The Butterfly Of Genoa

And: Trump & Faith; Sinister Normandy; Ignatius The Babylonian God

That’s me with the Italian artist and engraver Luca Daum. I’m holding his 2018 “Temptation of St. Galgano”; he’s holding the Italian iconographer Fabrizio Diomedi’s icon of St. Galgano that I commissioned. Luca and his wife Cristina were in Budapest yesterday as part of a guided tour of central Europe.

Notice the joy in her eyes

We met for lunch at what turned out to be a lousy Chinese restaurant across the street from the Nagycsarnok, the Market Hall, where we met. It was too hot to walk far, and I didn’t want to take the Italians to the excellent nearby pizza place, Manu+. Well, the food was crummy, and the Daums got to experience one of the few unpleasant parts of Budapest life: table service unreformed since Communism.

Luca speaks a smattering of English; Cristina none. I speak no Italian. We got through the lunch with goodwill and Google Translate. Luca is a very humble man. When I told him that he changed my life by approaching me that night in the Genoa oratory church, he shook his head and pointed to heaven, to say, “It was God.” Indeed it was, but God depends on our faithfulness to accomplish his work.

I’ve written about the “butterfly effect” with regard to J.D. Vance’s rise. You know the story: a liberal Seattle reader of my old TAC blog gave me a digital copy of Hillbilly Elegy, which had recently been published. She thought I would like it. The book knocked me flat. I found J.D. on Twitter, asked him for an interview, published it on my blog … and it went megaviral. Within days, J.D. was all over the national media, and his book rocketed to the top of the bestseller lists. And now he’s running for vice president. My role in all this was simply to be in the right place at the right time. The butterfly that flapped her wings in Seattle eventually caused the “hurricane” of Vance’s vice-presidential candidacy.

In a similar way, Luca Daum’s approaching me that night in Genoa to give me his engraving, only because he had been praying that afternoon and felt the Holy Spirit told him to do so, now has resulted in my book, Living In Wonder. I won’t tell that story again; you regulars have heard it too often. If you have never heard it, or need a refresher, click here. I realized as I neared the end of writing the book, that the core message of Living In Wonder is right there embedded in the engraving that Luca gave me that night in Genoa, out of obedience to the prompting of the Holy Spirit.

Here is a passage from the book, in which I talk about this:

One more thing: we have to learn openness to synchronicity, serendipity, and signs—and to listen (with discernment) to them. Where would I be if that Genoese artist had not listened to what God told him that afternoon in his studio and come that night bearing a gift for the American writer? Where would I be if I had not made the connection between the artist’s drawing of the obscure medieval saint and a little-known Russian film that just happened to pass before my sad and weary eyes on a warm spring night in Louisiana, offering me a way out of my despair?

I can tell you this much: you would not have the book you have just read. In fact, the image of Saint Galgano’s temptation is a condensed symbol of this book’s message: it is a portrait of a strong-willed man who, after refusing God’s call, went to a mountaintop and saw God. In response to this revelation, which included a true miracle (which you can still see today), he sacrificed his life for Christ, before whom, in Daum’s drawing, Galgano bows. Yet Galgano struggles to keep his eyes firmly fixed on heaven, despite the temptation of his own thoughts to attract his attention away from God.

There you have it: the core message of re-enchantment, in a single man’s story, captured in a single image.

• Listen for the Lord’s calling with a heart willing to obey when the word comes.

• Respond to the revelation of awe by sacrificing everything to serve God.

• Pray without ceasing.

• Keep your eyes on heaven, despite the many temptations to turn your eyes to the things of the earth.

Any seeds that this story has planted in your heart that bear good fruit can be traced first to Luca Daum’s act of prayerful obedience and my own willingness to receive this strange grace and to act on it as if it were a message in a bottle.

I was just going through stuff I’ve posted in this newsletter about my friendship with Luca, and found this e-mail he sent me. I translated it with Google out of Italian:

Dear Rod

When you tell me your human story and the pain of separation from your children and your former wife, I think back to what Monsignor Canale, my confessor, who died still young three years ago, told me one day.

In the darkest moment of my life, when everything was collapsing and I was crying out for an answer because I feared losing my faith, he told me that that very desert in which I suffered was the truth and essence of authentic faith.

He told me this when he was already ill with the disease that was killing him, but I didn't know it.

