.jpg)
Sport 21: Spring 1998
18
18
I have seen with my own eyes one of the levitating saints cited in Blaise Cendrars's Sky: Gerard Majella (1726-55), a Redemptorist lay brother who fell into an ecstatic trance one day while listening to a blind beggar playing a popular canticle on a flute. For five years (1989-94), I lived beside a monastery named after that saint, overlooking page 41 Oriental Bay in Wellington. During this time, the monastery chapel, which had been a regular venue for Sunday Mass, was closed. On the wall above the altar, there was a large 19th-century oil painting of monastery's patron saint, levitating outside a church above a bewildered gathering of women and children.
With the chapel no longer in use and the future of the monastery buildings uncertain, it was decided that the painting of Saint Gerard be returned to the Italian town of Mater Domini, just south of Naples. The picture, by Gagliardi, had been gifted to the Wellington monastery around the turn of the century and was now worth millions upon millions of comparatively worthless Italian lire which, surprisingly enough, when the figures were rounded up, came to roughly one million NZ dollars.
I sighted the levitating saint crossing Hawker St, carried by two workmen who were struggling to steady the canvas against the prevailing northerly. The saint, his arms outstretched, appeared to be flying parallel to the pavement, after the fashion of a missile or a child's drawing of a jet. Or a migrating bird heading for the northern hemisphere. (The seasons were changing and the saint's trajectory could quite accurately be described as a kind of migration.)
The last I saw of Gerard Majella, he was gliding headfirst into the back of an O'Brien Removalists truck (the legend Don't Risk It, Let O'Brien Shift It emblazoned on the rear door), to reappear, I imagine, some months later in Mater Domini amidst great celebration and solemnity, the one leavened by the other.