The Dwelling Place of Wonder

By Harry L. Serio

Newark, New Jersey, in the mid-twentieth century, was, for a teenager growing up, a mix of wonder and fear, excitement and discovery, joy and pain. What I have written is memory--a life not necessarily as I have lived it, but as I have remembered it. I have spent my days slipping over the surface of life, seldom probing its depths. I have learned a little about everything, but never quite gaining the wisdom that comes from living out the true essence of one's being. Like an old phonograph needle that skims across a plastic landscape producing only endless sounds, we do not value the ups and downs, the peaks and valleys of life. Yet, it is on the slopes and depths that the music is heard. It takes a lifetime to play it back and hear it. This is a memoir of the spirit that reveals the meaning of one's existence.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Resource Publications
• Release date: Jul 14, 2016
• ISBN: 9781498291583

Harry L. Serio

Harry L. Serio is a minister in the United Church of Christ. He is a frequent lecturer and workshop leader in the areas of archaeology, spirituality, the arts, and meditation. Serio is a former president of the Academy for Spiritual and Consciousness Studies and is the author of The Dwelling Place of Wonder and The Mysticism of Ordinary and Extraordinary Experience.

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THE DWELLING PLACE OF WONDER

Harry L. Serio

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THE DWELLING PLACE OF WONDER

Copyright © 2016 Harry L. Serio. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.

Resource Publications

An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers

199

W.

8

th Ave., Suite

3

Eugene, OR

97401

www.wipfandstock.com

paperback isbn: 978-1-4982-9157-6

hardcover isbn: 978-1-4982-9159-0

ebook isbn: 978-1-4982-9158-3

Manufactured in the U.S.A.

Table of Contents

PREFACE

THE PLAY IS MEMORY

PRESENT AT THE CREATION

FAMILIA

TABLE OF MEMORIES

THE FARMER FROM SARATOV

THE MAD MONK

AMONG THE GLADIATORS

THE SUNSHINE HOOK

THE ROLLING GARDENS OF PACIFIC STREET

RENAISSANCE MAN

AUNT BETTE

BILLY

THE RAT SAFARI

SATURDAY MATINEE AT THE RIVOLI

THE RESTORER OF SOULS

HELLO DARKNESS, MY OLD FRIEND

NEWSPAPERS

EYES ON THE STEEPLE

THE CHURCH OF THE VANISHING JESUS

IT STARTED WITH A COFFEE CAN

THE OAK IN INDEPENDENCE PARK

THE MAGIC SANDBOX

A FRIEND FROM LITHUANIA

CIRCUMAMBULATING THE MARNE

HOLOCAUST

THE CRONE

BANANA BOB SLEEPS WITH THE FISHES

CHASING GYPSIES

ANGELS DESCENDING

BUTTERFLY WINGS

WORDSWORTH WILLIAMS

GHOSTS

A TRICKLE OF BLOOD IN THE GUTTER

WALKING THE GOAT

MURDER IN THE MORNING

MEMORIES OF CATS AND OTHER STRANGERS

PASSING SHIPS

I WILL ALWAYS HAVE PARIS

THE GLOAMING

ON BRADLEY CREEK

THE DWELLING PLACE OF WONDER

PREFACE

I am not certain whether in some pre-existent state I made the decision to enter this life and confront all the variables that determine one’s course through all the years of living. Did I pre-select my parents or where I would be born or the world in which I would live? Were the events that filled my earlier years somehow chosen in order to lead me in a particular direction and to shape who I would become?

Life is not accidental, but it is nevertheless filled with events that astonish and amaze as well as the ordinary routines that everyone moves through. Heredity, environment, relationships, and so many other factors add to the beauty and wonder of life. Ralph Waldo Emerson was right when he observed, Evermore in the world is this marvelous balance of beauty and disgust, magnificence and rats.

What I have written in this book are some of the events that have given meaning and texture to my life. Every time I revisit my past I find new meaning in what has occurred. We are always in the process of becoming, and continual reflection contributes to that process. The past is indeed a dwelling place of wonder.

I am grateful to many people whose lives have intersected with my own in meaningful ways—family, friends, associates, parishioners, and those with whom brief encounters have also influenced and changed the direction of my life. I owe much to them—in particular to my wife, Mary Ann, and children (Stuart, Tasha, and Matthew). I also appreciate the contributions of friends and colleagues who read this manuscript, made helpful suggestions, and offered encouragement, especially Maren Tirabassi, John Morgan, Byron Borger, and Mary Ann Serio.

The journey continues and every event is meaningful and filled with purpose and wonder.

THE PLAY IS MEMORY

We create the worlds we inhabit.

I can sit on my swing in the backyard and look toward the line of trees two hundred feet away. Squirrels cavort nearby. Birds eat out of our feeders. Groundhogs scurry around the fringes of our property. They are part of my world as I observe and think about this one-acre universe of my perception.

