Listening For Eternal Echoes

How to Be: April 2025 Newsletter of Author Judith Valente

A poet friend recently observed that April is the month that doesn’t know what it wants to be. It teeters between winter and spring like an unsteady hinge. Today, just when the yellow buds of the daffodils were on the verge of opening, I found frost on my car window. Last week, I stuffed my winter gloves and scarves into the back corner of a dresser drawer after a day of 79 degrees, only to dig them out again as the temperature dipped a few days later to 28 degrees.

My initiation into the whimsy of Midwestern Aprils took place in my first year living in Chicago. I set out in the early part of the day without a coat as the temperature soared to nearly 80. By late afternoon, a cold front pushed in, the temperature dopped about thirty degrees, and a hail storm erupted amidst wild winds. Such is April’s split personality.

Still, something major is stirring. There’s a moist earth scent when you step outside. Along many sidewalks, the dogwoods have opened into an umbrella of white blossoms; the star magnolias have erupted into a riot of pink. Soon, every tree will wear a fresh cape of green. I admit, though, to loving the spare architecture of winter trees, as if each one is showing us its true self in its bare beauty. Still, as U.S. poet laureate Ada Limón says in her poem, “Instructions on Not Giving Up,” I’ll take it all.

Despite its occasional capriciousness, April is one of my favorite months. One reason is that National Poetry Month falls in April, as does National Library Week, two celebrations dear to the heart of any writer.

In these days of whiplashing breaking news – most of it troubling – I need poetry as much as I need prayer. Poems have an uncanny way of creating order out of the chaos of human experience. Reading a poem helps me feel less alone. Writing a poem, I can create my own narrative beyond whatever tumult is happening in the world around me. It is a way of leaving a record, of stopping time, of creating in this world a little piece of immortality.

I read a poem a day as a kind of vitamin boost for my soul. Good poems are usually as close as my fingertips – not just on my bookshelves, but online, on Facebook and Instagram, and in my cell phone news feed. Everyday, some lines from a new poem cause me to pause, excite me with hope, like these from a poem titled, “Alpine Crocuses” by James Crews:

Your flowerness is in there somewhere,
the desire to become just who you are 
for no reason other than your own existence.
You feel it while looking at the clusters
of alpine crocuses that have multiplied
and shot up this spring …
every flower repeating
the same mantra: We are enough

This year, April also includes the Easter celebration, a time that reminds us death isn’t an ending. Life is constantly renewing. Every day we wake up is its own discrete resurrection. As the poet and theologian John O’Donohue points out in his book Eternal Echoes, the life we are living now is but an echo of the eternity we fell into when we were born. We came into this world from somewhere unknown, and we leave it for another unknown, a different “eternal echo.”

May we also keep listening for the many, less dramatic “eternal echoes” that grace each day. It might be the return of a black and white warbler’s song following its winter hiatus elsewhere, or a shock of white dogwood petals dropping like confetti across a sidewalk. Or, perhaps, it is a crocus, silently reminding us by its very presence, I am enough.

What eternal echoes are you hearing this April? Feel free to share your spring graces in the comments. A blessed Easter and springtime to all!

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Join Me May 14 for the Launch of The Italian Soul

I’m delighted to announce that The Book Cellar on Lincoln Square in Chicago will be helping me launch my latest book, The Italian Soul: How to Savor the Full Joys of Life, on Wednesday May 14 at 7 p.m. Central Time. It will be one of the first bookstores where the book is available.

I’ll be in conversation about The Italian Soul with the wonderful poet, musician and connoisseur of all things Italian, Al DeGenova, the founder of After Hours, one of the great Chicago literary magazines. Many thanks also to The Book Cellar owner Suzy Takacs, who has helped me launch each one of my previous books and does so much to build community in the Lincoln Square neighborhood.

Based on my many extended stays in Italy, The Italian Soul explores the many simple practices in Italy that allow Italians to see what is sacred and poetic in ordinary life and to live more mindfully and joyfully. Among those practices are Italians’ deep appreciation for quality and aesthetics; the way they value slowness in order not to miss the important moments in life; their strong sense of community; how they make time for leisure, care about the impression they leave with others; find beauty in the everyday; and can laugh at themselves.

The Italian Soul is more than a travelogue, it is also a spiritual guidebook, a way of showing that we can have a taste of la dolce vita, wherever we are.

