Jackhammer Surprises and Lumen Gentium

I’m constantly finding myself surprised by those unexpected events that pop up in my life. You know, those times when you get out of screensaver mode, put yourself in the moment that’s happening or has just passed, and say in trite bewilderment, “I wasn’t expecting that.” Those.

Of course, some surprises come in the form of unpleasant revelations about yet-another-area for Future Improvement. You live, you learn, as Alanis Morissette nasally wailed in her good aungsty days. (Happiness deteriorated her career). But there are other joyful moments that leave you happily satiated with a sense of good delight and expectancy. So yes, you must learn, and painfully so. But you mostly, hopefully, you live.

I came to Rome to live. To live life fully, eat pasta and gelato, and coincidentally, study social institutional communications so that I can eventually . . . do something with it. It makes sense. I love writing. It’s a barometer for my well-being. I love editing and designing and just the sheer act of communication, period. It’s fulfilling to me. So, I never expected that my new favorite class, now that I’ve actually cracked open the book to prepare for a test one week away, is Ecclesiology and Ecumenism. That's been my surprise of the week.

Snore, you’d say. I said so too, while I was in class. The class is sort of a joke. There are about 70 priests and maybe 4 women in it, and they all cough, all the time. A choir couldn’t be more coordinated. One section stops, the other section starts up. The professor, in the meantime, has a microphone attached to his collar, but the batteries are always dead. And he’s Spanish, so he has what we refer to with a kind smile as the “Italian Spanish lisp.” His voice is strong throughout the sentence until the last key word, that one concept upon which everything hinges: and then his voice trails down, the hacking starts up, and I start having wild uncontrollable urges to pelt my entire class with cough-drops.

Even under circumstances such as these, there are singular occasions when the class, really, really shines. Like when the microphone wasn’t working and they were finishing up construction work on the piazza outside our university. Someone had the brilliant idea to open a window. Usually, that’s a relief. Let’s just face it, certain nationalities just don’t believe in deodorant. But it's not so good when someone’s using a jack-hammer outside. Fabulous. Now we can ALL lip-read and get headaches together too! The best part? No one seemed to notice that no one could now hear. Nope. They just kept on looking blankly at the teacher and scribbling stuff, while I, the glaring American woman, seethed. Maybe they’re all fantastic Italian lip-readers, but I'm the person who's still looking up "alora." But what can you do? So I continued on. And you know, they only shut the window when a screaming ambulance parked outside the building. My theory? Someone in the class below, having an experience similar to mine, had had enough and decided to end it right then and there.

But enough of such unholy thoughts. I love the class, when I can hear it. Why? Because it’s theology. It’s knowledge for itself, and it’s all about God. It’s an escape from the practical mechanics of learning how to shape public opinion and write HTML and what to do when your communications plan blows up in your face. My joy and gratitude every day is generated by trying to find the sacred in the mundane, to infuse the ordinary with the extraordinary. It’s such a relief when it’s handed to you on a platter.

You read familiar words you’ve heard all your life, like, “God’s salvific plan for man’s redemption,” you take a step back because you haven’t heard about that in awhile. And because you know a little more about the ugliness and horror and sin than you did in highschool, now you know exactly why those words mean so much. You get all excited when you think about God’s grand plan to love and save each soul in the universe, that He had figured out way back when (even when Adam and Eve got cocky), and you’re just left in wonderment and awe. Because that’s you, too. And that’s why Ecclesiology class is cool.

(Oh yeah, and the fact that our test is going to be open book(s) is pretty dang cool, too).