In March (as you know), I find myself alone in Rome.
I’m lounging on a sun-drenched bench in the Villa Borghese’s gardens, wondering how to spend my final afternoon in the city, when an idea materializes in my head: if I want to douse away the spiritual drought lingering over me for months, I need to show up at St. Paul Outside the Walls. I need to go now. For whatever reason, I thought I was going to leave there with a renewed spiritual inertia. I plug the Basilica into my map: 6.5 kilometers south (a 1 hour 40 min walk), I read, but just down the street. So I start walking. About 40 minutes in, I realize I’ve forgotten to eat lunch. I stumble upon an organic bar, grab a green juice, keep walking. An hour in, I’ve started painting this as some sort of pilgrimage. Thankfully, I soon discover a cluster of electric lime bikes nestled by the Pyramid of Caius Cestius where I’ll turn onto the busy Via Ostiense. Recognizing my depleting energy levels, I unlock one, excited at the prospect of turning the rest of my journey into a leisurely pedal through the wide, fairly empty sidewalks in this southern part of Rome.
Of course, as soon as you unlock the bike, you receive a pop-up message that says you may not, under any circumstances, ride the bike on the sidewalk.
So that is how a blonde girl in a polka-dot blouse and boot-cut jeans puts on a daring face, discards a compostable juice cup, climbs onto an e-bike, and proceeds to wobble right into the whizzing and whirring Roman traffic.
After about 15 minutes of tiny Italian cars and Vespas swerving around me, I’m sweating but getting used to the rules of the road. Realizing I’m close enough to the Basilica, I veer off the road when it comes into sight, climb off, and squint at the beast of a building looming before me, its front facade as over-saturated as I am over-stimulated. I did it, God, I whisper to myself as I huff through the front garden, past palm trees, a towering statue of St. Paul, the portico. Through some ornate doors to a grand archway.
Here I am.
Four soft, cylindrical beams of light fleck down between columns surrounding the nave. They assert: here is silence. And it’s as vast as the space itself. I tiptoe around to glance over the papal portraits and pause inside side chapels, afraid to interrupt. But I’ve not just come to ruminate; I’ve come to go to confession; I had been feeling drawn to come “back” in that way. So, I start readying myself: I circle melodramatically, scoping out the English-speaking confessional. I tell myself I’ll enter the adoration chapel and then approach St. Paul’s tomb afterward. Eventually, I’m ready.
As I often have, I leave confession spouting little tears of relief, release, and joy. I beeline for the chapel and kneel, all according to plan, soaking in the intensity of my emotions. Thank you, I whisper dramatically to the ceiling, to the beam of light, warm and dusty mercy. I’d found exactly what I’d sought, I thought.
A little re-conversion (that I had…effectively…masterminded).
After about twenty minutes of prayer and pondering, I part ways with St. Paul and march myself triumphantly to a gelateria, where I have–admittedly–an equally profound spiritual experience with some pistacchio and caramello salato gelato con panna. By the time I finish my cone, the feeling from the chapel has already peeled itself away from my skin and gone into the trash with its paper wrapper.
I had seen something that afternoon, but I didn’t feel like I had encountered him.
I left Rome the next morning and life’s eddy quickly consumed me again. Then, somewhat unexpectedly, I found myself back in Italy about a month later during Holy Week – this time in Naples, this time with friends. One evening, we were on our way to stuff ourselves with more of the city’s glorious pizza, bone-tired after trekking up to the Castel Sant’Elmo. Somewhere in the middle of the steep 6-kilometer descent back to sea level, we braked our tired feet to a stop on a small stone balcony overlooking the gulf. Partly to catch our breath, partly to laugh in delight.
I’d never seen the sky look such a way.
In the breeze, miniature Napoli flags fluttered between sheets and towels, framing a sunset whose colors were melting together like sorbet. The orange clouds impersonated city oranges we’d picked in Sicily a few days before. They took the shape of plump gnocchi, boiling themselves languidly through streaks of wildflower blue and goldenrod. Twirling together in a tarantella of glory. I have this image still tattooed in my mind: my four friends peering over the balcony at this Renaissance sky and the water nestled solidly below us.
Beginning at that moment and as we continued walking, I felt a slow and unfamiliar zooming-out sensation, of God looking down and laughing at us–really, next to me, smiling with me. That ragtag group of kids–a law professor, environmental consultant, elementary teacher, budding psychologist, and me–underdressed for the evening chill, shivering slightly, silent, all forgetting the existence of jackets and the prospect of pizza for a minute, simply struck in disbelief that something this magnificent existed. I liked that feeling. I greeted it, welcomed it in. And somehow, it–he–held onto me for days afterward. In churches and chapels, yes, but pretty much everywhere else, too.
Coming home from Italy the second time, I tried to nail down why it was only now that I felt like I was seeing God. In Rome, I’d gone looking for him. I opened myself back up to him. But…why hadn’t I seen him?
I think it’s because I had been expecting to feel him in the instantly gratifying way that our society craves today. I was looking for him to appear to me in an overwhelming, cinematic sort of surprise-party sense, and I took every action accordingly. But in that, I was focusing on myself. I wasn’t noticing his steady presence, his warmth. But sometimes, I believe, encountering his presence is slower. It can take a little while to focus our vision on how tangibly he is right there. It’s a slow build, like the car warming up on a frostbitten day, or realizing this time the waiter is coming to your table with the pizza. Like feeling slowly nudged to notice he is seeing you, right there. However you find yourself, and exactly where you are. Here, this, now. That is always where he meets me.
Seeing God in everyday life still often eludes me when I take drastic measures to seek him. I’ve learned that much of the time, my search falls short because I don’t know exactly where or how to look–and I’m blind to his help. I realize now that God, with his masterful sense of humor, often needs me to notice that he is peering down, laughing, seeing me–and just trying to hand me some glasses.
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