The Skull on Jumping Jack Flash’s Prie-Dieu

It’s de rigeur, if I remember my awards banquet etiquette, to give a lengthy and sanctimonious speech whenever you get your little statuette. While my golden image of a knife-wielding Fr. Sibley must have gotten lost in the Italian postal system, it seems only appropriate to keep up the tradition in some form, being a stickler for propriety. Oh yes, and be sure to check out my green ribbon supporting the plight of the endangered aborigines of the Transylvanian rainforest. Aren’t I wonderful because I’m promoting awareness?

Never mind.

Writing for the Shrine has been a wonderful roller-coaster ride through my own slowly-maturing psyche and through about half-a-dozen other people’s minds. The Blog has really become a part of me, a cozy and familiar part of me. When we started out, it was fun. Just fun, for me, at least—a real lark, a jolt, an opportunity to have a go at sacred guerrilla theater among the big names like Fr. Sibley and Herr Doktor Viktor Lams. Like jumping Jack Flash, it was, as they say, a gas, gas, gas. We introduced the world to the cult of St. Flutius, the clerical rock group Vatican Airplane, and promoted Groucho Marxism. We even got censored. All in a good cause, of course.

There was a serious side to it all, of course, but it took me a while for it to sink in. I wrote plenty of cultural reviews, meditations on liturgy, and thoughts on theology, of course. Though it was always a sideline to something else, a divertissment, not part of some great plan. As the summer drew to a close and Rome began to loom large on the horizon, I realized, though, the Shrine could be something more, a real slice of my life to give back to my friends—and most importantly, my family, who would not see me for nearly three months straight as I roamed around the Italian peninsula. And a slice of life to give back to me to remember what I’d seen and done in this year abroad.

I’m slowly realizing I’ve changed this year in ways I have yet to fully realize. I’ve said before I skipped adolescence to some degree, long before I officially turned twenty-one. But it’s still taken me a long time to mature, and I know I have a long and hard road still ahead of me. But the Shrine taught me that I could do more with my talents than just amuse myself, It was providential—though I hate to use such a loaded and holy word—that the Shrine came into my life the year I spent abroad in Italy, away from family and my closest friends. I had to learn to live with myself, as well as with others.

I slowly learned that my little quirks, those enjoyable little gossipy vices and minor vendettas that we all struggle with, don’t have to be part of me. Some are harmless—like my very occasional and largely self-ridiculing participation in royalist politics—but some, perhaps, are more dangerous than they look. It takes a humility I still have yet to master to stop admiring them like the idiosyncratic and crotchety contours of the personality of a character in a novel or the comic relief in a play. I finally realized, at long last, that the fact I knew so many jots and tittles of obscure and arcane information, wasn’t worth a single cent on its own. It’s difficult, sometimes, and you risk falling in love with pure knowledge, or enjoying your gifts for their own sake rather than for Who Gave them to you. I still don’t pretend to have all the answers, or even all the questions, but at least I know I’m at the beginning and nowhere near the end.

It’s a start, anyway.

The Shrine has done so much good for me. It’s opened up new doors, found me new friends—sometimes more email buddies than this poor young fellow has time for—and reawakened my love of the romance of ordinary life. I used to love writing stories of mysteries and conspiracies, swordsmen and miracles, envying Borges’s weird corridors of thought and Umberto Eco’s contorted labyrinths of prose. I still love them and hope some day to return to those fertile—if gothick—intellectual stomping-grounds, but now, well, I long for something else, something sweeter and funnier, brighter and more mundane. Walking around Rome will do that. It’s easy to tell a tale of heroes and duellists, but it’s hard to capture the simple delight of a bell sounding the hours. You can lapse into clichés and toss in reams of Eliot and scraps of Latin, but I’m not sure that still gets us anywhere.

I have long called myself a Chestertonian, but I never drank deep enough of his great love of logic amid paradox. Perhaps I enjoyed the paradox too much, enjoyed the shadows and wild sunsets and the sharply-cut shadows, but I sometimes forgot the real logic at the head—and heart—of shabby little Father Brown which is the logic and romance of order and ordinary life, of things going right for a change. Sometimes I find myself wishing I could do something small rather than grand, write a short story in a paragraph or ape the simplicity of Garrison Keillor rather than my own baroque redundancy.

Though even then, Rome’s taught me to see the method amid the madness I so love, the geometry that manic Borromini wove in amid his curves and countercurves. The frosting’s fun, too, but it’s not much good without a cake underneath it.

In short, this strange conjunction of the Shrine and the shrines of Rome have slowly started to teach me to love things for their own beauty, not just because I happen to love them. I can’t say I’ve succeeded as yet, or know quite where to go or how to do it, but time (and God’s will, I hope) will tell.

Writing—and writing not just for myself, but for an audience—has enlarged me. I couldn’t close this meandering monologue without a word of thanks for everyone who has helped me, or who has let me help them. First, my parents, Michael and Silvia, and my grandmother, Rosy. Ironically enough, this long absence has brought me much closer, in a mature and enduring way, to them then I’d ever been before. Sharing with them my adventures, even at a distance, has made a deep relationship even deeper than I could have imagined. Second, all my friends on the Shrine, Dan, sweet Emily, Andy, and our two absentees Becket and Rich; while perhaps circumstances have not allowed us to spend the year together, the Shrine’s been a tether back to Alma Mater, which is in this case Alma Mater Redemptoris, Notre Dame.

The Shrine has kept old friendships, but it’s also given me new ones. I admired Fr. Sibley and Fr. Tucker, but now they’re my own confreres. Such high praise that they’d take notice of us is exciting, but it’s also more than just mere pride, I think. It gives me renewed faith in the catholicity of Catholicism, and, more importantly, the Church’s infinite variety, that out on the web you could find, united by faith, a priest who praises Marse Robert and listens to Corsican chant, a singer-songwriter family man-funny man, lovely Catholic musicians, a crotchety dead Athenian with a Matrix fixation, and a Theodore Roosevelt smells-and-bells Tory.

That I could trade words and ideas—be influenced, as well as influence—with this gallery of wonderful and varied types, has been an infinite treasure. And it’s not just been my fellow bloggers, but my various comments-box friends, who have enriched my life. The Shrine brought me together with a wise old veteran in Canada, and more closer afield, to a seminarian in my own adopted home town of Rome who, for all his proximity, I would have never met. A year ago, I would have said, thanks for letting me talk to you, but I thank you now, all of you, for talking back to me.

I know, it’s terribly mushy and navel-gazing, but someone’s got to do it. The Shrine’s still perhaps a bit of a Vanitatis vanitatum for me, and perhaps I need to keep a skull on my desk like the monks of old, for ascetic rather than aesthetic reasons—but it’s also been a great force for Providence in my life. Not too bad for something that’s just a gas, gas, gas.

Oh yeah, and I almost forgot. Let me draw your attention to this other ribbon on my lapel, the white one, which is protesting the plight of the starving French royalist émigrés of Southwark Borough—