St. Lawrence of Brindisi

At first glance perhaps the most remarkable quality of Lawrence of Brindisi is his outstanding gift of languages. In addition to a thorough knowledge of his native Italian, he had complete reading and speaking ability in Latin, Hebrew, Greek, German, Bohemian, Spanish and French.

He was born on July 22, 1559, and died exactly 60 years later on his birthday in 1619. His parents William and Elizabeth Russo gave him the name of Julius Caesar, Caesare in Italian. After the early death of his parents, he was educated by his uncle at the College of St. Mark in Venice.
When he was just 16 he entered the Capuchin Franciscan Order in Venice and received the name of Lawrence. He completed his studies of philosophy and theology at the University of Padua and was ordained a priest at 23.
With his facility for languages he was able to study the Bible in its original texts. At the request of Pope Clement VIII, he spent much time preaching to the Jews in Italy. So excellent was his knowledge of Hebrew, the rabbis felt sure he was a Jew who had become a Christian.
In 1956 the Capuchins completed a 15-volume edition of his writings. Eleven of these 15 contain his sermons, each of which relies chiefly on scriptural quotations to illustrate his teaching.
Lawrence’s sensitivity to the needs of people—a character trait perhaps unexpected in such a talented scholar—began to surface. He was elected major superior of the Capuchin Franciscan province of Tuscany at the age of 31. He had the combination of brilliance, human compassion and administrative skill needed to carry out his duties. In rapid succession he was promoted by his fellow Capuchins and was elected minister general of the Capuchins in 1602. In this position he was responsible for great growth and geographical expansion of the Order.
Lawrence was appointed papal emissary and peacemaker, a job which took him to a number of foreign countries. An effort to achieve peace in his native kingdom of Naples took him on a journey to Lisbon to visit the king of Spain. Serious illness in Lisbon took his life in 1619.

The Great Fire of Rome

Background

Though the infamous emperor Nero ruled Rome for less than two decades, his reign witnessed tremendous changes to the empire's capital city. Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus -- more often known as Nero -- was a great-grandson of Caesar Augustus. When he was a child, he and his mother, Agrippina, were exiled by Agrippina's brother, emperor Gaius Caligula, to the tiny Pontian Islands. Two years later, however, the banishment was lifted when Agrippina's uncle, Claudius, took hold of the empire. Nero's mother soon convinced Claudius to marry her and make Nero his heir. In 54 A.D., Claudius was murdered, purportedly a victim of poisonous mushrooms given to him by Agrippina. Nero became the emperor of Rome at age 16. Several years later, Nero had his power-hungry mother moved to a separate residence; shortly thereafter, he allegedly had her killed. There was no end to Nero's ambition. One of his grandest plans was to tear down a third of Rome so that he could build an elaborate series of palaces that would be known as Neropolis. The senate, however, objected ardently to this proposal. Exactly what happened next has remained a mystery for nearly 2,000 years.

On the night of July 19, 64 A.D., a fire broke out among the shops lining the Circus Maximus, Rome's mammoth chariot stadium. In a city of two million, there was nothing unusual about such a fire -- the sweltering summer heat kindled conflagrations around Rome on a regular basis, particularly in the slums that covered much of the city. Knowing this, Nero himself was miles away in the cooler coastal resort of Antium. Yet this was no ordinary fire. The flames raged for six days before coming under control; then the fire reignited and burned for another three. When the smoke cleared, 10 of Rome's 14 districts were in ruin. The 800-year-old Temple of Jupiter Stator and the Atrium Vestae, the hearth of the Vestal Virgins, were gone. Two thirds of Rome had been destroyed.

History has blamed Nero for the disaster, implying that he started the fire so that he could bypass the senate and rebuild Rome to his liking. Much of what is known about the great fire of Rome comes from the aristocrat and historian Tacitus, who claimed that Nero watched Rome burn while merrily playing his fiddle. Gangs of thugs prevented citizens from fighting the fire with threats of torture, Tacitus wrote. There is some support for the theory that Nero leveled the city on purpose: the Domus Aurea, Nero's majestic series of villas and pavilions set upon a landscaped park and a man-made lake, was built in the wake of the fire.

"It would have been seen as very inappropriate on the part of the elite in Rome," says art historian Eric Varner. "They would have been happy if Nero had built the Domus Aurea out in the country, but to do it here in the city really was an extraordinary kind of statement."

Tacitus was a member of this Roman elite, and whether there is a bias in his writing is difficult to know. Indeed, Tacitus was still a boy at the time of the fire, and he would have been a young teenager in 68 A.D., when Nero died. Nero himself blamed the fire on an obscure new Jewish religious sect called the Christians, whom he indiscriminately and mercilessly crucified. During gladiator matches he would feed Christians to lions, and he often lit his garden parties with the burning carcasses of Christian human torches. Yet there is evidence that, in 64 A.D., many Roman Christians believed in prophecies predicting that Rome would soon be destroyed by fire. Perhaps the fire was set off by someone hoping to make the prediction come true.

Twenty centuries later, is there a way to establish who or what started one of antiquity's most destructive conflagrations? Is there any truth to Tacitus's insinuation? Or to Nero's? Archaeologists, historians, and contemporary fire investigators try to pinpoint the cause of this monumental tragedy of the ancient world.

Searching for the hero inside of yourself

This summer at the movies promises to be one packed full of Blockbusting super heroes. From Harry Potters last stand to the return of Captain Jack Sparrow the heroes come to town. The interesting thing is that being a hero doesn’t come easy and they are very often deeply conflicted.

