Back to the "Old Country"

For nearly 10 months I have lived in the land of my origins--the suburban Midwest--within 6 blocks of the house of my youth. My children have gone to my old schools. Although I moved away 27 years ago, I still recognize most of the street names. It is all very comfortable but something is missing. For 4 years we lived in Flanders, and that gave me a thirst for something else.

Phil Doran in his The Reluctant Tuscan--How I discovered my Inner Italian puts well what I feel. He writes:

One of the more enduring axioms in literature is the idea that life
in an American suburb is sterile and emotionally desolate. This is a theme well
explored by writers and poets.... And I must admit that before I lived in
Tuscany, I never really understood what they were talking about other than
venting some Bohemian contempt for middle-class values. But now I
understand that in creating our man made environments, we have distanced
ourselves from the primary experience of reality.

Tuscany is far older than America, but ironically it is more
unspoiled. Tuscany is the reality, where our suburbia is the re-creation of that
reality. Think about it...our neighborhood park is really a re-creation of a
meadow. A mall is a re-creation of a village and a swimming pool a
re-creation of a pond. The net effect is to make one's experience a step
removed from the immediate impact of life. Our lives in the 'burbs are clean,
efficient, well organized, and essentially soulless. And I would have never
understood that if I hadn't come to Italy [pp. 205-206].

They recently built a new shopping center close to us. It is a collection of individual buildings and streets. It is designed to feel like a small town...a community where people walk and linger and talk. We used to have real ones; now we have costly reproductions of what we formerly discarded. This place doesn't feel real. It feels like a bit "Disneyesque." And the core values that support it are not a shared commitment to a quality community. The core values of this place are consumerism and commerce.

This an opportunity for communities of faith in America. People hunger for a connectedness and sense of community that cannot be found in the isolation that suburban life can bring. And as neighborhoods break down in our cities, more houses become rentals, and people become less trusting, here too is an entree for faith communities.

Many of the immigrants with whom we will work in Italy experience feelings of dislocation, alienation, and isolation. They come from village societies or places where the bonds of extended families are still powerful and ever present. We hope to provide places of community where these folks can find refuge from their isolation and alienation...to reproduce for them in a community of faith what they left behind in their homeland.
Jim

The Journey Begins

This is the beginning of our blogging, which is appropriate since we are beginning a new leg of our journey. Four years in Belgium, a year back in the States, and now we prepare for 5 years in Italy. As we travel we will write. When the journey is full and fast, we will write fast and sparse. When the journey moves at a slower pace, we will write more reflectively and expansively.

We write because we believe that the journey itself is the true treasure. It is along the way that we grow and change, that we are prepared for the next thing. We believe that how we travel is more important than getting where we are going. If we have not given attention to how we are traveling, when we arrive we will be unprepared.

So we will write and reflect; we will notice the landscape and listen to the stories of the people we meet along the way..
Jim & Debbie