Spring Break in Rome:
Prologue: Porta Coeli

The doors! The doors! In wisdom let us be attentive.
--Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom

And so I stood there, late that Saturday evening, almost near that peculiar witching moment where it turns into the Lord’s Day, Sunday, and watched the door of my studio close and my visitors, my friends, disappear into the midnight darkness of the little Roman street beyond. It seemed like they had stepped through a portal into another world, like the exeunt of a stage-play, like the recessional of a mass. I’d called out, “Ite, missa est” to Emily as I caught a glimpse of her head turning back for one final glance. A shared sacred wisecrack among all my visiting friends, but perhaps that quotation, with all its holiness, was more appropriate than I supposed then.

The airport taxi would come at five in the morning. No reason to sleep, and they'd pack before they left, if they could figure out how to fit ten pounds worth of copies of the Vulgate into their suitcases (don’t ask). They spent their last night in Rome sitting on the Ponte Sant’ Angelo among the weightless but very physical Bernini angels, perhaps cold and milky-marble in the darkness. They gazed at the fiery orange and pale green floodlights that gave a subterranean cast to the dome of St. Peter’s, that great sacred breast of the Mother Church. It had been a grand success--they’d seen the Pope. Brian had gotten his Cardinal Ratzinger shirt signed, much to everyone's amusement. Andy had gotten his beloved statue of Our Lady of Mount Carmel after days of popping into stores and getting blank stares from shopkeepers at his question of Monte Carmelo? Or even worse, an attempt to palm off Our Lady of Victory on him instead. Shocking. You never know what those rapacious religious-article guys are going to palm off on you.

And so they waited. Em sat pensively at one end, singing snatches of Pange Lingua from memory (she’d been humming it all week along with Stabat Mater, while my friend S., my co-host, tried to fend off the stony chill and sat next to Andy, her good, great, gentle friend. Good, reliable Rich (perhaps a little too sober sometimes) had gone already to sleep, while I imagine Kristin spent her time dreaming of the Dying Gaul, the one thing she had come to Rome to see. And occasionally they teased Brian gently.

I was tempted to go after them, spend one last shard of time with them and ignore the clock with Carthusian gusto. But I had to leave as well, leave the Rome of pilgrimage and pastime for the Rome of work and thought. And so to bed. Though first, I turned back to the computer lab and found a grad-student friend of mine at a station. I realized I hadn’t seen Kate in three weeks--it was a jarring reminder of reality; and somehow she seemed oddly out of place even here where she belonged. My two worlds had passed like ships in the night--or perhaps like the Barque of Peter.

We’d both passed through our own door and life had returned back to normal. But, as I lay there in bed, waiting for sleep to close in over me and watching the dull neon-orange light of a Roman night cast vague and strangely-colored shadows on the walls of my bedroom, it was a comfort to think that they were still in town, somewhere--that unlike characters in a play, they were out there somewhere in the same universe, Andy, Brian, Rich, Emily, Kristin (and Stacy, who'd left the day before), and some day I would see them again.

Perhaps the last minute or so I spent with them seems an odd first chapter of my attempt to describe our visit, with its masses, its clerical celebrity visits, its silly religious humor and absurdist puns--someday I’ll try to explain to you about Rich’s elaborate gag about giving birth in the Gesu, his favorite church in the whole wide world--or even its moments of quiet profundity as rosary beads rattled and we paced around a silent Romanesque cloister praying in half-remembered Latin.

Or singing, for that matter, delightfully off-key looking over each other’s shoulders at a little Gregorian Liber Cantatus as we walked down a tiny Roman side-street in the shadow of Sant’ Ivo’s Babylonian spire of wisdom.

Pange, lingua, gloriosi
Corporis mysterium,
Sanguinisque pretiosi,
quem in mundi pretium
fructus ventris generosi
Rex effudit Gentium.

Before they left, they’d presented me with a little wooden triptych of the Virgin, and I found myself fingering it in my pocket the next day during mass. I’d wandered beneath a long-looked-for blue sky up to Sant’ Attanasio near the Spanish steps and taken a seat amid the dozens of guttering candles of the Byzantine church. A bearded face peeped out from between the curtains of the iconostasis, the gold and crimson robes making him seem almost as gaudily glorious as a Mandarin (gaude gloriosa--gaude, gaude Domine in laude) I stood and watched the scarlet-vested priests, deacons and clerks of the Greek College circle slowly around and around before the iconostasis and venerate a relic of the Cross with solemnity so rich and grave it bordered on comic.

It was a spectacular and unfamiliar scene, about the farthest I had ever traveled liturgically from the mass of Rome, and yet I was still in Peter’s royal city. The priests had formed up, beneath an ornate crucifix and the great silvered sunbursts of the liturgical fans, moving from one door to the nave as the choir boomed words with exotic masculine beauty. I found myself, however tired from my late night, singing along in Greek, in transliterated words off a crude song-sheet, in modes and tones I had never heard before.

The priests continued their slow progress, the celebrant bearing a great veiled tray on his head, blazing with candles like a Hellenic St. Lucia and weighed deep with flowers. If it weren’t so beautiful it would have seemed ridiculous, wonderful in its extravangant strangeness. Like so many of my friends’ esoteric jokes. Like trying to sing a Kyrie to the tune of The Lion Sleeps Tonight over dinner or calling the Graduale Triplex, with amusing but genuine enthusiasm, crazy-go-nuts with its elaborate scarlet-and-black chant notation.

We laugh at such things because we love and cherish them. We laugh because we believe. We sing with our tongues the song of the Savior’s glory, and occasionally share a joke with Him. This year, as I have said so many times before, has been a purgative one, a time to discover the adult in me. But perhaps I was trying too hard, putting on a long face without reason, being a dour puritan in my soul. Growing up doesn’t mean turning into Hamlet; serious times bring out serious feelings when they are truly needed. Grace and God and crises force us to show our quality, but in the mean time, a smile and a snicker, given honestly as a self-gift, is almost as good as a thousand “adult” frowns. Gallantry is the only way to face life.

And so I watched this foreign rite, with its flowers and gold-shot scarlet vestments, almost Buddhist or Chinese in its Asiatic splendor and triplex bows and crossings, like something one might have glimpsed centuries ago in one of those crumbled Nestorian parishes of central Asia or perhaps a court ceremony of the mythical immortal priest-king Prester John in Tartary or the shapeless Abyssinia of Renaissance cartographers that covered half the continent of Africa.

I kept fingering my triptych, something physical to hang on to. That my friends had come six thousand miles to spend a week with me, some of my favorite people in my favorite city amazed and gladdened me. I’d been afraid this year might cut me off, leave me out of the daily life of my friends, but to know they missed me as much as I had missed them, that unlike a character in a play, neither they nor me had vanished from our consciousness the minute we exited the respective corners of the stage, stood as a great comfort. I mean something to them--I am remembered. It sounds perhaps a trifle selfish, but I don’t mean it that way. Because I respect all of them so very much, and keep them in my prayers, to know that the same is true for them about me is a marvelous thing.

We all in some form or other image God’s love to one another, we become in a sense gates of heaven. Andy said something at dinner once this week that threw me for a loop for a second, that we all play the role of Theotokos--God-bearer, Mary the Deipara--at one time or other, and I’d at first assumed it was some amusing parody of modernist theology. But then he blurted out, “No, at communion!” and I understood wholly.

The Anaphora was being said behind the curtain, and there was a moment of perfect, kenotic, cathartic silence in the church after so many responsories. Strange metallic clinkings and clankings came from beyond the iconostasis, the jingle of thurible bells and the murmur of hidden words.

The little triptych sitting on the computer right now, my pocket triptych, has a scene of the Annunciation on it, that great proto-archetype of Holy Communion where Christ entered through the ear of a Virgin. And it seems wholly appropriate because I realized this week, beneath the wonderful and delightful veneer of humor and self-conscious Catholic Nerdiness, how much my friends bring God’s presence to me. There’s always that moment, somewhere, when someone drops the mask and you see God in them, holy transparency. I’ve seen it before when a joking, jocular priest ascends the altar and turns into another person, quite literally. Alter Christus, the inside face of the closed triptych.

It requires silence, emptiness, and most of all, not forcing it. You can’t force it. It comes when God wants it. It’s like loving God: it’s so difficult sometimes, and trying to do it from a mere emotion can swing from mushy sentiment into paralyzing, self-doubtful fear. Prayers feel arid, dry, and you realize you’ve been saying the words without thinking. But then you realize, like distant friends--more than that--like the ultimate friend and brother, the Lord loves you and all you need to motivate yourself to move towards that real love which is an act of the will and not mushy sentiment is to simply let yourself be loved. It’s a hard realization for some of us, and perhaps it smacks of that spiritual gluttony St. John of the Cross speaks of, but at the same time sometimes you simply need something to assure you of that grace, give you that fuel that will come through in the heroic minute when you throw off a favorite temptation. The love of my friends, all my friends, not just those who visited me, helps me grasp in some small way the love of God.

And so I found myself in line for the Sacrament at Sant’ Attanasio, watching the priest intinct the Body with the blood with businesslike solemnity. Leavened bread. The Greeks used leavened bread for the Eucharist. I felt momentarily, oddly disturbed as he placed the crusty substance in my mouth. Jesus, God help me, tasted like French bread and was just as hard. That familiar dissolving wafer, the sacred, subtle taste of the Eucharist, the sweet holy taste was gone--and then there was this instead. I knew it was the Presence--but something felt oddly wrong. And I found myself faced with the worst (and half-comic) nightmare of any closet Tridentinist: Do I crunch down on Our Lord?

Yes, you do, because you must consume Him. Because He’s in there too, even if perhaps more deeply veiled than you’re used to. Just like God’s invisible love or the memory of my friends so physically far away, He was most assuredly there, making a self-gift of Himself in the form of the holiest masquerade--the holiest irony--the holiest humor ever.

And somewhere, under the same blue Marian sky I saw the Sunday morning their plane left, Brian and Emily are trying to sing Pange Lingua even though they’ve forgotten some of the words.