So in the early hours of the 24th of August, it happened. My husband noticed it more than I. I remember sort of waking up and thinking something was odd, but my husband said, "Did you feel that? The building was swaying and shaking! There's been an earthquake." I may have mumbled out an "oh really?' in my half asleep daze. I don't remember if I said anything else. I drifted off to sleep again thinking I was feeling the earth underneath me in motion and half thinking of our young missionaries wondering if any of them had been more affected than us. An hour later another tremor happened and again I wasn't sure I even fully noticed it. I just remember hearing my husband say, "it happened again!" I think the rest of the night was fitful as I dozed and wondered if this was all there would be to it.
At 6AM my cell phone rang and I shot up in bed thinking, "Oh no! This can't be good!"I raced from our bedroom to the living room looking for my phone and sure enough it was President Pickerd's name on my screen. Fortunately his voice was reassuring. He told me they had been up listening to CNN and that there had been a bad earthquake by the town of Norcia, but our missionaries were all okay. He asked me to get to the office as quickly as possible to send out an email to parents to reassure them that all was well with our young missionaries.
In the office that day, I felt some aftershocks, a particularly strong one in the afternoon. We knew there was a mounting death toll in the towns around the epicenter 130 km from Rome and we felt sadness that the tremors would be affecting them and the recovery effort. I won't dwell on that in this particular blog but I do feel badly for those who lost their loved ones.
Over the next few weeks I asked various missionaries if they felt the earthquake and how they felt about it. Some said it woke them right up and they worried. Others said they slept right through it while their companions asked them if they were responsible for shaking their bed. Others were like me; they woke up a little bit and had a vague awareness that something had happened and then drifted off to sleep again.
I've gotten thinking lately that scripture study can be like that. So often we sleep through our reading or we come across something that affects us a little and we go "that's nice"and then we go on back to whatever we were doing. And then sometimes we come across something that we may have read many times before (or at least our eyes passed over the words many times before) and suddenly it shakes us to the core. I had an experience like that with section 121 of the Doctrine and Covenants recently. That section has a couple of famous verses that many in our church would be familiar with and that's not what I'm talking about. In fact, I don't think I'm even going to tell you which verse it is because some may look at it and say "so? What's so interesting about that?" But I felt the tremors of the spirit teaching me when I read that section and I was in awe. And like I say, I'm sure my eyes passed over that verse many times before and it never registered - just like sleeping through an earthquake.
As for rainstorms, since September came, we've been experiencing them with some frequency. July and August was non-stop heat with very little rain and the plants and grass showed it. It's amazing to me how just a little rain turned the grass in the park by our office back to green again.
We were in Crotone, a town in Calabria on the very bottom of the "boot" that is Italy last week. (In case you never noticed, Italy geographically looks like a boot). Here's a look at Crotone from our B&B:
Hermes was there to perform a financial audit on the church units down there. On the day we flew in we phoned the missionaries there and they said they were cleaning up the meetinghouse because a flash flood had poured rain through a few of the windows, We experienced a near flash flood a few days later ourselves. On the Friday night we went to see this castle:
and decided to come back the next day to see it in the daytime and see the view of the Sea there. We were sabotaged by a very strong downpour that made us turn around and go back to our B&B. It was pouring buckets to the point I was a little worried.
Traveling to Crotone was such that we had no choice but to spend a few days there. There is not train service into the town, and even if there were, it would have been expensive and taken 8-10 hours to get there. A no frills airline, RyanAir, flies in and out of Crotone from Rome but the only flights we could get at the last minute was to fly in on Thursday and depart on the Sunday. The audit was scheduled for Saturday morning so we took the opportunity to explore the area a bit. Neither of us had ever been that far south in Italy and I don't know if we ever will again.
We saw a nice castle and scenery and some archeological digs which were pleasant.
But I realized after that the most pleasant thing about being in Crotone was connecting with people and it's those people I will remember the most. Here is one person who was an absolute delight to get to know especially for my husband who got to do the audit with him. This is Salvatore Corrado with my husband:
Until approximately five years ago, he was a Catholic Priest-Exorcist there in Crotone as you can see from the picture below:
Now he is a married father of a little baby and a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He has an absolutely incredible story of conversion to our church which I'm not sure is my story to tell. Regardless, he gave me permission to put his pictures and talk about him in my blog. That is him with his wife, Eleonora Ranieri, and their baby Giuseppe.
I am astonished at the courage it must have taken for him to change his life so completely. He has a PhD in theology and is an extremely learned man. He had to give up his livelihood and face the scorn, anger and broken hearts of his family to join the LDS Church. He makes his living now driving a taxi. He is an absolutely incredible person.
As a priest he wrote some books on theology and he continues to do so. I want to recommend one of his books to you:
You can find a link to it here:http://www.lulu.com/shop/salvatore-corrado/mormons-catholics-friends-enemies/paperback/product-22602351.html. I think it might also be on Google books.
He was asked to write it for the Neal A Maxwell Center for Religious Studies after they became intrigued by a comment Joseph Smith made in the early 1840s that the LDS Church and the Catholic Church were the most similar of the two churches.
The book is astonishing! People of both faiths are likely to learn things they were not expecting.
Besides Salvatore, we had fun meeting the owner of a seafood restaurant named Sergio. He must have encountered Mormons before because when we sat down he took one look at our nametags and offered us water instead of wine. :) Sorry, I don't have a picture of him on my own camera. But here's one of us at the restaurant.
And we had a fun evening with the four young missionaries who serve in Crotone, Sorella Conde, Sorella Hills, Anziano Simonsen (also known as President Simonsen since he is currently the Church Branch President in Crotone) and his Italian companion Anziano Redaelli. It was nice to spend an evening listening to their concerns and experiences. It is difficult not to love those young people who serve here. Actually, I don't even try not to love them.
I often think, how lucky can I be to serve here? Italy is an incredible land with so much to see. But I know that what I will remember most is not the castles I've visited, the beautiful cathedrals I've explored or all the other wonderful beauties, it's the time spent with good people and hearing their stories. Crotone taught me that. Oh, and I'll probably remember that rain storm too.
