The resistance will not be televised
The Tradition of Living Beautifully, Issue #58
(A quick note! You can listen to me read this essay by clicking the player above!)
We stand a few feet from the entrance of the small chapel. My husband’s away for the weekend, and I’m alone with our two small boys. Men in shiny teal and gold vestments rustle about, completing last minute tasks, ensuring everything’s in place before the big moment. More men in long, royal blue capes with red velvet at the collar, and women with their heads shrouded in mantillas, or lace coverings, also stand about, some with children, some without, waiting for those in the crowded chapel to start making their way outside. The wooden carrier is covered in white flowers. The marching band, called a feast band, plays complete with horns and heavy bass drums. I bend down and whisper to my four-year-old, Here comes the Madonna.
She makes her way through the chapel doors, carefully hoisted aloft by a handful of the robed men, money bills of various denominations draping her on all sides, a sign of devotion from those she’s helped, healed and saved. She’s lifted onto the carrier, and then again hoisted onto the shoulders of some six or seven men to begin the procession. Viva Maria! one of the men yells through a megaphone,Viva Maria! those around him respond.
My dear friend, my brother, really, John, is one of the men donning a cape. He lifts my son, his godson, onto his shoulders so that he can get a better look at the Madonna and the accoutrement below. The cape, along with the red cross and blue ribbon I have pinned to my lapel, are the garments of the chivalric order to which we both belong, The Sacred Military Constantinian Order of Saint George, a dynastic order of knighthood of the House of Bourbon-Two Sicilies, which once ruled Southern Italy, connecting us to our cultural roots. While I’m merely a Dame in the order (in short, a female knight) John is the grand puba, His Excellency (H.E.) Delegate for the United States.
I lean over to John and say, It’s amazing that we’re still doing this. By which I mean: It’s amazing that we, here in New Jersey, in the year 2024, the children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren of Southern Italian immigrants, who brought these traditions with them to a country that didn’t understand or appreciate, are still participating in them, when the world is on fire, when traditions are dismissed, when things we once understood easily are no longer easy to understand, and when this must certainly appear to the passersby an absurdist, archaic pageant.
We do it as resistance, John says, flatly, matter of factly. This is our French Resistance.
As often happens when I’m around John, I go quiet, because what he’s said hits me in a place that recognizes truth. In this world we’re living in, donning the robes of our ancestral homes, honoring the saints and holy mothers of our cultural religions, stepping out of what society tells us is worthy of our time, to participate in a tradition that has been going on for centuries among our people, one that is rooted in the spiritual, the holy, the other worldly, is an act of resistance.
I take a deep breath. I look at the women wearing mantillas, which is a rather old-fashioned tradition of a woman showing respect before God by covering her head, and wish I were one of them. When we baptized my first son, we went the extra mile to be sure to have a Latin Mass, with an Italian priest who included many traditional rites in the service, but I’d forgotten to wear a veil and have regretted it since. I think about that, feeling that familiar schism in me—one part wanting to be covered in lace and babies, the other part wanting to be dressed in the latest, most fashionable style, on the cover of some glossy magazine; the pull of the old world and the new, tradition and modern. I haven’t bridged the chasm, and perhaps have come to terms with the fact that I never will. Maybe for some of us it’s just the razor’s edge we walk along.
This feast is organized each year by another dear friend, Pat, who has resurrected this festa of Madonna del Sacro Monte, the madonna of the region from which his family hails in Italy. If you’ve ever planned a simple child’s birthday party, you can imagine what might go into planning a weekend-long religious feast, complete with food and music and various elements of devotion. What Pat’s doing is an act of resistance. Society tells him this is a ridiculous thing to waste his time on, and Pat defies that edict by doing it year after year. And let me tell you, he spares no detail. Each year he revives a long-lost aspect of the feast, including dissecting the pattern of an antique gonfalone, a large banner, in order to recreate a new one as the pattern hasn’t been made in decades. Each year he funnels the profits from donations back into reviving more lost tradition. He does it for his ancestors, the community, and of course for God; three things not at the forefront of most Americans’ minds in this day and age.
As the procession begins, we follow behind, a sign of loyalty and solemnity in honor of the holy mother. I walk behind the Madonna with some of my closest friends and my two sons, as I did with my own parents when I was a child, and they did with theirs when they were children in Southern Italy, and feel John’s words strongly, and sensitive as I am, let them kind of wobble in my throat, emanating emotion.
The time of the French Resistance, which was not an idyllic one, although I’m possibly about to describe it in ways that may make it seem so, has been on my mind lately; I’ve been thinking about the artists of the era between the world wars—Picasso, Matisse, Hemingway, Stein—and how they worked with brushes and pens and paper, without thought to social media, without blue light and touch screens, without cell towers and keyboards, how they sat in cafes drinking coffee and wine and spoke to one another, face to face, between laconic threads of cigarette smoke, reaching for handkerchiefs in well-tailored pockets to dab the very real summer sweat from their brow. When I think of this time, I think of tables made of iron and wood; I think of wildflowers and bicycles with wicker baskets filled with fresh bread and eggs and cheese that didn’t require a label to tell whether it was produced in a way that’s safe and nutritious to eat. I think of hands used for working, for letter writing, for touching one another; I think of strong rivers and dark nights where the stars were always visible in the sky. I think of it as one of the last eras of the human.
I don’t know what will happen to the world or how we’ll live in it in the years to come. There’s very real talk of artificial intelligence overtaking almost everything, just as we’ve been reading about in Sci-Fi novels since the 1950’s, and talk of replacing meat with insects on the dinner table. I hear in Oregon they’re shutting down family farms, small, private farms, in the name of saving the climate. I hear the future will not be human, and the worst part is, looking around, I can believe it. And so I guess my place is here, somewhere between the old and new, and I guess if there’s a war of sorts afoot, and I have to choose a side, as I guess we all will, I’ll be part of the resistance, cooking and baking and mothering, sewing and praying, with my family and blood brothers at my side, being human, as our ancestors were.
Have you been wanting to gather the stories of your ancestors, but just haven’t been able to commit to it? Carve out some creative time with me this summer for inspiration and to learn how to gather, organize, write, explore and connect with your family stories. I still have some slots open for the summer session of my creative workshop, “Tell the Story of Your Ancestors,” which will be held over two consecutive Saturday mornings, July 13th and 20th, from 10 am to Noon Eastern time.
This is a casual but spiritual and encouraging workshop designed to help you see how the line between you and your ancestors remains unbroken, while also documenting your larger family story for future generations. This is not just a workshop on didactics, but poetics, asking you through writing prompts and examples, through conversation and question to look inside these stories and see more than anecdotes. It will ask you to see yourself in the long, majestic story of your ancestry.
We work together during online sessions, held virtually over Zoom, so you can attend from anywhere in the country, but we also converse in-between sessions so that you can get the most out of our time together. You can learn more about the workshop and register by visiting bellafigurapodcast.com/workshops.
