Sunday, January 17th, 2010

I went over to the Gottas today to iron a jacket before I leave town for three weeks on Tuesday.

I’m terrible at ironing so my jacket doesn’t look too much better than when I got there, but that’s okay, because I got so much more than I bargained for.
I wasn’t too surprised when middle daughter Laura, 15, offered me a hot drink. She was insistent so I accepted a hot chocolate and that was just the beginning though at that point I was still planning on leaving fairly soon afterwards. I mean, all the kids had tests to study for and I was sure I would just be a distraction.
But then Elisa decided to take a study break to play the piano. “Do you recognize this song?” she asked me as she started to play something modern and popular sounding. I didn’t really. “But I can never figure out how this part goes!” she pointed to the top of the 4th page where the 6/8 rhythm changed its downbeat from the 1 and 4 to 1, 3 and 5 and back again. She tried it a few times and then I asked, “May I?” and she moved out of the way for me to sit down. I tried it and messed up and tried it again and we laughed, counting and pounding out the beat. “What note is that?” I wondered about a note written several ledger lines below the treble clef. “Re, if I’m not mistaken,” Elisa answered. (“If I’m not mistaken” sounds way formal compared to the Italian version which they use all the time.) Shoot, Re? That’s an E, right? I thought? I hit the E, not thinking it sounded right but not sure either, given the sound of the song. “No, Re,” Elisa said again but it wasn’t until about five minutes later that I realized that Re is D, which sounded much better.
Elisa went back to studying but let me keep playing the piano. I picked through her small music collection delicately (my nails are currently way too long) and sightread whatever caught my fancy as Elisa studied English literature and Mrs. Gotta quizzed Giovanni on European geography.

After a while, I tried to excuse myself. I knew it was approaching dinnertime and I didn’t want to make it awkward if they had to start preparing dinner and couldn’t or didn’t want to invite me to stay. Besides, I had food in the fridge that I needed to eat before I leave on Tuesday. But I should have predicted that they would have asked me to stay anyway, and that it would be difficult for me to say no. “Won’t you stay and have a pizza with us?” Mrs. Gotta said to me right as she pulled out a mat to roll the dough on. I explained about the food in my fridge. “I’m sure you can eat it tomorrow,” Elisa chided me, “and I can come help you with it if you need me to.” And well, it wasn’t too hard to convince me to stay and eat homemade pizza with this family that in some ways feels so much like my own.

I offered to help with something for dinner but instead ended up helping Elisa study for her test on Victorian era English literature. Before we ate, she asked me to listen to her read a text in English and tell her if she mispronounced anything. She had been studying Great Expectations all day, so that’s what I expected it was but halfway into it, I realized that it was Dr. Jekyll talking. I even learned a new English word--tincture.

But the real treat for me was yet to come, and no, it wasn’t the pizza, though it was good. I thought I would leave soon after dinner; I was concerned about wearing out my welcome. After all, I invited myself over so I could iron my jacket. I had expected to get out of their hair after that. I don’t remember what we were talking about as dinner finished up, but the kids pealed away to study again and I was left talking to Mr. and Mrs. Gotta. Somehow I got to talking about my family and a little bit about their story and so I felt, when a lull came in the conversation, I could ask them a little bit about theirs.

“Did you grow up in Christian homes?” I asked them, ever curious about how the current Italian church came to be. “I did,” said Mr. Gotta and I didn’t get much past that. “How about you?” I asked Mrs. Gotta. “My mother became a Christian when I was seven,” she started. And then began to open up a little more. “My mother had been Catholic, well, she was sort of practicing. On the other hand, my father was a practicing Catholic.” “That’s unusual, that your father was more religious than your mother…” I had to comment. “Well, he grew up in Sardinia, which is very traditional, very Catholic, very rooted in its traditions,” she explained. “My mother’s family, on the other hand, was Austrian. She was more skeptical towards religious things, and so was I, as a child. I think I got that vibe from my mother. Then, at some point, there was a door-to-door evangelism campaign. There was this small church and the pastor, no, the pastor’s wife, actually, came to visit her and she shared the gospel with my mother. My father came to know Christ soon afterwards and my family shared with everyone else in our family, but no one else every came to know Christ. My parents went up in Austria and told my mother’s family, but none of them came to know Christ. My brother also is a non-believer.”

And then Mr. Gotta began to tell a little more of his story. “My great-grandfather was a farmer in the Piemontese region, and one day, it must have been in the year, I don’t know, 1850, something like that, he went to a nearby town. He went to the market in the plaza and there he saw someone selling Bibles. In 1850, it was impossible to get a Bible in Italy. The country was just beginning to open up after religious persecution. My great-grandfather was interested and the man selling the Bibles explained the gospel to him and he accepted Christ on the spot. And he bought a Bible even though he didn’t know how to read. He had no idea how to read and he bought a Bible!