I’m delighted by the early reviews of the book, like this one on Book List:

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My Newest Poetry Collection Coming in May

May is providing a cornucopia of blessings for me as an author, as I just learned that Kelsay Books plans to publish my latest poetry collection next month. Titled How to Be a Contemplative, the collection includes my most recent poetry as well as brief reflections to accompany each poem.

I am delighted that the cover art is a photograph taken by my cousin J. Alden Marlatt at a park in Lebanon Township, New Jersey, our home state. The photo shows the bronze sculpture of two children attentively reading a book. The sculpture was commissioned to honor Ralph Bleck - a high school friend of my cousin - for his service to his community. It is a perfect image for the collection.

Singer-songwriter Carrie Newcomer wrote a beautiful Foreword for the collection. I’m grateful, too, for the many endorsements I received from poets I admire. I hope to give a reading based on the collection sometime in June.

Here, meanwhile, is one of the poems in the collection:

My Father’s Down Vest

When I put on the olive-green vest
my father wore to ward off drafts, I become

someone who never exceeded the speed limit.
In 40 years of driving a Mack truck,

never had an accident, was philosophically 
opposed to washing cars, saying, That’s what rain’s for.

I become someone who counseled his volatile daughter,
You catch more flies with honey,

that there are two things in life to remember:
when you’re hungry you eat, when you’re tired you sleep.

I become a man who never read Tennessee Williams
but clipped a photo from The Daily News of ice-covered trees,

titled it The Glass Menagerie and taped it to our basement wall.
The vest shines in worn spots, is still soft and plush,

enough emptiness there for the freedom of arms, 
pockets large enough for a few coins, a handkerchief, 

some peppermints, rubber bands. When I put on 
my father’s down vest, I become straight like an iris among nettles, 

releasing a scent of peace, unscathed by surrounding thorns:
a singular bloom in an overgrown garden.

For Reflection:

My father was certainly a character, a “singular bloom.” Someone who wrapped a red rubber band around his ring finger where other fathers wore their wedding band. Who wore the same Navy-blue ball cap year after year. I don’t know why but when I was packing up some of his clothes to give away after his death, I couldn’t part with the down vest that was as much a part of him as his ball cap and flannel shirts. I started wearing the vest around the house on particularly cold days. Putting it on brought back a flood of memories I hadn’t thought about in years. I became my father. Perhaps everyone has a piece of clothing, an article of jewelry, a letter, an item of furniture, that can evoke that magic. My hope in writing the poem is that others will remember their own fathers, and see parts of their fathers in mine.

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The 2025 Benedictine Footprints Retreat/Pilgrimage to Italy

Plans are set for the third annual Benedictine Footprints contemplative, cultural, culinary retreat/pilgrimage to lesser-known parts of Italy. We will be taking 13 pilgrims this year, including two former school superintendents, two retired teachers, two writers, a library director, an early childhood specialist, a Baptist minister, a Benedictine sister, a clinical social worker, a pastoral minister and a husband-and-wife farming and business-owning team. What a fantastic group! I can’t wait to introduce them to the slow rhythms and sacred spaces in small town Italian life.

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La Cucina Italiana

And speaking of Italy … Instead of nourishing the mind with our usual “Reading Room” section recommending books, this month I thought I’d nourish the stomach with a recipe straight from an Italian Mamma’s kitchen. This is the recipe for spaghetti carbonara as prepared by my friend Jessica Sciubba’s mother, Giovanna Di Cresenzo, the best cook I know. I was surprised to see how different carbonara, as made in Italian homes, is from what most Italian restaurants in the U.S. serve, which is a dish that usually has bacon, peas and cream in it. Here is an authentic and much simpler version of carbonara:

Sautee pancetta in a frying pan. You can find pancetta in most supermarkets in the section for Italian charcuterie, such as Genoa salami and prosciutto. You might want to drain excess oil from the frying pan and pat the pancetta with a paper towel after cooking it.

Start the water boiling for your pasta.

In a separate bowl, separate two egg yolks from the whites and after beating them, mix with a cup of grated pecorino cheese, a bit of pepper and about a third of a cup of the hot water from the pasta.

When the pasta is cooked (al dente is best), drain it but keep some of the boiling water in the pot. Stir the pasta to make sure the strands don’t stick together. Add the egg and cheese mixture and stir until the mixture is combined (the heat from the pasta and boiled water will cook the egg yolks without making them scrambled). Add the pancetta and mix.

