Captain Reverend Mother

On Anniversaries, Fault Lines, and Staying

The birthday cake arrived with one of those little roman candles jammed into it, hissing and spitting in a way that had me checking the ceiling for sprinklers. My spouse was delighted, despite being sung to in public, which is part of the marriage contract. Fine, the resigned face said. Sing. This year I did…in Italian! Tanti Auguri a Te…

I had to be in Sicily to visit one of my bases, so we built the birthday around the trip. Then Mount Etna erupted the week before and closed the airport making us travel instead by overnight ferry. After a whole career of going to sea on purpose, the Navy still found a way to put me on a ship for my spouse’s birthday.

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

My knee went out that morning. The only other time I had a knee issue was 27 years ago, training for a marathon on a leg that turned out to run slightly crooked. My body apparently wrote that down. (Bodies write everything down!)

We went up Etna anyway, of course. But by gondola. At 2,500 meters (8,202 feet), half our party found a bench and stayed on it. Thin air after several rounds of COVID-19 is no joke, and knowing your limits is a spiritual discipline. The other half (the one that tests those limits) climbed onto an all-terrain bus to 3,500 meters (11,483 feet) and wandered around the top of the tallest volcano in Europe, which comes out a different height after every eruption.

(There is a sermon in that. I will spare you most of it. But not all of it…)

Mount Etna sits on the same seam of the earth as our villa outside Naples, the fault that shakes our beds most mornings. We signed a lease on one end of a crack and took a boat to the other end. In more ways than one, we are faithful to a fault.

When we say “yes” to life with another person or commit to a calling, we were not handed a map with the faults. We find those later, one tremor at a time. And some days the only prayer we have is asking God to love what we are too worn out to love properly ourselves, be it a spouse, a job, an institution, a country. As a professional pray-er, thirty-five years in the same collar, I can attest those prayers count. Maybe most.

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

The United States turned 250 this month, which my family celebrated at Carney Park, the Navy’s recreation area outside Naples. The park sits inside the crater of a dormant volcano (I am noticing a theme) and had hosted the most spectacular fireworks display I have ever seen, down to mastering blue bursts.

Two hundred fifty years sounds old until you live anywhere else in the world.

Sicily has seen so many people come through: Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Normans. (I am skipping several.) The Arabs brought the oranges, which are still in the courtyards. The Normans came to conquer and instead kept everyone. Arab clerks, Greek scholars, and the mosaic artists all worked on the same cathedrals, and when we stand in those cathedrals today, it is easy to lose track of who built what.

The Sicilians absorbed rather than erased. The island kept the good parts, let the flags wash out to sea, and stayed itself the whole time. People have farmed this impossible mountain for three thousand years, planting vines straight into the ash, because ash is where things grow.

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

We rode the gondola down and went for dinner, to include dessert at the end. The birthday sparkler was gold and went long past the song before burning out. Another lap around the sun, finished. Here we still are.