I could narrow my field of vision to the bit of grass at my feet and see in miniature a tangled environment of various strains of grass, twigs, stones, and seed pods—rugged terrain for the insects that crawl about or hover slightly above. If I look no farther than this patch of turf and allow it to be my world, it becomes a vast plain inhabited by thousands of life forms, some so small as to be barely perceptible to the human eye.

Though I cannot see it, I know that there are an infinite number of microscopic worlds around me with billions and billions of micro-organisms living and dying within their own life cycles.

The silence of my world is penetrated by the distant sounds of laughter coming from beyond the trees. Though I cannot see what is happening, I recognize the sounds as human, and with the sound of splashing water I deduce that there is a pool party going on. My senses now incorporate a larger world. The neighbor’s dog barking expands my world in another direction. My short-term memory gathers these divergent sensory stimuli and my mind creates the world that I am experiencing.

I can probe other memory banks to recall conversations I had earlier in the day, the trip to Philadelphia yesterday, a conference I attended last week, people I had known a decade ago, an incident from childhood.

A television series in the eighties, St. Elsewhere—a medical drama set amid the staff of a Boston hospital—had a unique ending to its final season. It was revealed at the conclusion that all of the episodes were fragments in the impenetrable mind of an autistic child. It was the writer’s way of saying that all is illusion, that we create our own worlds, our own separate realities, and then we determine how we will react to the perception of the events around us. I create my world new every day, and then re-create it.

Is my world only what I experience at the moment or is it the accumulated memories of a lifetime? Are the lives we live no more than memory and illusion and interpretation? Of course they are all, for as Anaïs Nin has said, We see life, not as it is, but as we are.

The novelist Anne Sexton once said that it didn’t matter who her father was. What mattered was how she remembered him. Perhaps Woody Allen said it better in his film, Deconstructing Harry: We all know the same truth. Our lives consist of how we choose to distort it.

Our lives are shaped by the experiences of our past. Not so much by what has happened to us, but by how we continually remember those experiences and perpetually revise them in the replaying. The Apostle Paul may have put away childish things, and we may put the past behind us, but we never stop learning from who we were and what we did. The events of our lives continually reshape our present and our future. The child is indeed father to the man.

Tennessee Williams in his autobiographical play, The Glass Menagerie, has the narrator, Tom Wingfield, open with these words: The play is memory. Being a memory play, it is dimly lighted, it is sentimental, it is not realistic.

How we remember our past shapes our reality, our perspective, our framework for understanding persons and events. Our lives are a work in progress, and we are continually rewriting the script. I imagine heaven to be a wonderful welcoming party where I will be greeted by those I’ve known in life who have gone before me, as well as by familiar persons whom I have never known in this life. As we sit down at the banquet table, they will gather about and ask, So, what did you learn?

What I do in life is never as important as what I learn from it. And if I learn my lessons well and become a better person because of them, I will have been a blessing to others in their journeys.

What I have written is memory—a life not necessarily as I have lived it, but as I have remembered it. I have spent my days slipping over the surface of life, seldom probing its depths. I have learned a little about everything, but never quite gaining the wisdom that comes from living out the true essence of one’s being. Like an old phonograph needle that skims across a plastic landscape producing only endless sounds, I have not valued the ups and downs, the peaks and valleys of life. Yet, it is on the slopes and depths that the music is heard. It simply took a lifetime to play it back and hear it.

I have created my world and tinted the windows through which I view it. These are my memories, my baggage, my junk. No one can say it isn’t so, for they would only be replacing my world with their own.

PRESENT AT THE CREATION

I was born at an early age, and so I have difficulty remembering the day I emerged into this world. I don’t recall whether that September morning was a bright, sunny day that would be an indication, true or not, of the life to follow, or if it was a gray dawn that would mark a cloudy future.

Sometimes I think I remember the day, or at least my departure from the other side, the realm of the spirit. There is a legend that assumes the pre-existence of the soul and that at the moment of entry into this life, an angel puts her finger to the formless lips of the child-to-be and says simply, Forget.

There is then no longer a conscious awareness of the former existence until the return following death. There are only fragments of memory, a feeling that there is more to life than what we observe, some fleeting moments of yearning for what had been in another time, another existence, perhaps even in another state of being.

Lurking somewhere in the primal consciousness that begins developing in the cerebral cortex of the embryotic brain are the faint traces of that memory of a previous existence. It is that element that leads to religious constructs to explain who we are, where we have come from, how we can maintain contact with our spiritual origins, and what our purpose and our destiny might be.

A group of early Christians known as the pre-existiani believed that the souls of all persons existed before they were born. The early church theologian Origen shared this belief, and it was later perpetuated among the Albigenses who further developed the concept of Christian reincarnationism. Although Origen was condemned by the church at the Second Council of Constantinople in 553, his beliefs continued as an expression of Christian mysticism.

