Happy Feast Day San Gabriele!!

 

San Gabriele - Our Lady of Sorrows

I have known about you and loved you since I was a little girl. 

I got to know San Gabriel I guess you could say from the day I was born, although it would be a few years before I could say his name and come to know him through my mothers devotion to him. And it would be a few years more till I developed my own friendship and devotion to this joyful and youthful Saint.

I came to know San Gabriele of Our Lady of Sorrows through stories my mother would tell me about him, his miracles and his life. He is the patron saint of the Abruzzi region in Italy where she lived and grew up.  My mom loved San Gabriel and often spoke of him.  She often would ask for his intersession with the Blessed Mother and Jesus. And she longed to return to visit his shrine that was built in the Gran Sasso mountains of Italy.

I guess you could say my mother came to know him from birth as well through my Nonna Rosina who was devoted to the Sacred Heart of Jesus and the Immaculate Heart of Mary and had a love for San Gabriele and many other saints.  And San Gabriele being the patron saint of Abruzzi  was a very popular saint with many people in the area.  But I also think the devotion may stem from his receiving his canonization by Pope Benedict XV on May 13, 1920, just 5 days before my mom was born.

At the end of the summer of my junior year in college I took a trip to Italy with my dad. My mom who had suffered many hardships in Italy before coming to the United States had always had issues with her hips and recovering from her numerous surgeries between both her hips through the early 70's and 80's.  She was one of the first to have a total hip replacement and she suffered other ailments and issues because of complications from the surgeries, anesthesia and blood transfusions over the years.

With her difficulty walking my mom was not able to travel with me and my dad to Italy that year. But she was adamant that daddy take me to San Gabriele's Shrine in the Gran Sasso mountains.

It was an amazing trip with my dad.  We visited with his family, my mom’s family, we walked the land that he and my mom walked as kids, as a couple, visited family churches, sites of family events, beaches, landmarks, holy places, graves of our family, spent time walking our families land and the remaining parcel of land my parents still owned at the time, sitting outside and inside around the table, singing, making music under the stars and drinking wine into the night, we attended family events, and local feast days in the village, we picked fresh figs, apricots, cherries, grapes and fresh vegetables for the family table from the family gardens and orchards, took a peek in the chicken and rabbit coops, took strolls in the evening, played bacci, ate gelato, drank tons of espresso and shared meal after, meal and story after story.  We even took a bus trip with a small group of family to Padua and Venice and traveled with family to Rome and so many places in between.  

I got meet face to face relatives that I had spoken to on the phone and knew all about but had never met before.  I took lots of pictures and notes, asked lots of questions, got birthdates and anniversaries, got details on family lines and soaked up anything I could to capture the historical details of our family tree.  I wanted to capture every moment. And I got to speak italian, not the proper roman italian, but the dialect I was raised with and it was glorious.  I was experiencing a great blessing and I knew it, and I had the blessing of sharing this time with my beautiful family in the country of my parents and siblings’ birth.   

And as part of our adventures, my dad arranged for us to visit San Gabriele’s Shrine during  our third or fourth week there.  He wanted me to fully experience the beautiful Abruzzi region that was his home before coming to the United States and to experience other areas of Italy as well,  And we have the blessing of having a large family in various places.  

Yolanda, in front of the chicken coop

But most important was spending time with our family just relaxing and catching up, no plans just wherever the day took us.  Daddy had devoted a whole week to taking me to visit my mom's village and meeting her relatives.  During that week daddy took me to visit my mother’s best friend Yolanda.  Yolanda kept hugging me, and she kept telling me that looking at me was like seeing my mom when she was my age.  I knew all about Yolanda because of my mom’s communications with Yolanda over the years and their loving friendship that transcended years and distance as they wrote letters and exchanged packages over the many years since my mom left Italy. For me it was like meeting an old friend.   I listened to Yolanda’s stories as she talked about her friendship with my mom and their life growing up and the many memories they shared. We laughed, cried and in short time I came to love Yolanda like I know my mom did.

Daddy also took me to the one room with a tiny loft home my mother shared with her mother and grandfather before they married and then years later shared the same one room with my grandmother and siblings.  That one room over the years had become a chicken coop. It was so small with a barley discernable loft and I was baffled how my mom made that house a home for three adults and three children.  My mom worked in the fields, made pasta from grain and would sweep the dirt floor clean every day.   It was amazing to me, by my mom and dad made that one room chicken coop a home to raise their family before they left Italy for America.

