Ecco mi

Ecco mi. Here I am, ready to take on the full weight of my vocation. So sounded the voice of Carlo whenever he had to respond to being 'called' in his ordaination ceremony. Like the prophet Samuel, scared that his nerves would reduce his voice to nothing, he belted out his 'Ecco mi' to the profoundest corner of the cavernous cathedral.

He hasn't change a bit, I hope you don't mind me saying so, Carlo, if you are reading. A little less hair ... a little more pinchability in his cheek ... perhaps even a little more confidence in his own competence ... but essentially the same Carlo as the one who bade me farewell those ten years ago. As I was the only one coming by myself he sort of spoiled me, putting me up in the Archbishop's house which houses rooms and rooms of centuries-old works of art. It could have felt like being locked up in an art gallery as in 'Ferris Bueller's Day Off'. Fionnuala will know what I'm talking about. I spent hours the first full day there just walking around and looking at room after room of paintings. Eventually I came to a square room whose acoustics made it an echo chamber. I discovered this by slowly walking across it and hearing my footsteps magnified as I approached the middle spot. Then my whisper was carried about the room as if by microphone. The wonders of geometrical proportion. It taught me that to be heard one must only deign to step out into the middle of things, and just speak as one normally does. Then Carlo came to show me the bedrrom where the Pope had stayed in 1990 when he visited Ferrara, which made for an affecting moment for me.

But I almost didn't get that far. As our Ryanair plane was approaching Forli it travelled through a horrendous mist, which turned out to be a thunder storm, lightening et al. The pilot tried to descend but we had a shaky shaky experience much like you would see on some disaster movie, before the plane then banked sharply up. We circled Forli for half an hour before the pilot came on to say that we would have to go to Treviso, fecking miles away. It was where David and all of us had stayed in my last visit quirkily, but hardly the place where I would need to go twice. And no way to contact Carlo while in the plane, and when descended no number to ring except his work number. But he managed to pick up my message by calling his work phone, and he then proceeded to sleep for three or four hours, as did the Bishop's driver who had come with him to pick me up. See what I mean, first class treatment for which I didn't even feel guilty. So a three hour bus journey later from Treviso to Forli and I was there and reacquainted with don Carlo again.

His English was better than my Italian, but I just about survived talking with his relations in a smidgeon come splattering come smidgeon of pidgeon Italian. He looked every inch the priest and after the festivities of his ordaination and first mass, we had time to walk and talk around the lovely old cobblestoned Ferrara, the city of bicycles. It seemed an idyllic, slower pace at which to live one's life. I was acquainted for the first time with the wonder of hot chocolate in the morning with Zambucca which a smiling octaganarian sister of the Bishop had made for me. She seemed at least ten years younger than that. She held my cheeks and then gave me a book on why Ferrara is a beautiful city. Later she asked me my age and when I said trenta-due she shook my hand. I wasn't quite sure what that meant, but I think it was something like I had the rest of my life in front of me.

Seeing Carlo so in his place and vocation made me weigh up where I am in relation with mine. I definitely know two things about it - philosophy and now teaching. Philosophy was there first and I thought teaching would get in the way to an extent. But now I would miss something without the teaching. Starting to tutor 'real' philosophy students again, and not just seminarians or social science students who have to be there, reminds me how much I have missed that and the joy reminds me that it's part of who I'm meant to be. But what I sort of finalised over the time away was the importance of writing to me. It allows me to exercise the imagination muscle and flex out the boundaries of me. The need for this blog is enough of a testament to that fact. The plays and poetry are the more serious reflections of my soul, but as I and the world are serious enough, I think it is now time for me to write comedy. Ecco mi.