My own belief is that I have entered this life with a purpose, and that my experiences—a combination of events, feelings, relationships, knowledge, and wisdom—all are part of why I am here. I am less certain as to why this purpose exists, whether for my eternal spiritual growth, or for some aggregate spiritual entity or collective unconsciousness in whom resides the totality of all that is and has been and is to be, and of which I am ultimately a part.

Nevertheless, I feel that there is a divine spark within me, a manifestation of the divine, the Christ-essence if you will, that makes me at one with all living creatures and spiritual entities on this planet and those that may exist throughout the universe.

If this sounds esoteric, that’s OK, because we are all out of this world, which is what esoteric literally means. We have our origins beyond the realm of time and space. What I have written, however, is a narrative of this temporal existence and my attempt to make sense out of my own life, those who are a part of it, and those who have skirted the edges of it bringing their own gifts of insight to my life.

FAMILIA

Genealogies tend to be boring. Only very few people are interested in the family trees of others, unless they happen to be a monarch, president, or someone of great renown. The writer of Matthew’s gospel includes the genealogy of Jesus, which contains some very notable celebrities of the Bible. It also contains some rather seedy characters that could embarrass some descendants.

Included among Jesus’ ancestors are Abraham, who put his own wife at risk in order to save himself; Jacob, who lied and cheated his brother out of his birthright; Tamar, a prostitute who fornicated with her father-in-law to produce a child; Rahab, a Canaanite spy and prostitute; Ruth, a foreigner, who had a questionable encounter with Boaz after he got drunk; David, an adulterer, who had Bathsheba’s husband placed in the front line of battle to cover up his sin; and Solomon, who had three hundred concubines and worshipped Astarte, the Phoenician goddess of love and fertility. With such a background it is no wonder that the church emphasized the virgin birth of Jesus.

My own family probably has its own cast of colorful characters. I have learned that my father’s family descended from an old and distinguished Italian line that traces its origins to the nobility of Naples. A genealogy requested by my cousin, Don Ciro Maria Serio, a priest in the town of Nocera Inferiore where many of the Serios lived, gives this brief history:

The Serios belong among the noble families of Naples. A branch was joined to the patrician family of Ostuni (Lecce) resulting, in the

18

th century, in the births of Antonio and Ludovico Serio in Vicolo Equense in

1748

. Ludovico was an extemporaneous poet from

1771

. He was a professor of eloquent Italian at the University of Naples. He died fighting on the banks of the Sebeto (a little river of the Campania region which feeds into the Gulf of Naples). The battle pitted the Neopolitan soldiers defending the Holy Faith against the followers of the Partenopean Republic.

Various members of the House of Serio held power in the Reign of the Two Sicilies (Regno delle due Sicilie) under Ferdinand IV in

1854

. The Serio family flourished and enjoyed nobility in Sicily as well as Naples.

The brevity of this description has led me to speculate on who was left out of the family tree and why. In 1955, Don Ciro requested the Instituto Genealogico Italiano to research the Serio family crest. They provided gratis the following description:

The antique helmet is placed on the shield as a remembrance of the cavalier, the military tasks, and also the expeditions to the Holy Land. The crown is that of nobility because the Serio had this distinction. The lion is the most noble animal of heraldry. The symbol represented the Command, the Grandeur, and Magnanimity. The lion holding the compass is showing the council of the strong and just man, the profound courage and knowledge of the world. The stars are configured to indicate the brightness of the future heirs. The undulating patterns are generally emblematic of the course of water and of the ocean waves.

The crest symbolizes the River Serio (a river of the province of Bergamo which feeds the Adda and subsequently joins the Po and with these feeds the Gulf of Venice and then the Adriatic Sea) and represents the meaning spoken by the name Serio.

The information was obtained from the original framed crest owned by Fr. Ciro. Since his death, the crest is in possession of his niece, Maria Picaro, in Nocera Inferiore. In the 1980’s, Emilio Serio, working from a photograph of the crest and a heraldric description, painted the Serio family crest that was distributed to the New Jersey clan of Luigi Serio.

There is something ironic about the children of poor immigrants displaying an icon of lost nobility and the faded grandeur of past history when they have achieved their own success and placed their own stamp on the heritage they will pass on to their children.

In the new science of epigenetics there is evidence that the life experiences of parents can affect the genetic character of their children so that behavioral traits can be passed down through generations. It may also explain cultural memory, the retention of habits and traditions, as well as the Jungian concept of racial memory. We do inherit more than we think we do from our ancestors.

Today, Serios can be found in abundance in both Campania and Sicily, which appears to be their prime habitat. There is a village in Sicily in which the name Serio is quite common. The territory of southern Italy and Sicily was occupied in ancient times by the Greeks and then by the Romans. After the fall of the Roman Empire when the northern half of Italy was controlled by the Pope and various European princes, the southern half remained in Byzantine hands until it was eventually seized in turn by Saracens, Franks, Catalans, and many others. Southern Italians might have various strains of Greek, Arab, and Spanish in their bloodlines.

There is some irony in that after Anna (one of the daughters of Luigi) married a Lebanese Maronite named