Early one morning as my uncle drove us towards my mom's village my dad asked my uncle to stop the car at the base of the hill that led up to her village. He wanted us to walk the steps my mom walked growing up and that he and my mom walked together.  

Along the way we met a woman from the village, we stopped and talked with her and took a picture.   She was walking with her donkey balancing a heavily laden basket atop her head.  

And as we walked along we stopped in surprising various relatives and friends.  Seeing me, they all commented how much I looked like my mother when she was my age.

We had wonderful visits along the way.  It was surreal and amazing to meet my family, walk the fields and meadows, groves, gardens and vineyards that my mom walked and worked.  We stopped by old homesteads of my mother and her family growing up, meeting cousins at their homes, in the fields and on their tractors working the land.  

We even walked through overgrown brush and vegetation to visit the old washing font where my mother would wash clothes and where my parents first met each other and began their love story.

As my dad tells it, the day they met, my dad and his brother were taking a short cut through the woods when they heard someone singing.  My mom was alone at the washing font.  The font is an area where people in the village would go to wash their clothes.  My mom was washing her clothes and was singing in her lilting raspy voice.

Daddy heard mommy’s raspy lilting voice singing and when he got closer to her, he saw a beautiful young woman as he has described over the years in a bright salmon colored dress washing her clothes.  The rest as they say is history. Daddy was smitten, and my uncle who was with him and recognized my mother cautioned my dad that her mother, my Nonna Rosina, was known in the village as being very protective of her daughter and would not let anyone near her.  

But my dad was not deterred by the news, he instead went right home, told his father that he wanted to meet her and would not take no for an answer.  So my dads father, Nonno Sabatino, a widow, made the arrangements for them to meet with my Nonna Rosina and her father, my mother's grandfather.  And so, my parents courtship began and as my siblings and I can thankfully attest, or we would not be here, the rest is history.  

On the day that we walked the hills of my mom’s village we came to face to face with some of my mother’s relatives from her father’s side of the family who I don’t think my dad was planning on bringing me to see.  But they got word that were in the village and they found us.  It was a sobering day walking around and meeting relatives of my mother’s father's family who were not kind to my mother and my Nonna.

Nonna and MariaAngela

It's another story for another day. But to put things in context.  After my grandmother and grandfather married and when my mother was three months old, her father set sail with his older brother for the United Stated to make a better way for their family.  He left my grandmother and 3 month old mother in the car of his father and over the years he sent back money to support them.  My mother's grandfather, her father's father was a wonderful man, he adored my mother and took wonderful care of his daughter-in-law and he made sure that the money that my grandfather sent back from the United States for them took care of all of their needs.  My mother adored her grandfather.  When she was 7 years old he died and with her father still away in the United States one of his brothers and his wife took over control and were unkind to my mother and grandmother and they endured many hardships over the following years.  I had heard some of the over the years growing up. Being the youngest left at home with my siblings married and in homes of their own.  I was a sponge soaking up the love and memories my older parents shared.  I have always been a bit of a gatekeeper of family history and I have always been interested in the stories and details that my grandparents, parents and relatives would share.  So as difficult as it was be in the environment of many of my mother and grandmothers painful memories, I was grateful for the opportunity to learn more about the amazing woman that I was so blessed to have in my life.

Suffice to say I learned a lot of the family history that often stays hidden on that sobering walk through the village that day.  And when my uncle picked us up at the base of the hill to bring us back home to his house across the valley my heart was in agony and aching for what my mother and Nonna endured and experienced and the trials they faced after my mom’s beloved grandfather passed away and unkind and often cruel relatives stepped in to take over control the money that was being sent back for my mother and grandmothers care and they suffered great hardships.  That is a story all its own and will be left to another day.

My head and my heart were swirling with the events of the day when we returned back to my Zio and Zia’s.  After dinner we relaxed in the courtyard.  I shared some of what I remembered from my mother’s stories, what my dad had told earlier in the day and the events of the day with my uncle’s wife, my beloved Zia Assunta, a distant relative of my moms who was married to my dad's brother Vincenzo.   

When I shared with her about the woman, we met walking the donkey carrying the basket on her head she told me that my mother did that all the time and she taught me how to do it myself.  I could not believe that I could balance a basket on my head, for even just a few minutes.   For a short while the heaviness of the day was at bay while we laughed and joked and I tried again and again to balance the basket until I finally got it and was able to walk with the basket on my head.

