PhotPEACE | WATERCOLOR | HEALING | FLORENCE
Piazza Santo Spirito
Peace is about more than joy
Fruits and vegetables
Locals and tourists mingled -
Hurt and healing
Fruits and vegetables
Roxanne and I sit in the morning shade of spreading trees on the Piazza Santo Spirito, the church of the same name behind us, and a brooding politician, Cosimo Ridolfi, stands on a marble plinth at the far end. He contemplates the market tents set up under his gaze.
There’s chatter all around… a restaurant worker, hauling pallets of fresh produce for the day’s menu, calls to a friend selling fruits and vegetables. Cafe patrons enjoying a lazy breakfast. A couple of Americans talking intently on a stone bench. The calming coo of pigeons strutting about the place. A little puppy named Wellington, “named for the shape of a Wellington boot,” her English owner tells me, ambles by to inspect our work. A man stops to take our photograph… ahh… the fame of being a bohemian artist in Florence!
Roxanne is capturing the scene ahead… a fountain, pigeon-topped, and umber-colored villas in the background, cut by shadows that rake their faces diagonally. You might think that the focal point would be the fountain, but it’s the brilliant white of the market tents that draws the eye. The fountain is too grey… it blends too much with similar color values.
Locals and Tourists Mingled
This is the workaday world of locals and summer tourists, all intermingled in one another’s lives. A toddler arrives with her Mom, and together, they take out her scooter to practice in the piazza. She looks eager, but… scooting is an untested skill, and it doesn’t go well. Her wheel catches the lip of a stone paver, and down she goes in a heap, face first. There’s a pause as the world watches, then crying. Mom scoops her up to the bench for respite and recovery, and after a while, with gentle holding, she is happy having a healing banana.
This is what peace looks like.
All the people, living their lives… coming together for a time in public space. Every one of them carries their heart-trauma with them, and sometimes, new scars get added, even here. But mostly, it is neighbor meeting neighbor… strangers finding one another for a moment, delivering coffee, handing over a bag of fruit, regarding one who passes by. You would think it is the piazza that would be the focal point of the story, but it’s the people who carry the brilliant light of their lives for us to see.
Hurt and Healing
I have been working as a hospital chaplain for over a year now, and I find similarities. People come to the hospital for all kinds of reasons, some awful. And while you might imagine that illness is most on their hearts, it’s not. Illness, like this piazza, is just the foil for our coming together. It’s the heartache of a lifetime that they need to unburden.
I enter their room and set up my tent, offering a safe space and listening ear. They look over what I have, thump the melons, and sense it might be ok, telling me what’s breaking their hearts. Healing comes… not from cancer… not from foot amputations… but from trauma, family conflict, and abandonment. Healing comes for the loss of beloved ones and loneliness. Healing comes for things done and left undone.
That’s the thing about peace; it’s about more than joy. It also includes conflict, hurt… and a face planted on the ground. And… it is about the encounter… the calling out to one another… and holding one another in their grief and loss. Peace includes light and shadow. It includes satisfied coos and upsetting failures.
And isn’t that what the Holy Spirit does for us? Doesn’t she call us together in her piazza to live our lives in peace?
Here’s another Medium article you might enjoy:
I like this one because Karthik Rajan knows something about the most fundamental of spiritual values: dignity…
If this resonated, there are more:
The Rev. Ron Steed is an Episcopal Deacon in Southeast Connecticut and a chaplain at Lawrence & Memorial Hospital in New London, CT. He writes haiku and lyrical prose that he hopes will help others put their head and heart in the right relation.
Top writer in Art, Watercolor, Haiku, Sermons, Refresh the Soul Weekly, and Episcopal Church.
