Florence in Ecstasy by Jessie Chaffee

Author:Jessie Chaffee
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781944700416
Publisher: The Unnamed Press
Published: 2017-05-05T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Thirteen

Lorenza leaves for Milan—“Estate business,” she says with determination—and I work full days and don’t go to the club in the afternoons. I won’t see Luca until Friday, and so it is a solitary week.

I spend my evenings with the mystics. As soon as I start reading about them, I cannot stop. I am hungry for words. On the surface, they are all very different. They lived centuries apart in different regions of Italy and came from different social classes. They joined different religious orders—Dominican, Franciscan, Carmelite—or founded new ones. St. Clare of Assisi was born into wealth but gave up material goods for the ascetic life of the Franciscans, then created her own order, the Poor Clares. St. Margaret of Cortona, born decades later, was impoverished and followed a path of sin until her conversion. They had disparate methods for practicing their faith, for proving their devotion. St. Agnes multiplied loaves of bread for the poor. St. Margaret could detect the difference between consecrated and unconsecrated hosts. The evidence of Clare of Montefalco’s sainthood came after her death, when her Augustinian sisters opened her corpse to find carefully arranged in her heart the crucifix, whip, and crown of thorns.

They were virgins or widows or devoted wives who never left home. St. Catherine of Genoa was a model “holy housewife.” Trapped in an abusive marriage, she never entered the convent. She served the sick during the plague without falling ill herself. They were political figures, like St. Catherine of Siena and the Blessed Lucia of Narni, famous for her political prophecies; and they were recluses, like Maria Maddalena de’ Pazzi, the Florentine mystic whose church I had visited weeks earlier—intensely private, she had visions that left her bedridden.

They were pure, precocious naïfs and hardened, penitent sinners. They were from Tuscany and Umbria and Emilia-Romagna. They were rich and poor and everything in between. It is as though any woman, whether born in the 1200s in Cortona to peasants or the 1500s in Florence to nobility, had the potential to cross that elusive threshold. As though that first apparition of the cross or God or Satan was there waiting for whoever might stumble upon it—Catherine in Siena or Angela in Foligno or Clare in Montefalco. This is where it starts. But there is no consistent starting point, no predictor, as these women, one after another, fell into sainthood.

There is something alluring about their behavior—Margaret cutting down to the bone when flagellating herself, Angela drinking from the sores of lepers, Maria Maddalena licking the wounds of her ailing Carmelite sisters and punishing her own body with burning and icy water—and I’m not disgusted but curious. As with St. Angela, there is a longing, an intense desire that simmers and ultimately explodes into feverish visions, and I witness, again and again, them straining away from a world that can no longer sate them. Life is torture, existence a punishment—

Living, I seem to die in pain—St. Catherine of Siena.

I wish to die a thousand times a day—St.

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