 

And later as we sat in the courtyard of their house under the starlit August sky sharing more stories Zia Assunta shared her knowledge of the events and people and some of the struggles both she and my mother endured as young wives during the war.  I learned more of our family history and came to love this beautiful woman even more as we laughed and cried together.  And I came to understand the deep devotion my Nonna had for praying the rosary and her deep devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus and  the Immaculate Heart of Mary. I came to understand the inside of her closet door and all the prayer cards of saints she had plastered all over it.  I came to understand my mother’s deep devotion to her beloved San Gabriele. And in some small part I came to understand where the deep joy that my mom and especially my grandmother came from despite the years of hardship and trials.  Although at the time I’m not sure I fully understood as I do today.  And I am sure that I will say the same years from now, because I know that in no way while I am traveling this journey on earth will I ever fully understand the depth of joy and love that surpasses all understanding.  But in certain moments we can catch a slight glimpse.  And in those moments I can see they possessed teh dame joyful spirt that was a hallmark of their patron saint.

And in thinking about what was coming up the next day I was a little apprehensive about going back to have lunch with this branch of my mom’s family.  Not so much about seeing them, but in the confrontations I might have.  At the same time, I was excited about our trip to visit Gran Sasso and San Gabriele shrine the day after that.   

But the shrill ringing of the phone that broke the early morning silence of the house as we all slept that morning dramatically changed our plans.  My sister Irma called to let us know that mommy had been rushed into NE Baptist for emergency surgery because a bursa had burst in her hip, it was serious.  We needed to get home right away.  My sister Anna was also on her way to Massachusetts from Texas.   The rest was a whirlwind.  

My dad who was always so strong and gently commanding allowed me to take the lead and make the arrangements to get us back home.  And through the process I was able to show him that he and my mom taught me the Italian language well growing up as speaking Italian I was able to make the calls and communicate with everyone I encountered at the travel agency in Pescara to make the changes in our arrangements so we could leave Italy earlier than planned.  Arrangements that were made more difficult by an airstrike over Canada that was also taking place at the time.  San Gabriele was with us all every step of the way.  I think he was working overtime.  We made it back not as soon as we had hoped, but soon enough to greet mommy when she was brought to her hospital room after first recovering after her surgery in ICU.  And when mommy saw us she wasted no time in sharing with us how she prayed for San Gabriele’s intercession, how she felt his presence there with her and how she longed to make it back to Italy one day to visit his shrine on Gran Sasso.   From that point on it was my mothers great desire to get back to Italy and to make a pilgrimage to San Gabriele’s shrine to thank him.  And it was mine to go back with her.

 

Sadly, my mother was never able to make it back to Italy to her beloved San Gabriele.  I had mass cards made for her with her beloved saint.  

A year or so after her death 7 of us along with my dad were able to go back in her stead and a group of us made the pilgrimage to San Gabriele.  Along the way I asked my cousin to stop at a florist so I could have a bouget of flowers made to bring with us to place at his tomb.  

It was a blessing to share this time in Italy again with my dad and to also be there with my sisters, sister-in-law, two of my nieces and my nephew. And for me it was so important to keep a promise to my mom to make a pilgrimage to Gran Sasso and the Shrine of San Gabriele in her stead.

But Jesus is never to be outdone in generosity.  And I know that San Gabriele is always interceding.  And he did in many many ways on this trip.  It was a turning point in my life and the beginning of many changes that would eventually lead me on the journey that I am on today,

For it was on that second trip to Italy I made it to the Gran Sasso mountain to visit San Gabriel my childhood friend and was led to yet another mountain, the Maiella, where I found healing in places I never expected and experienced miracles that at the time I didn’t fully understand.  

It was through my mom’s death, our visit to Italy to see our family and our pilgrimage to San Gabriele and the experiences that followed that I deepened my friendship with San Gabriele, found my voice, grew stronger in my faith, found my way back to the church and opened the door of my heart to a deep and personal relationship with Jesus Christ. 

Happy Feast day San Gabriele.  

Thank you for your brief but powerful life, your love of Jesus and your devotion to the sorrows of the Blessed Mother.  

Thank you for always being a guiding light in our family, in my mother’s life and in mine. 

Someday I pray to make a pilgrimage to your shrine again, this time with my beloved.