The Boy in Brescia (1 of 2)

1946 – 1962

My father’s hands were the first theology I ever studied.

Giancarlo Ferretti was a stonemason by trade, which meant that his hands were perpetually scarred, perpetually calloused, and perpetually in motion. He built things. He repaired things. He looked at broken structures and saw, with an instinct I cannot explain and have never managed to replicate, exactly where the weakness was and how it might be made whole.

He was not a talkative man. In our house in the Borgo Trento neighborhood of Brescia — a modest house, two floors, a courtyard where my mother grew tomatoes with a dedication that bordered on the evangelical — silence was not awkward. It was inhabited. My father could sit in a chair by the window for an entire evening, and you would not feel his absence from the conversation because his presence in the room was so complete.

He prayed the same way he worked: quietly, with his whole body engaged, as though prayer were a physical labor he had been hired to perform and intended to do properly. I would see him kneeling in the early mornings before I left for school — not performing devotion but simply doing it, the way he would have set a stone, level and true.

He never talked to me about God. He showed me God in the posture of a man who had decided, somewhere deep inside himself, that God was real and that this fact should organize everything else.

I have met many brilliant theologians in my life. None of them have taught me as much as Giancarlo Ferretti’s morning knees on the kitchen floor.

• • •

My mother Lucia was the theologian of the household, though she never used the word. She used other words: the Liturgical calendar, the feast days, the names of saints spoken with a familiarity that made them feel like neighbors rather than monuments. She knew which saint you prayed to for which affliction, not from superstition but from a kind of accumulated wisdom about how the communion of the saints actually worked in the fabric of daily life.

She read to us in the evenings. Not always Scripture — sometimes poetry, sometimes the lives of the saints, sometimes the letters of Padre Pio, who was still alive in those years and whose mysticism she approached with a reverence that I, as a child, found both impressive and slightly frightening. She had a gift for inhabiting the stories she read, so that by the time she finished, you felt you had been somewhere rather than heard something.

She also had opinions. Considerable opinions. On the Church, on the priests at Sant’Alessandro, on the proper way to observe the great feasts, on the relative spiritual merits of various approaches to Lent. My father would listen to these opinions with an expression of profound and affectionate patience. He very rarely argued. When he did, he was almost always right, which perhaps explains his caution.

Together they created a home in which faith was not a department of life but its atmosphere. You breathed it. You didn’t decide to be Christian in our house any more than you decided to be Italian. It was simply what you were, and the question was only how fully you would inhabit it.

• • •

Post-war Brescia was a city of recovery and memory. I was born in 1946, so I have no direct memory of the war itself, but its residue was everywhere — in the gaps where buildings had been, in the faces of the older men, in the way adults would sometimes stop in the middle of a sentence as though a door had opened onto something they did not wish you to see.

There was also, simultaneously, an extraordinary energy of reconstruction. People were building — physically, economically, spiritually. The Church was part of that rebuilding in ways that seemed entirely natural to a child growing up inside it. The parish of Sant’Alessandro was the center of our neighborhood’s social and spiritual gravity, and Don Matteo Ricci — our parish priest, no relation to the great missionary, though he would not have been displeased by the comparison — was its beating heart.

Don Matteo was sixty years old when I was seven. He was a small man, compact, with white hair and a face like a benevolent hawk. He smelled of incense and pipe tobacco, which I have always associated with holiness, and he had a manner of looking at you that made you feel simultaneously seen and safe. He was not a great intellectual. He was something rarer: a man of genuine prayer who had allowed that prayer to make him genuinely kind.