|
|
|
Posted: December 30
I find myself searching for metaphors this afternoon to describe what it feels like to be in the Curia right now as we are only a week away from the start of the general congregation. A few days ago I felt like I was back in a high school directing a play. The company that is installing the electronic equipment for the delegates had their cables spread all over the “aula” (the big meeting room where all 226 delegates will have their desks). The frame for a giant screen was partly set up behind the speakers’ table, and on the balcony workmen were setting up speakers. Yeah, it looked just like a theater a few days before opening night.
Then today the sun came out and it warmed up enough to take the bike out for a spin through the city. That made it seem like a regular Sunday, and I am feeling pretty relaxed. All of the items on my original To Do list are crossed off and the new list only has five items. Perhaps we might just be ready on time after all. So now the metaphor, “The calm before the storm” came to mind. The number of Jesuits in the community who are home right now is down as some have taken the Christmas-New Years holiday as the chance to get away. And we have not had any guests staying here all during December; the minister wanted to give the workers a chance to get everything cleaned up and ready. On Friday the invasion will start. We will suddenly double the size of the community with 60-some guests staying here for the next few months. The house is going to flip from quiet to chaos. All of a sudden there will be lines of Jesuits waiting to do this or that. And our dining room will have 140 men eating the main meal of the day at midday.
Of course, we have been working for a long time to get ready for all this and the preparation work has been truly impressive. We have been doing renovation work on the 70-year-old building here for the past two years. All the bathrooms have been redone, marble panels installed in the stairwells and even a new heating and cooling system. The community next door, the Residenza San Pietro Canisio, has undergone an even more major renovation, including even a major redo of its chapel. Everyone has become tired of the sound of hammering and drilling, so the “calm before the storm” is pretty accurate. (I hope we are not in the eye of the hurricane, ready to get slammed a second time; nope, that is the wrong metaphor.)
My own new innovation is the podcast, “Jesuit Voices.” I set up a simple audio area in my painting studio up on the terrazzo. It has two microphones, preamp, compressor, mixer and one of the new flash-memory recorders so the sound goes direct to digital. Then I edit it on the computer and post it on the website. Yesterday I set up the RSS feed so that people can subscribe to it. The idea for this has been germinating for some time. We get a steady flow of really interesting people coming through the Curia from all over the world. I have done a few interviews that I then edited and posted on the web site. But that takes a lot of time and loses the immediacy of the voice of the person being interviewed. I have always enjoyed the NPR radio programs in the United States and know how good a recorded interview can be. The general congregation means that we are going to have lots and lots of interesting people here for a long time, so I decided to start a podcast, which is just the current term for an audio program ‘broadcast’ over the network. You can check it out at:
http://www.jesuitvoices.org