Harry Potter struggles with his inner identity whereas Captain Jack seems to be an accidental hero who rises above his vices to save the day.

The spiritual writer Deepak Chopra wrote a book recently looking at what makes for a superhero and he came up with the seven spiritual laws of superheroes. The first and most important is “the Law of Balance” which is grounded in the interaction between being, feeling, thinking and doing. At their core the hero finds a balance between the darkness and light this is within and so achieves an inner power like no other.

Finding a balance inside ourselves is a theme taken up in the Gospels when Jesus speaks of the dilemma of the weeds among the wheat. How do we cope with the failings or sins which seem choke our every effort to be a better person, we recognise the rich harvest of goodness that is within and allow it to outgrow our weakness.

Ultimately we are assured despite appearances the wheat is so much stronger than the weeds.

Fr. Peter O'Reilly

Song of the Builders

On a summer morning
I sat down
on a hillside
to think about God-

a worthy pastime.
Near me, I saw
a single crcket;
it was moving the grains of the hillside

this way and that way.
How great was its energy,
how humble its effort.
Let us hope

it will always be like this,
each of us going on
in our inexplicable ways
building the universe.

Mary Oliver

The Yen for Order

Summer undoes my careful allotment of time parcels to this and that--this day, this hour for administration, that other day, that other hour for writing my blog, and so on. Actually, life, aka God, undoes my careful allotment of time parcels all the time. And I realized this morning that I spend far too much time trying to tie them up again.

According to Genesis 1, "making order" is a quick way of describing God's creative work. God spends five days out of seven ordering time, space, and the first pragmatic interactions of created beings in a life-sustaining food chain. Only then does God set human beings down into an ordered cosmos, suggesting that a certain amount of order is essential to human survival. However, if you read carefully, you begin to notice that God is not particularly tied down to the kind of linear order laid out in your typical planner. (I wonder if the proliferation of calendars, planners, time management seminars, how-to-organize-your closet-your-desk-and- your-life books, and other gems of the human gift for parting one another from our money reflects a love of order or a frantic but fruitless scramble to impose it.) God creates light and darkness quite awhile before coming up with sun, moon and stars, for example. God makes provision for seed-bearing plants both to feed animal life and to proliferate into an undefined future to feed future generations of animal life but offers very little for the sustenance of marine life (in Genesis 1, not in the actual cosmos. This may be one more sign of the Israelites' utter disinterest in having anything to do with the seas and their denizens.) And there is the forever unanswered question about how Evil, the force that runs around undoing all order, got into the picture at all.

God's work of ordering has two facets that tend to elude me when I sit down to plan the tying up of my careful time parcels into nice, neat, diagrammable pages in my various calendars, planners, and notebooks, which, of course, I can never find when it comes time to put the diagrams into practice because my desk is such a jumble. The first is that God's creative energy all goes into orders that sustain the always-untidy business of life and living on a very grand scale. If we don't understand where cockroaches and mosquitoes fit (God's gonna have a lot of 'splainin to do in heaven), why mountains sometimes fall into the sea as the psalmist notes, what good hurricanes are, and above all why human beings, charged with the task of continuing the divine work of creating, make such an all-fired mess out of it without calling down on our heads another cosmic flood (see Genesis 6!), perhaps it's because we don't really understand what life in all its richness is.

The second facet of God's creative work that eludes me when I'm "planning," is that it always starts with chaos: the rather terrifying primal chaos of Genesis 1:1-2, or the degenerate human chaos with which the biblical new creation begins in the prophets' promises of a new promised land after the return from exile in Babylon or in the gospels' testimony to Christ, the restorer of all that has gone awry. In both cases, chaos is the essential preliminary to the work of creation. The primal chaos is what I've often called "a seething cauldron of possibilities" out of which God draws everything.

I am a creative person. We all are, whether our creativity makes Michelangelo's David or Bach's Magnificat or a birthday cake to delight the hearts of a roomful of four-year-olds or simply that unappreciated gift, a clean, uncluttered space in which we can live, move and have our being. We must be. At the end of Genesis 1, when we know very little yet about God except that God is an incredibly imaginative Creator, God says "let us make humankind in our image." Christian reflected has heaped all sorts of things into that basket, "the image of God," but that image begins with creativity. As a creative person, I need to start where God started: with chaos, with "the seething cauldron of possibilities" as yet unnamed, unsorted, apparently purposeless. If we try to explain Genesis 1 from the belief that God created ex nihilo (out of nothing), then we have to believe that God first made the chaotic mess from the Divine Word then drew all of created reality. Contemporary thinkers who have given us the chaos theory propose that God never actually reduced all that primal chaos into order: it is still among us and around us, still seething with possibilities, still giving birth to beings.

I wonder, then, if "chaos" is really an enemy to be confronted with the chair and whip of my various planners and licked into submission so that I can get on with life. I wonder if chaos isn't rather the perpetual treasure chest from which spill out all the possibilities that spurn creative work in all its forms. Human beings do need order, especially the truly primal order of purpose, to survive. But I wonder what would happen if I were finally to succeed in wrestling every breath of time, every corner of space, every piece of paper and dust bunny in my own small universe into the kind of careful order for which I seem to hanker. I wonder if I would find that not chaos but excessive order, neatly packaged in linear rows, is sterile.

©2009 Abbey of St. Walburga