heresy (maybe)
Fr. G. still mending my soul all these years later
Raph1 describes St. Peter’s Basilica as “overwhelming” — I think the word he’s looking for is “awe-ful”, in the old sense. It’s his first time seeing it, and he says it doesn’t feel like a place to pray. They tell you in Catholic school that the cathedrals were built to draw one’s eyes up toward Heaven, but these places — opulent, beautiful, awful — feel more like monuments to Man than to God.2 I never understood why Judas was in the wrong when he asked Christ: “Why was this ointment not sold [...] and the money given to the poor?”3
When I first visited Italy eight years ago, I entered every church I saw because of my mother’s maybe heretical belief that we are allowed one wish when entering a new church for the first time. I remember what I wished for in all those street corners between Rome and Venice, something I haven’t wanted for years now. I revisit some of these same churches, hoping there is a statute of limitations on wishes as I exchange old supplications for new ones. Nothing is permanent. Not even prayers.
Part of the impetus for this trip is to visit Fr. G., our high school chaplain who, now seventy five years of age, has finally returned to his home country. In the months leading up to college, I had told Fr. G that I was growing weary in my spirituality, that I no longer heard God’s voice nor felt the consolation of conviction. He told me, without any patronization, that I was in the midst of what the saints call the dark night of the soul. It was his tacit way of comforting me with the knowledge that doubt is an ancient tradition. There are no new questions.4
A colleague of Fr. G.’s cobbles together the English to say that what he loves about the faith is that it unites us across borders. I bite my tongue. These days, I am more used to seeing my religion weaponized by those who’ve made idols out of power. On this trip, I see evidence of international solidarity not in the houses of worship, but in hints that the world is full of people yearning for freedom everywhere. But having flown across the world just to spend a few hours with someone I knew as a teenager, who am I to say it was not faith that brought me here? Is this not a pilgrimage?
We are sipping aperol spritzes under a canopy of gray green trees in a public park. Fr. G is not one to wallow in self-pity, and I hear amusement in his voice as he describes the internal politics of the school in which he is working and laments that the kids tell him his jokes are too long.5 But I prod, “Is there anything you miss about the U.S.?”
“The desert,” he says. Fr. G. tells us about his solo trips to Death Valley in the summers, how he would hike all day, resting in caves, until he could count twelve stars in the sky, at which point he would make his way back to his campsite, lie on his cot, and fall asleep under the light of the Milky Way. The quiet of the caves, he tells us, was incredible. He invokes the story of the prophet Elijah, who stood on a mountain in search of God and found him not in the storm, nor the earthquake, not in the wind, nor the fire, but in the empty that came after.
I don’t know that the dark night of my soul has ever let up, but I still show up on Sundays, recite the Nicene Creed with belief if not zeal. Because everything I am — my rage, my gratitude, my desolation, my love, my awe — must go somewhere.
At the beginning of our trip, Raph gifts me a disposable camera and tasks me with capturing twenty seven memories over the course of the week. I’ve never had the eye for photography; you can tell that all my pictures are unoriginal, flat for lack of perspective, communicating the same rudimentary message: “I was here.”
In Florence I wander through the old palace of the Di Medici family. I find hints of the region’s history through their art collections. I compel myself to start using the disposable camera rather than holding out for better views to come. It takes a great deal of conviction for me to decide what I want to capture, but I muster the courage. I was here. I was here.
I get lost in the palace gardens. The birds are singing in a different language than home, and Tracy isn’t here to tell me who I’m hearing. The shrubs and trees and pathways meander, and I’m late to meet up with Raph. I don’t know where I’m going. I choose a direction and walk.
This is my first international trip without family (which suggests to you how much adventure I can ordinarily stomach), but Raph is essentially a brother to me.
“Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
The next verse is a copout: “He said this not because he had any concern for the poor but because he was a thief. He was in charge of the money bag, and he used to steal from it.”
Or as boygenius once put it, “Solomon had a point when he wrote Ecclesiastes.”
BAD take.