Re-entering the world

Whichever door opens is the one to go through

Finally moving: how does Providence usually work?

The “rat-in-a-maze” school of discernment: stay calm, follow the scent of the cheese, try the door in front of you. If it doesn’t open, try the next one.

4.5 years ago, in April 2017, 6 months after the last earthquake in Norcia, I came to live in the little flat in the big farm house in The Middle of Nowhere, Umbria. Tomorrow the movers are coming to bring me a stack of boxes, and the final stage - the actual move - will begin. There is no part of moving that is not a trial, particularly for those with Benedictine sensibilities, for whom stability is a deep instinct, but this feels solidly necessary and willed from above, and I’ll explain how I know.

(It helps to have Gandalfian monks around to help you figure things out.)

I have waited here for 4.5 years - 1.5 years longer than the lease - and often in a state of confusion, for some clear sign about what to do next. Deep down, I was confident it would come (this strange life has been a long series of such unmistakable calls) and that I would be unequivocally certain it was correct when it came.

How do you know a thing is the will of God for your life? Most often when a sign or signal to move comes, it is not the result of some bright idea of your own, or from your own struggle to make some particular thing happen. Very often, most often, the Thing you’re supposed to do is not something you could have come up with on your own. But it is something that coincides with other things already established, of a piece with them, but is moved forward by external things not of your own making.

And if you’re in the habit of prayer, keeping your tinder dry and your weapons sharp and oiled and your armour in good nick like a good soldier, you will know; it will be a clear signal, like the lighting of the beacons.

From 3:34 am, August 24, 2016 to November 8, 2021

It was the right place to come, in the end, for a lot of reasons. I needed quite a lot of sorting out. To start with, it took two years for the sharper edges of the PTSD to wear down, so at least I don’t do the Earthquake Freeze anymore every time a truck goes past the house. But it’s taken this long - including all the way through the Covid hysteria - to understand what I was supposed to do next. And for a place to do it to become clear.

When I came here, after a month of looking for any place at all, it was the very last moment. Time was running out on my holiday flat rental, and I was up and down the length and breadth of Umbria, along with thousands of other people who had been displaced all over central Italy.

As refugee camps go, it could be a lot worse.

This little place, a one-bedroom flat in a big old farm house on the farm land near Perugia, with its big garden attached, became a place of calm and recovery. But it was obviously never going to be home. It had all the things I needed except the one thing I needed most: the Mass, and the sacramental life and the Divine Office.

One thing this time of exile, this long fast, did for me was really sink it in that the Novus Ordo religion is not my religion, and there could be no crossover. The New Thing cannot replace the ancient Faith, and I cannot attend the Novus Ordo rites for the same reason I would not attend a Lutheran or Buddhist ceremony to fulfil my obligations.

Tempio di San Michele Arcangelo; 4th century, Perugia. From time to time it was possible to get up to the city for Mass here, keep the flame alive.

That was a hard pill because it meant there was no way I could settle here, and with the true Mass and Faith shrinking in Italy - being aggressively stamped out by the authority of the Church founded to protect and promote it - it meant there were very few places left to go. I can’t live in a city like Florence or Rome; but the Mass is available almost nowhere else - and now who knows for how long even there.

So for over four years the main problem remained insoluble. In one sense, though frustrating, it was also a relief; I had no way to solve this problem, and was forced to leave it in more capable hands.

With the gang in Rome, first Synod on the Family, 2015 and my last time with them all. I knew already that my time was done.

A seed planted blossoms in the ruins

Shortly after I moved to Norcia in 2014, I stopped writing full time. Having studied seriously classical academic drawing and painting at a private atelier throughout my time in Rome, I had never settled on how I could turn that training to productive use. But when I moved to Norcia, the Prior of the monastery suggested that people who come to Norcia love monastic life and medieval things, and they would love sacred art in the old Gothic Umbrian style to take home with them. It was the germ of an idea, but it took a catastrophe to get me started in earnest.

After I came here, and for a long time, depression and isolation - with the grinning spectre of despair crouching behind them - hovered around me in the shadows, and sometimes would get hold of me for a while. It helped to remember what St. Anthony must have experienced in his early days in the desert. I wanted to go home to Norcia so badly, but there was not the slightest hope. The town had only barely started to recover when the lockdowns bashed it down again. (Damnable idiots, as well as evil, this government...)

But it was clear I had to be removed entirely from the Old Life, the Old Man, where activism and involvement, the desire to be known and important, to be out and about and doing lots of important things in the world, would be washed away entirely.

Idol worship and unforeseen consequences

In a sense of growing desperation to figure out what I was supposed to do, I made a test. I went down to Rome where all my former colleagues were meeting to have a big To Do about the pope and the Amazon Synod, and this was the confirmation. It was wonderful seeing everyone again, reconnecting with old friends, but it could not be any clearer. My time in that world is completely over. It was clear there was no room for me in it anymore, but more importantly, no room for it in me.

It would be hard to imagine anything more clearly apocalyptic than what we saw that week. There was not the slightest doubt there would be dire consequences for such an appalling crime. And these were not long in coming.

Whatever else, and however one interpreted it, there was no denying anymore that something BIG was going on. The only question I had was about the correct response. Was it the will of God to oppose this with more “activism”? With conferences and press releases, articles and YouTube videos, podcasts and open letters…? What is the correct way to fight a spiritual battle? With the things, the methodology, of this world? Maybe it was right for some. It’s certainly true that people needed to hear an opposing voice, to at least be assured they weren’t imagining what they were seeing, to help them fight the gaslighting.