That statement from him didn't give me any comfort at the time and didn't ease my pain, but it was as if a hand, with a single firm and decisive blow, had driven a nail of painful awareness somewhere in my soul.

The wound is still there with his pain. Sometimes (often unfortunately), I numb myself with the things of the world to uselessly alleviate the effort of bearing that "nail", but, with the grace of God, I don't want to eradicate it. I will never tear it out because I am certain that it will be the last thing that will remain with me at the end of the journey, the last thing that will keep me nailed to my Savior in the end.

Excuse me, Rod, the banality of what I write; you know these things because every Christian comes to know them. I'm probably just clarifying for myself a suggestion that I want to offer you thinking about our mutual friend Galgano.

You already know what I want to tell you but I'll say it anyway: the sword is that nail, and that nail, if accepted, puts us in a position not only to "take up our cross every day", but to welcome it enough to accept being nailed to it.

I don't want, because I can't, to give you any advice on the choices you will have to make. But I want to tell you one thing if I am able to help you: I believe that you are already fully in the vocation that the Lord has given you.

Your heroic fidelity to the sacrament of marriage, the books that you write to testify to the Truth and which sow so much good in souls, your coherence lived through the trials of life, what are they if not a faith lived in the desert?

Aren't you and I the Stalker [of the Tarkovsky film — RD] who cries and says "the Zone is all I have"?

I add crying: "I will not remove that nail, I will not remove the sword from the rock of Christ."

Finally, because I have already said too much, I want to bring you a phrase that was said to me by the priest in confession a little while ago: "Life is a hard-fought misery".

For the rest I thank the Lord for giving me a friend

What a good man he is! Luca is now constructing a website to sell prints of his work. I’ve encouraged him to make it quick, because once Living In Wonder hits the market, there is going to be a lot of people eager to know more about this mysterious Italian artist, and who are going to want to buy a print of his “Temptation Of St. Galgano”. Luca is such a talented engraver. Take a look at this website for a 2019 exhibit of his work; you can see the range of his talent.

I told Luca today before we parted that any good that Living In Wonder does in the world is in part thanks to his faithfulness. And this is true for us all, is it not?

Later yesterday, Luca texted me to say that there was a part of the Galgano engraving story that he had not told me. He sent it to me in Italian; here is the Google translation, which he gave me permission to share:

I’ll try to explain to you what had pushed me deep down to give you the print that distant evening at the oratory of San Filippo Neri.

It was not only for the reasons I have already told you, or because it was an engraving of a religious subject. Those motivations remain valid, but there is a more intimate and profound reason.

You see, not everything creative that comes out of our hands is truly authentic. It often happens that know-how, the craft, unconsciously takes over.

The engraving of the San Galgano matrix was carried out with the burin (in English Burin or Graver), a technique that takes a long time, and is very difficult because it requires constant applied pressure and great patience. I remember that, during the entire duration of the engraving of the matrix, I kept my heart in prayer in the sense that I asked the Lord to guide the tip of my burin for each single cut in the copper of the matrix.

I try to practice the prayer of the Russian Pilgrim [the Jesus Prayer — RD[ in everyday life, but I cannot truly live it deeply.

But when I engrave, especially when I use the microscope to be more precise, I can concentrate my attention much more easily, and this allows me to go into the depths in some way. This is true if there is a right decision of the will in doing so. In all sincerity, I can tell you that during the weeks spent working on that matrix I felt in communion with the Lord more than in all the previous works I engraved.

I therefore chose to bring you that print because, for the reasons I told you, I considered it the most authentic and the one for which I had the most gratitude to the Lord.

Look how much gratitude I still owe to the Lord for the wonderful fruits that have subsequently blossomed!

That man prayed the Galgano image into existence, like an iconographer! I am not worthy of such a gift, but maybe, because it gave rise to Living In Wonder ,(which features a full-page reproduction of the Galgano engraving), I am just following the promptings of the Holy Spirit in carrying out God’s plan. There was a time in my life — a cynical, callow time — when I would have sneered at people who said that about the things they do, and the things that happen to them. No more. The reason I tell at the end of Living In Wonder the story of how Luca’s Galgano image came to me, and what it inspired in me (the book), is because I want the reader to know that if you keep your eyes open and your heart ready to follow, these things may happen. The evidence is right there in your hands. It publishes Oct 22; pre-order here, or from Eighth Day Books exclusively if you want a signed copy.