Top your pasta with grated pecorino and black pepper. Deliziosa!

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Learning To Love the World Again

Many of my friends have been watching events develop under the Trump administration and have been asking, “Where is God in all this?” and “How can I be a loving presence in our fractured country?” I am reprinting a column I wrote on Medium.com recently, which tries to answer those questions and raise our hopes that this too shall pass.

The wonderful poet Lisa Breger, who leads a monthly online Poetry & Spirituality workshop I attend, sent out a beautiful reflection recently well worth sharing. Lisa had been re-reading Mary Oliver’s poem, “Messenger,” which begins with the line, My work is loving the world. Lisa asked herself how can we love the world at such a troubling time? So many bloody conflicts. The astonishing arrest of a graduate student snatched off the street by masked officers for writing an opinion piece. Our national secrets broadcast over an unsecure line and no one held accountable. Thousands of migrants deported without due process. Mass firings of federal workers. The canceling of U.S. food and medicine shipments to people at risk of starving and dying from preventable diseases across the world.

“I don’t know how to continue to love this world -- this world in this strange new room,” Lisa wrote.

A google search she did turned up a surprisingly insightful response from AI:

“Loving a difficult world means to approach life with compassion, understanding, and a commitment to making positive change despite the challenges and hardships you encounter.”

AI also recommended these actions:

- Embracing empathy
- Actively seeking to help others
- Focusing on small acts of kindness
- Acknowledging the complexities of situations
- Looking for hope even in difficult circumstances

Equally important: “Engaging with the world in a proactive manner, even when faced with adversity.”

Many of my friends who are despondent over the attacks occurring against our judiciary, free speech and democratic norms are asking: Where is God? Reading Lisa’s reflection, it occurred to me that God is here, here in all the mess and tumult, as close to us as the air.

What do I mean by that? Perhaps this unfortunate period in our history is a wake-up call to return to our senses. The daily Mass readings during the liturgical season of Lent are both beautiful and challenging in reminding us of what God expects of us, as in this passage from Deuteronomy:

“Moses spoke to the people of Israel and said, ‘Now, Israel, hear the statutes and decrees which I am teaching you to observe, that you may live … Observe them carefully, for thus you give evidence of your wisdom and intelligence to the nations who will hear all of these statutes and say, ‘This great nation is truly a wise and intelligent people.’”

Moses might as well be speaking to the U.S. in 2025. This passage asks of us: Are we going to be a nation that is generous toward the less privileged, compassionate toward strangers, and protective of the vulnerable? Or will we settle for a government that extorts law firms, educational institutions, and even other countries to get them to do our bidding, that labels dissenters as traitors?

That is not the America I want.

I am heartened, though, by the many positive actions taking place. I recently received a long email from a Jesuit priest from Santa Clara University whom I encountered through a mutual friend. The priest worked for six years in the Kakuma Refugee Camp in northwestern Kenya. The camp originally sheltered many of the so-called “lost boys,” orphaned in the 1980s and 1990s during a Sudanese civil war. It now houses Africans fleeing from famine and repression in many surrounding countries.

Jesuit Refugee Service oversaw this camp, just one of the programs the Service has in 58 countries. Or had, until the Trump administration canceled its source of funding – USAID -- an agency that helped feed the starving, sheltered and gave medical assistance to at-risk women and disabled children, and educated and trained thousands of young people.

Since then, the Jesuits have been working to publicize the truth: that international aid accounts for only about one percent of overall U.S. government spending each year. Aid to refugees and migrants accounts for a mere .0012 percent of the budget. This, despite the fact there are an estimated 139 million forcibly displaced persons in the world today, according to the U.N. — an increase of over 100 percent since 2016.

My Jesuit friend writes of a memory of the Kakuma Camp he says he cannot forget. “The children, some very young, recited a long poem in English and Swahili. And I remember so well one little girl, just six years old, kept repeating the refrain: ‘I am an African child, give me a chance.’”

The priest went on, “Give me a chance. The migrants and refugees we serve are not looking for a handout, for the narrow and pinched pity the great bestow on the small … God has made us equal to one another … Each of us is created in dignity, inalienable, permanent, irreplaceable … No one is lost to God, no one is exiled from God’s love.”

These thoughts reflect our calling as people of faith. And as people of faith, we must demand our government offer the same compassion and dignity we are called to give.

