of Europe, and superior to most restaurants you will find anywhere in the United States.  It’s cafeteria style, but there are always different sections – a salad bar, a pasta station, a meat station, dessert.  Even though they’re cooking for hundreds of people, somehow they manage to get the pasta al dente.  The silverware is actual silverware.  Out where you sit and eat, a collection of glass bottles of olive oil and vinegar are waiting.  We split a tortelloni with spinach and a bowl of clementines.  I saw a guy in his 20s with a plate of grilled zucchini in front of him.

At the cashier, the woman asks you if you want a coffee (I do).  This is added to your bill, and after you eat, you carry the receipt down to the coffee bar where they serve you your coffee.  The server then executes some kind of personalized ritual – tearing the top half of the receipt or marking it with a thumbnail – to note that they’ve processed your order.   You drink your coffee standing up at the bar.

As it got dark and we drove north toward Trent/Trento, we listened to a Fresh Air interview with Barbara Brown Taylor, an Episcopal priest who left her church to go teach religion to college students, and who has since found some modest interviewed-by-Oprah-level of notoriety.  Terry Gross bubbled with excitement every time she said “ePIScopal PRIEST,” suggesting that interviewing a member of the clergy on NPR is some kind of subversive act these days.    In the interview, Barbara Brown Taylor gave one of the best descriptions of God that I’ve ever heard¹.  She also said how she felt like she couldn’t go to Good Friday services anymore, because of things said about the killers of Jesus in the Good Friday gospel readings which she thought might be hurtful to her Jewish friends.  I’m certainly not qualified to debate scripture with Barbara Brown Taylor, but I think she might have seen one too many Mel Gibson movies.  As I read it, the point of the Good Friday story is not at all that one group of people was good and another was evil.  It’s that all people were unwilling to see that God was right there among them (“…He came to his own, and his own people did not receive him (Jn1:11)).”  It’s that, when push came to shove, some of JC’s own disciples were more interested in saving their own asses than in recognizing the son of God (Mk 14:66-72).  And it’s that Pilate himself, generally considered the villain in this drama, and scorned from the Apostles’ Creed to Telly Savalas, wasn’t convinced that Jesus had done anything wrong; it was the crowd who in the end called for his crucifixion (Mt 27:23).

Meanwhile, back in Boston.

I realize that I didn’t say much earlier about giving up sugar for Lent.  At first, it was more difficult than last year, when I didn’t eat meat.  I can’t think of too many circumstances in which I’ve been “craving” a hamburger, but I realized this year that I was eating, and craving, sugar every day.  A little chocolate in my muesli at breakfast (or a pain au chocolat at the airport), some dark chocolate with after-lunch coffee, and some kind of dessert after dinner.  When traveling and eating out, I would never refuse dessert; the cupboard in my apartment in Cambridge usually contained a bag or two of those fiendish² Tate’s cookies you find at Whole Foods.  I wouldn’t call my eating behavior out-of-control (or unusual), but when I consciously stopped eating sugar, it made me more aware of the difference between feeding myself and feeding a craving.  It drove a kind of wedge between my “self,” which is me, and my desire, which is something I feel but which is not me.  This is hard to describe without sounding flaky.  Paul gives it a shot in Romans 7:15:   “For I do not understand my own actions…For I have the desire to do what is right, but not the ability to carry it out…Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I who does it, but sin that dwells within me.”  The Buddha serves up more or less the same dish, hold the guilt: the origin of suffering is “craving, desire, or attachment.”    

Meanwhile, back in Salthaus, I celebrated Easter with a piece of cake, layered with dark and white chocolate and whipped cream, topped with a layer of passion fruit jelly.  It was delicious, and I savored it like someone who hadn’t eaten any sugar for 6 weeks, but I didn’t find myself mindlessly shoveling it into my face.

I think I was hoping for some kind of Easter revelation at the end of all this.  It didn’t really come, as holiday trips are always busier than you think they’ll be, with driving around and doing things.  Also, there were a couple of work emergencies that I had to deal with, and my sense is that one’s opportunities to experience the mystical are inversely proportional to the number of PowerPoint slides one encounters in any given week.

Still, there is something unavoidably divine about South Tyrol.  The way that the mountains seem to rise vertically from the pool-table-flat valley, and thus how, when you’re in the valley, your field of vision is completely occupied by earth tones, or rather by earth itself, and a mysterious calm comes over you.  The way that the farms are perched high up on the mountains, with plowed rows gripping onto the steep grade, and you feel like some kind of harmony between man and nature has been realized here.  The way the smell of the apple blossoms overtook us as we hiked the Schildhöfenweg.  The white noise that the Passer river makes as it flows over rocks that seem so perfectly placed as to be man-made.  In Leaving Church, Barbara Brown Taylor talks about the Irish concept of a “thin place,” where the membrane between the mundane and the mystical seems to dissolve into almost nothing.  This is one of those places.

Late afternoon on Easter Sunday I went running, out and back along the Passer River, and then up the steep hill past our hotel.  I crossed the street and walked over to St. Michael’s Church in Salthaus, which I’ve never seen in service, but whose doors always seem to be open whenever I try to go in.  It’s a newer church with a modern design, built to complement the surrounding landscape.  A wide window to the right of the altar affords a view of the mountains; the ceiling is wavy parallel slats of wood.  I sat alone and said a prayer of thanks, and drops of my sweat made a little slapping sound as they fell onto the vinyl kneeler in front of my pew.

¹ “When I use the word God, I do not envision a large person with two arms, two legs, a nose, and two eyes.  I envision, instead, some presence so beyond my being, a presence that both knows the stars by name and knows me by name, as well, that is not here to be useful to me, that is not here to give me things as much as to ask me to give myself away for love…(W)hen I say I believe in God, I mean I trust.  I trust in the goodness of life, of being.  I trust that beyond all reason.  I trust that with my life.  And that’s what I mean by God.”

²  It’s not insignificant that we often use diabolical metaphors like this to describe food.