Swim with My Spirit, Little Dude!

A year ago, as I was ironing out the logistics of my impending arrival to Florence, Brother Milad asked a pretty standard question, “So….When will you arrive in community?” I knew I wanted to give myself a few days to get things settled in Bergamo, to reconnect with family, to breathe that Cenate Sotto air again… 🙂 ❤ My flight had already been booked for June 3rd, so I suggested, “Is June 7th good? I want to spend some time with family beforehand…” Brother Milad and my brothers here graciously accepted, and my uncle, aunt, and I made the drive down to Florence on that day. When it came time to sign my volunteering contract, it said this part of my cammino would end on June 6th, 2014…. 😉

Never Far from Home

For the past week, as my journey in Florence comes to a close, I’ve been forced to ask myself a daunting question

Where do I go from here?

And not in the way you might think, from a practical, vocation-based, future-oriented perspective. If you’ve kept up with my blog, you know that “practical” isn’t an adjective used to describe me 😉 I’ve asked myself that question as friends have repeatedly hinted that Italy may end up being “the place” for me. There was one of my sister Hounds who came to visit me during Holy Week who said, while I was picking her up from the Santa Maria Novella train station,

Daniele, you look like you could live here forever. I’m surprised you’re even coming back to the States….

Finding My Nirvana

I still have dreams about it a year later…..and they all end the same way: eyes open, big smile, with that familiar skin tingle. It’s like happy chills 🙂 🙂 🙂 …. which make me want to get up, start groovin’, and get swept away all over again….. 🙂 🙂 🙂

We all have our ways of dealing with life’s stresses, life’s joys. In discernment, I’ve learned that we really can talk to God about anything, He wants us to. Like a priest at la Badia said during a homily,

We have to be daring in prayer! We have to ask Jesus for everything. Insist on Him, because He will help us purify our desires, only good things, He will lead me to ask for my true good. ‘Jesus said to his disciples: Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks, receives; and the one who seeks, finds; and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened. Which one of you would hand his son a stone when he asked for a loaf of bread, or a snake when he asked for a fish? If you then, who are wicked, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your heavenly Father give good things to those who ask him.'”

My Certainty in Uncertainty

If this is so….how have I been so blessed?

“For someone who says ‘the words just won’t come’..you seemed to have found a lot of words! 😛 ”

This was part of response to an e-mail I sent to my sister and co-rector on her birthday, predominantly thanking her for her amazing influence on this cammino. All those words that I used were just that: an attempt, a futile one at that, to try and get to the heart of what she has done for me. I use “futile” because, truly, everything I will ever say or write will never do justice to this reality of grace. Fr. Ciszek knows the truth of this new world God creates for you once you embrace Him:

There are movements of the soul, deeper than words can describe and yet more powerful than any reason, which can give a man to know beyond question or arguing or doubt that “digitus Dei est hic [the finger of God is here]”, and the name of that reality is grace. God does inspire men by his grace, does lift the heart, does enlighten the mind and move the will. Faith is required to accept that reality, but it is a reality nonetheless.