But it was very clear, with a strong internal certitude, that it was not the right way for me. I went home. My trip to the City had been informative in one sense, but I was still no further ahead in finding out what I was supposed to do in a positive sense.

A new way

On the work table today.

It cannot but have been Providential that during precisely that time in Rome, with all the mad things going on around and my own inner turmoil, I found a little notice for an iconography course, pasted into the window of a shop. I had gone back up to Norcia to consult with Fr. Oblate Master, and though he didn't really have anything concrete to suggest, agreed wholeheartedly that my strong feeling of aversion to the activist world was correct, and to be heeded. So I went home, still without a plan for going ahead, but at least comforted that I had definitively crossed off one path from the list.

I had already contacted Sr. Susanna about the course, but she told me the class was full. But when I got home from Norcia, still in a state of confusion over what to do, I found an email saying there had been a cancellation and I could come. Some kind friends in the US sent me enough to cover all the class fees, travel expenses and the couple of months rent it would require, since I would be too busy to write. It was an open door.

I took the class in November and December 2019, little guessing that in only a few months the entire country - and shortly after nearly the whole world - would be locked down and the chaos of the last two years would begin in earnest. And through it all, I just painted. I had my first commission before the class was even finished, and they have not stopped coming. 

St. Anne and the Infant Virgin, egg tempera on wood panel, in the style of Fra Angelico, Duccio di Buoninsegna and Pinturicchio. Looking at it with a more educated eye now, I can see it is a strange conglomeration of styles that maybe don’t fit too well together. But I still like it.

Through the entire crazed Covid period, I painted and prayed. The world locked down, and we all watched in growing fear a world that had ceased to even try to make sense. I guess I just didn’t know what else to do. And the more I painted and prayed, the less interesting everything else became.

I still wrote a little, but every day, bit by bit, this other thing filled my entire interior gaze. The more I learned, the more I wanted to learn and the more I started re-defining myself, re-understanding who I was supposed to be. I was being re-configured, somehow, by this work.

And I also wanted to try to share the incredible things I was discovering. This world of beauty, rationality and divine meaning this form of art represents seems to me like the solution to the insoluble problem of a world that has entirely and abruptly lost its compass.

A signal flare: time to move

Then, when my mind was fully absorbed and interior peace was growing more firm, three external things happened at once that seemed to push the decision forward.

First was that the government was imposing the Green Pass, and would likely restrict public transport and other public services only to the vaxxed. This for me would mean a condition of permanent lockdown in this isolated place, which seemed intolerable.

The second was the horrifying news of the effective suppression by this pope of the Traditional Mass throughout the world. With lockdowns and restrictions, and a viciously hostile episcopate, very few weekly Masses survived anywhere in Italy. The hope we’d had from Summorum Pontificum that there would be some growth that could come through the dioceses was finally completely squashed. It was obvious that the moves against the Faith we had been expecting for so long were under way; which said it was time to at least find a secure place for the long wait. 

The third thing, I heard - from LifeSite of all people! - was that the Consoling Sisters of the Sacred Heart, an Italian community of sisters affiliated with the SSPX with whom I was friendly, were looking at buying a large convent in the centro of Narni to house their sudden population boom of American novices.  

It was a flare in a darkening sky, and a sense of urgency suddenly appeared. Half a lifetime of using the internet to find things out came in handy; I found a guy with a very large flat to rent.

It's a bit removed from the general bustle of the town, being right up nearly at the very top of the mountain,

The neighbours’ place. Probably mostly ghosts these days.

right next door to the Rocca castle. It will be quiet and safer for the beasties to go outside (though there are cinghiale in the park and woods, and where there’s wild boar, there’s the lupi who like to eat them) well away from traffic and noise and tourists, with nice Italian neighbours. Three bedrooms, a good functional kitchen, a little lounge with a fireplace for the evenings and a wrap-around terrace with good western-exposure light for flower and herb pots. 

A trecento fresco in Narni Duomo. A tiny city full of beauty.

The Plan

But most important is the huge living room that I have asked Massimo to remove nearly all the furniture from and that has a whole wall of windows to give excellent light. This will be my first professional studio - instead of just a corner of the sitting room. .

I’m also looking seriously at expanding the kind of work I’ll be doing. Still doing full formal icons as commissions, but also adding smaller works on paper, and prints, cards, gift tags and Christmas decorations - anything one can do with a digital scanner and printer. I’ve been diving into information on how to create high-quality, high-resolution scans that can be sent out as unique digital products, thus skirting the problems and expense of shipping works out of the country.

I hope also to offer classes in drawing, egg tempera painting, iconography and sacred art and all that goes along with it. To build a centre, so to speak, where these ancient and almost lost things can be preserved and loved again

Tomorrow I get started. I wanted to write all this to give a fuller picture of where things are going and what it all means to me. And to have a chance to thank again all those who generously helped with the fundraiser to cover the moving expenses. I hope to see at least some of you in Narni some day. I’ll put the kettle on.

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Thanks for reading all the way down to the bottom. If you would like to follow my work, or even donate to help keep it going, I post frequent updates on projects I’m working on as well as thoughts and investigations into Trecento and Gothic Italian sacred art at Hilary White: Sacred Art and on my FB page. Thanks and we’ll talk soon. HJMW.