Wandering Through Grace
When I start a new story like this, I pluck a recent story from the recently saved ones and use its format to delete the story and replace the title. That saves me from having to choose a font and font size and get the alignment right. Today, the old story I plucked from the array was When Will You Make an End, which was about my Hobbit House, but starts off with the story about the painting of the Sistine Chapel by Michelangelo. That’s quite a coincidence because today we went to the Vatican Museum and saw the Sistine Chapel in all its glory. I figure that’s probably the twentieth time for me and I will never say never, but I may never go back again. It’s been five years since I was last in Rome and I’ll be 73 if I go the same time between visits.
Today, we broke with our promise not to bother going to the Vatican. Gary is sort of anti-religion and I have just gone so many times that we thought we would just skip. Then we got talking about what was left to see in Rome. I threw out the Catacombs, but there were no takers. We very quickly defaulted to the Sistine Chapel, fully aware that that meant starting in the Vatican Museum. The Vatican hasn’t changed much in sixty years, but the processes of the Vatican Museum visitor handling system certainly has. We got our tickets ahead of time and managed to get there and inside without too much trouble, but the distances one has to travel inside the Vatican are, as they have always been, laborious. They don’t let you just see the famous rooms painted by Raffaelo and Michelangelo, you have to go through every anti-room in the joint and look at every piece of religious art produced in the last two Millennia first. They weave you through every room and up and down every stair they can think of. Since you start and end at the same place, Ill bet there is a much easier way to do it, but its like catechism…doing it the easy way isn’t the objective. They want you to suffer for it. The only path to grace is through suffering according to the Church.
It is truly amazing to realize how long this institution has been around. I know there are lots of Jewish and Muslim history and historical venues, but there simply isn’t any other institution like the Holy See. It’s no wonder novelists like Dan Brown can make such a great living writing stories about this arcane and complicated institution. The secrets in the physical buildings of Vatican City alone could keep a room full of novelists employed for a lifetime. I wonder if any one person knows all the secrets? Maybe not. It’s a huge cavernous place that has been built and rebuilt over thousands of years with many different paranoid leaders with all sorts of weird and perverse objectives and probably just as many strange and secretive contractors doing the work as time went on. I imagine there are as many long-since forgotten secrets to that building as there are known secrets. And its very unclear that it will ever see enough light of day to become fully exposed.
For most great things made by man, there is a logical endpoint. Dust does eventually return to dust, but the Church may prove to be the exception to that rule due to its sustained and powerful presence and dictum over the eternal life of a vast swath of our species. Christians now represent 33% of the world population where in 1900 they were 34.5%. Let’s remind ourselves that that is even more relevant since about 50% of the world doesn’t go in for monotheism of any sort. I think its fair to say that more advanced cultures have dispensed with polytheism, indeed, the percentages of Christianity go up in the 80-100% penetration range in Europe and North America. The percentage of Christians that identify as Catholic hasn’t changed much in the last century, they still make up about half of all Christians. While some like to think Islam is taking over the world, at penetration numbers of less than 20%, but rising) its safe to say the dominance of Christianity is safe for another half century at least. That means that no one is likely to unseat the Vatican as the power player in the eternal soul business for quite some time.
The best part about the Vatican Museum tour (besides the masterpieces of Michelangelo and Raffaelo, of course) is getting a few stolen glimpses of the Vatican gardens. In theory these are reserved for the pleasure of the Pope, but getting a peek here and there can bring any of us pleasure for the price of 37 Euros and the need to walk what amounts to about 6,000 steps according to my iPhone pedometer of walking the hallways of the Museum in search of the Sistine Chapel. Those are the same hallways that have been walked by every pilgrim for the last hundred years and perhaps by every pontiff or pontiff-in-waiting along the way.
As we wrapped up our visit to the Vatican Museum, the homestretch consists of a circular downward spiral that Dante himself would have been proud of. The symbolism of leaving the realm of the Church with all its pious trappings and circling back down to earth or even below grade is a powerful reminder that the Church considers itself to be above us mere mortals. It may allow us glimpses of its holiness and even allow us to bask in the glory of its gardens for moments at a time in our lives, but we, as mere humans, are destined for a life of pain and toil down, down, down in the depths of the humanity that is the real human condition. The Church allows us to wander through Grace now and again, but requires that we remember that we must all wage our battles with life at ground level and pray that we might be elevated to the higher plane of its existence when we shuck off our mortal coils.
As we exit the Vatican, for me perhaps for the last time, its feels reassuring to be out amongst the real people of the world again. Instead of the inlaid marble of the Vatican’s hallowed halls and the painting by the great masters on the walls and ceilings around us, there are dark and irregular cobblestones underfoot with gum and candy wrappers on and around them. Rather than beatitude at eye level, instead we see the real glory of man in the eyes of the pilgrims awaiting their moments of immortality as they line up to enter the Vatican we have just departed. They too now have the opportunity to wander through Grace for a moment of two.