Jesuit Refugee Service is also advocating for a saner approach to the question of migrants and asylum seekers here in the U.S. The Trump administration has suspended programs for this group as well. The fact is, immigrants are by and large good for our country. Included among the refugees, migrants and asylum seekers allowed to remain in this country — some 3.2 million since 1980 — are leaders in science, medicine, business, the arts and sports, according to a Jesuit Refugee Service white paper.

The Jesuits have placed handy “Take Action” links on the Refugee Service website for people wanting to write the White House or their members of Congress asking for the restoration of international humanitarian aid and the passage of comprehensive immigration reform.

They also are seeking reforms that cut the time immigrants must wait for legal status, that keep families united, protect children born to migrants in the U.S., and give law-abiding immigrants a speedy path to legal residence and eventual citizenship.

My Jesuit friend notes that Jesus, Mary and Joseph were also refugees at one time. As St. Paul reminds us in a Letter to the Ephesians, “We are strangers and wayfarers no longer, but citizens in the household of God.”

This is how we go about loving the world. This week, as we move toward the end of Lent and the beginning of the Easter season, can we love the world and those most at risk, those most marginalized, a little harder?

For more on how to help restore the programs of the Jesuit Refugee Service, please visit Take Action to Strengthen U.S. Refugee, Asylum, and Temporary Protection Programs — JRS USA

To learn about Lisa Breger’s Poetry & Spirituality online workshop sponsored by St. Mary Monastery, Rock Island, IL, please visit Spirituality and Poetry — Sisters of St. Benedict (smmsisters.org)

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Upcoming Events

April 16
Thomas Merton’s Contemplative Wisdom for Crisis Times
Indianapolis Chapter of the International Thomas Merton Society
7 p.m. (Eastern)
Episcopal Church of All Saints
1559 Central Avenue, Indianapolis Indiana 46202
Contact Mark Hudson: markchudson@gmail.com

April 19
Holy Saturday Wild Flower Meditation Walk
A Morning of Poetry, Nature and Meditation with Rev. Jane Roeschley and Judith Valente
10 a.m. – Noon (Central)
Merwin Nature Preserve, 25777 N. 1925 Road East, Lexington, Illinois
Contact Rev. Jane Roeschley: janemark76@gmail.com

May 14
Book Launch for The Italian Soul
Judith Valente in Conversation with Albert DeGenova, editor of After Hours literary journal
The Book Cellar
7 p.m. (Central)
4736 N. Lincoln Ave, Chicago Illinois
Contact Suzy Takac: words@bookcellarinc.com

May 30
La Dolce Vita: What Italy Can Teach Us About Living More Mindfully and Joyfully
Online Retreat
11am – 1pm (Eastern)
Sponsored by Monasteries of the Heart 
Contact Katie Gordon: info@monasteriesoftheheart.org

June 19
Presidential Address by Judith Valente
International Thomas Merton Society 19th General Conference
In Person
Regis University, Denver CO
2:30 p.m. (Mountain)
Conference registration: https://merton.org/2025/default.aspx

June 21
Merton, Thomas Berry and the Search for Home
In Person Workshop with Judith Valente and Carol Lenox
10:30 a.m. (Mountain)
International Thomas Merton Society 19th General Conference
Regis University, Denver, Colorado
Conference registration: https://merton.org/2025/default.aspx

June 22 
Michael McGregor and Judith Valente in Conversation 
about their new books An Island to Myself (McGregor) and The Italian Soul (Valente)
The Tattered Cover Bookstore
2526 E. Colfax Avenue, Denver, Colorado
Contact The Tattered Cover Bookstore: 303-322-7727

July 27-Aug 7
Stirring the Ashes: Rediscovering the Flames of a Well-Lived Life
Retreat for Marianist Brothers and Priests
Marianist Center, St. Mary’s University
520 Fordham Avenue, San Antonio. Texas
Contact Terry Eversole: teversole@sm-usa.org

August 30
Podcast Interview on The Italian Soul
9 a.m. (Central Time)
Golden State Media Concepts Book Review with Host Sarah Meckler
Contact Sarah Meckler: smeckler@goldenstatemc.net

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Happy Easter and Passover, everyone! Enjoy the rest of April and be sure to read lots of poems during National Poetry Month.

It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there.

- William Carlos Williams, from “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower”