The Descent of Mount Tabor

The sign on the confessional said English and Italiano, but the priest was Polish. He was a black-robed OFM Conv., like all the confessors at St. Peter’s, and through the holes punched in the screen I could see a little silver fringe of beard around his chin in the amber light of the booth. If I had been more whimsically-minded, I would have said his voice sounded almost Californian in its casual ease.

It was a little before nine in the morning, and the taxi was scheduled to pick me up at ten sharp—or as sharp as ten A.M. can be in Italy. And so, naturally, I was nowhere near the hotel. One last time at St. Peter’s, one last pass at the Sacraments. There wasn’t time for mass, but at least I could snag a penance. The piazza was blissfully empty that morning, and as I stood on the steps of St. Peter’s, the pavement shone like beaten silver in the dazzling morning light. Summer was coming, and I felt steamed under my leather jacket.

The priest wasn’t my usual confessor. Every now and then, I would find myself, at odd hours of the day, at the polished-wood baroque box labeled Italiano, English and Bil Malti for five minutes with a sweet Anglophone Maltese priest who gave the same penance to me every time in a slow, deliberate tone. Say the Our Father, Hail Mary and Glory be seven times in honor of the Sacred Heart of Jesus.

A seminarian friend had recommended him to me, after I confided my initial uncertainty of confessing to a non-native speaker of English. I’ll always remember that neat, gentle little spiel he’d give before absolution in his accented voice: The Blessed Mother will obtain for you the graces…um…necessary… Uh…mmm, something…oh yes: Have so much charity, compassion… Never mind, I’ve forgotten it. It was a cool little speech, the little fellow had style. But I’ve forgotten it. Perhaps, though, that’s the whole point of Confession, the grace to forget. Not that I usually have much to forget these days: I seem to remember a number of confessions about riding on the Roman bus system for free, and something about overweight baggage.

Binding and loosing, it covers a multitude of sins, no matter how absurd. Thanks be to God.

Forgetfulness. I’m not sure now how much of Rome I remember. It’s a thought—sometimes a gauzy golden blaze, sometimes a cozy drizzle—tucked away in the back-alleys of my mind as I adjust to the United States. It’s somewhere deep in the substrata of my subconscious, the actual course of events less important than the changes it wrought on my soul and body. I sometimes find myself trying to piece together the customary walk from my hotel to my studio, past Sant’ Andrea della Valle and the white spike of Sant’ Ivo against a blue—or dirty brown—sky, and I still find the streets familiar. It’s there, when I need it again. For now, I’m content to let the Eternal City slumber in the lumber room of my mind.

Five til nine when I step out of the confessional and say my penance—three Hail Marys, three Our Fathers, three Glory bes, and an act of kindness. Penances in Rome were startling to me at first. I was so used to those lengthy and complexly vague meditations assigned by my old Rector; not without merit but somewhat difficult to finish off to your own reparatory satisfaction. Five Hail Marys, three Hail Marys, whatever, assigned in a curt, happy voice or slow, solemn voice, seemed almost preconciliar, as if Fr. O’Malley and his mandatory biretta were lurking behind the screen.

I once did see a priest in full surplice, biretta and stole hearing confessions—as a “judge at his tribunal,” as the old rubrical manuals put it. In the back of a church, during Holy Week services. It was a jowly, sturdy, hunched old South American, Fr. I., the first priest I’d seen celebrating the Latin Mass in Rome. He’d waved around an enormous cross during the homily, celebrating the mass with the frenetic quickness of the late 1950s. But, I imagine, confession is a world apart from that. I seem to remember reading somewhere that the biretta was worn to represent the priest’s juridical power, of binding and loosing. I’d never seen anything like it in my life, such an antique vignette going on in the middle of Good Friday.

The old ways, often, have their own hidden logic. I grew up on face-to-face Confession, “reconciliation rooms,” mini-therapy sessions with the confessor. Penance mystified me as a child. About my only memories of my first confession are some vague mnemonic association of the Sacrament with small flags—pennance, pennants, a typical thought for a kid—and mistaking the white plastic rosary they gave me afterward for a small packet of popcorn. And then there were the little lamp, the uncomfortable chairs, the disused and ornamental screen in the back.

The new way, I suppose, has some benefits as a mini-spiritual direction session for those who can’t find the time. There’s somehow more comfort in the no-frills, businesslike recitation of sins that looking at the priest through the grate, kneeling at that uncomfortable rococo kneeler, seems to inevitably call forth. It’s easier to stop justifying yourself, stop rehearsing your speeches, inventing excuses. Then three Hail Marys, as neat and simple as a prescription of pills for your spiritual disease. And like medicine, they’re easy to swallow and while they may not seem to work right off the bat, something’s still different afterwards. They’ve done the job no matter what you think.

Sometimes you can’t even see the priest’s face save for a vague whiskered profile in the darkness. It matters not: like the intentional alter Christus at an ad orientem mass rather than the unintentionally post-conciliar talking head, you shouldn’t be distracted by the fascinating wart on the end of the priest’s nose, or whether he looks tired, or bored, or even sympathetic. I found this out the hard way. For all my traditional-minded airs, my first handful of confessions at St. Peter’s were face-to-face, through the open cabinet doors of the box, but it was too much, too flustering as I looked up and saw the tired eyes of the Franciscan propped up on his checkered cushion. He had to endure this litany of excuses and petty sins all day, probably, and nothing else. It was too much.

Then I started doing it through the grate.

Simply watching the various shades of hieratic gesture that priests use in their boxes, the ones who sit out staring from the open cabinet, the ones who close them and let the light glow beneath it in even slits, the priests who read and the priests who don't, the priests who press their ear to the screen, one half-door open, another closed, covering their face anonymously. Green lights, red lights, on and off, signs and tables of available times in languages from Tagalog to Russian and something that could have been Korean or Japanese.

To think of the experience accumulated, the collective tally of years of sacred service represented by the confessors of a side-aisle in one Roman major basilica alone never fails to boggle the mind.

I’ve confessed at St. Peter’s, where I thought the confessionals were uncomfortable; I’ve confessed at St. Mary Major where they’re less claustrophobic and the Dominicans have the rather interesting sacramental superpower of absolving those reserved sins. (I once nervously blurted out in the middle of confession some complement about how nifty his order was). One priest there them even has the ability to hear confessions in Latin, though I’m not linguistically or sacramentally adventurous to try. I’ve confessed to Americans, to British, to even a very cheerful somewhat polyglot Dutchman, and it’s all the same sacrament. And now this gentle, somewhat reticent Californian Pole. And he absolves me, and I'm done.

It seems, in its own way, the best end to my trip.

I say my prayers, and meditate on them like he asked. I start thinking about an act of kindness I could do sometime today in between changing planes.

I try my best not to define these last few moments on my own terms, not to be too concerned about ferreting-out local color. I simply soak in the moment, for now, maybe for later. I watch the blaze of light on the intricate inlaid marble floor with its giallo antico and Amazon shields, the rising sun filtering through the big half-round window of the contrafacciata above the Pamphilj escutcheon. One or two tardy Sampietrini men are washing the floor with enormous chrome-hilted mops. I can hear the startlingly ethereal voices of a group of pilgrim monks celebrate mass in the south transept, two candles burning on the altar of St. Joseph.

I’d spent nearly two hours yesterday there amid the thick crowds. Attending mass, wandering, wondering, stopping and praying at appropriate side-altars for everyone and anyone I could think of. For friends, for priests, for nuns, even for archaeologists, civil authorities, soldiers and sedevacantalists, for some quirky set of reasons. Before Longinus; before Andrew, Veronica and Helen; before the horrible bloated statue of gentle, businesslike Pius X that looks more like a white-marble beluga than a saint; looking up at Louis de Montfort and having a little chuckle beneath Philip Neri, and even atop the porphyry disk where Charlemagne was crowned, 1,204 years, five months, and thirty-five days ago.

Somehow, oddly enough, I don’t recall pausing by the massive mosaic of Raphael’s Transfiguration with its eye-rolling demoniac and ecstatic Christ against a cerulean tessellated sky. But now I remember it, however vaguely, and those hours spent before the original in the Pinacoteca in a vast dark room full of glass cases and tapestries and another canvas showing St. John the Baptist with 1980s rock star-quality hair. And it seems appropriate now, that luminous mystery.

Deacon Paul, a lean-faced, olive-skinned and literary seminarian in neat, down-to-earth clericals, had invoked that Biblical memory a week ago right after our last school mass. We were at a reception in the architecture studio, jostling for refreshments with the rest of the arkies and a large number of other study-abroad students crowding against the imitation-marble walls of the undersized and distinctly Roman foyer. An ex-teacher with the masculine enthusiasm of an idealistic high-school baseball coach, he’s a smart man, a good man, and circumstances had kept frustrating earlier attempts for me to get to know him better. And so I enjoyed our few minutes chatting, bringing up my thoughts about leaving Rome, leaving this citadel of churches and plentiful mass-times, this interwoven network of grace and indulgence.

To go back, so to speak, into the real world. Paul understood perfectly. He became enthusiastic, gesticulating happy recognition. “But you gotta look at the Transfiguration! ‘Lord, it is good to be here,’ Peter says, but they come down and it’s complete chaos! Someone’s screaming, someone’s possessed, the rest of the Apostles can’t do anything. Chaos!” He smiles. He’s going to be ordained in a few months and sit in booths like my anonymous Polish, Dutch, Maltese friends. And he knows he has to face that chaos, too, and let God’s Spirit move on the formless void of the waters of the Terra Incognita of so many people’s lives. “You have to come down eventually.”

That’s his priestly mission, to come down into the confusion. And it’s my mission, too.

It’s time to go. I’ve got to leave Mount Tabor. As I step outside, the piazza’s already started to fill with pilgrims, and that lunatic blue balloon that floats up over the Pincio hill on the other side of town, is already hanging in the perfect sky like a weightless marble.

Life goes on, at Rome or at home. And the City (for there is only one City), in all its odd, luminous glory, isn't going to go anywhere once I leave the Mountain.