“He went back to the countryside and he went to the priest and asked him to teach him to read and write. That’s right, he asked the priest to teach him to read so that he could read the Bible and so my great-grandfather studied the Bible with the priest. And, so, my great-grandmother was very devoutly Catholic and when she found out that her husband had become a Protestant, well that was equivalent to being the enemy. She sent him out to sleep in the fienile, in the hayloft. She banished him. For months he slept out there. And then finally, my great-grandmother came to Christ as well and my great-grandfather could come back and sleep in the house again. And meanwhile, he was studying the Bible with the priest and after awhile the priest said to him, ‘I am old. I am not going to change,’ which is to say, he didn’t want to give up his pension… but he told my father, ‘but this is the right path, keep going down it.’
“And then in this little country area, there were maybe three or four thousand people total, there was another family that had also come to know Christ and their daughter married my grandfather.

“Shortly after my father was born, my grandparents moved to Argentina, but when my father was about 10, they moved back to Italy. When they were still in Argentina, though, my father heard a street corner preacher one time and he accepted Christ. Back in Italy, my father had to go through elementary school again because he spoke Piemontese and Spanish, but he didn’t speak any Italian. So he had to learn Italian. Then when he was 14, he began to work in a factory, but he was studying the Bible on the side. Working and studying and working and studying. He would have continued, but when he was 17, there was the war and he had to join the service. And so my father became a sailor. Our brilliant general took all of these boys from Piemontese and put them in the navy—boys who’d never seen the ocean in their entire lives! They didn’t know how to swim. Swimming pools didn’t exist then, they didn’t have the ocean, the rivers were too dangerous to swim in. And here they were all put into the navy. So if their ship sunk, they had no chance of surviving because none of them knew how to swim. My father’s ship was sunk, actually, and by some miracle he survived. Well, he knew how to swim because he had swum in the rivers, but most of them did not know how to swim.

“Then in 1943, there was October and the government of Italy fell and the king fled to Albania… Imagine if Obama fled the country when the US was at war. Not just Obama, but his entire government, all of his administration, just fled while the country was at war and had no other government in place. Italy was without government and so of course she was taken over by the Germans. Then, a lot of Italian soldiers fled, because if they didn’t flee, they were often killed, or they were captured and sent to concentration camps or sometimes they were made to fight with the Germans. Even if they fled, they were often sought and, if found, shot. My father fled back to Piemontese, back to my grandmother. They came searching for him but they didn’t find him.

“For a long time he never talked about any of these things, my father. But then after about ten years of trying to get him to tell me about his experiences in the war, he started to talk and then he never wanted to stop. He wrote an account of all of his memories actually. It’s really interesting, he writes about all the people he knew. Particularly the way he writes about the people he knew. He writes about sharing the gospel with them. Most of those people came to an ugly end. The war was really a disaster for Italy, it was really a very difficult time in Italy. But it was also a difficult time in the US, I am sure. I know that many thousands of Americans died in Italy.

“Though the church grew a lot in the years during and after the war. Really the evangelical church grew, probably the most, then. Now we have it so good, maybe too good, people aren’t interested in God.”

Somewhere along the way, there was someone in Mr. Gotta’s story who would make a long trek to church; I don’t remember who. But this man, when he was young, lived 50 km from the nearest church and so late Saturday afternoon, he would set off for church on foot and then after church on Sunday morning, he would walk back home. “And we get bothered about our 10 minute drive!” Mrs. Gotta chimed in. Mr. Gotta continued, “I knew a man who did that when I was younger, too. When I was about 15, there was a man in our church, he was in his 80s, who would walk a long distance to church from the countryside. And every Sunday after church, he would come to our house. And my father would give him a sponge bath. He lived in the country, with the animals and the last thing on his mind was bathing, but every Sunday, when he came to our house, he would get bathed.”
“But Pa!” Laura exclaimed, “what did you do?”
“I … watched? I… don’t really remember. I thought it was a pretty strange thing. I was about your age.”

Our conversation was interrupted by a moth in the kitchen and remarks wondering about where the cat was because he’s so good at catching them when he feels like it and other such everyday things. Elisa, who was studying on the couch, asked a question about a vocabulary word and then utilitarianism and Mr. Gotta had some things to say about that too, complete with a tangent about technology vs. science and science vs. naturalism. My heart was as happy as it has been in weeks; I felt so at home.

By that time, it was about 11, six hours after I’d stopped in to iron my jacket. “Thank you for everything!” I told them as I gathered my things to leave. “I really did come just to iron my jacket, but I got so much more than that. Thank you.” As it turns out, Mrs. Gotta had an extra iron which she sent home with me, though she was concerned about how good of an iron it was. “That one will work if you just have something you need to do quickly, but if you have need of something more, you can always come over here.”

I can’t imagine my ironing needs will ever exceed the abilities of the iron she was kind enough to loan me, but I can see myself going back there for a whole host of other reasons. I’m going to bed tonight with a happy heart filled up by a special dose of the international equivalent of home.