Tag

pilgrimage

Hello Brother Ass

MATTHEW 6:19-23

A homily from my recent Rome pilgrimage.

When I saw the Porziuncola again, the little church within the church, inside the Basilica of St. Mary’s of the Angels, in Assisi—the simple stone hut that St. Francis built in the 12^th century, with brick and stucco and mud, about the size of a one-car garage, and vaulting up all around it, marbled and high-ceilinged, still another great Italian church, a basilica, with all the usual arches and statues and bronze—I thought of the soul.

I thought of us.

We all have an inner innocence. We all have an inner goodness. But our pride engulfs it–our self-consciousness–all the elaborate architecture of our egos.

We have to throw off our finery, as St. Francis famously did. Not be afraid to be who really are.

I don’t mean that we have to be spiritual athletes, because we can’t be. Francis never expected his followers to observe his own austerities. He was always very gentle with others and accommodating of their frailties and their humanness, and in fact at the end of his too-short life he even expressed regret for the way he had abused his own body. I should have been kinder to poor “brother ass,” he said, speaking of his body, of himself. At the very end he asked a friend to make him the special kind of almond cake he loved.

We have to throw off our finery, as St. Francis famously did. Not be afraid to be who really are.

St. Francis wasn’t a puritan or a scold but more a clown, not just free of pretension but full of joy in the simple things of life.

June 22, 2016

Prose

The Structure of Angels

A reflection from my recent Rome pilgrimage.

The Vatican is called the Vatican because it is built on a small hill beside the Tiber that the Ancients Romans called Mons Vaticanus, after the vates, the poets and seers who used to live there, looking into the future. The word vates comes from vi mentis, meaning “force of the mind,” or, as Ross King says, the creative imagination, so that in a very real way the Church can be seen to come first not from Reason, from dogma and doctrine, but from somewhere deeper, somewhere only poets and artists can reach.

The medieval churches were the Bibles of the Poor, because the poor couldn’t read the Bible on their own. Even into the nineteenth century most of Europe was illiterate. The only way that the people could receive the stories of the Bible was through the preaching they heard and from the statues and paintings covering the walls of their churches—the chunky little angels of Giotto, for example, with their wings the color of popsicles, cherry and orange and grape.

I love those chubby faces. I love how you can never tell if they’re laughing or crying, even when they’re hovering in the dark air around the cross.

June 21, 2016

Prose

The Human Person Fully Alive

a reflection from my recent pilgrimage to Rome

   Art historians and tour guides are always talking about how Michelangelo’s David is a symbol of the Renaissance belief in the power of the human person no longer subordinate to God, free finally of the Christian structures.
   But that’s to ignore the Incarnation: God became human, entered into the ordinary world, and so everything human and physical and embodied is forever holy and good, and really always has been.
   It’s to ignore what faith has always really proclaimed: that the glory of God, as St. Irenaeus puts it, is the human person fully alive.
   We’re always getting God wrong.
   Look at the veins in those massive marble hands, and the tendons, and the muscles; see the wonderful concentration in those great marble eyes, looking out at Goliath, sizing him up.
   The confidence. The poise.
   The David is Christ.
   The David is us.

June 19, 2016

Prose

Sometimes Not Having Perspective is a Good Thing

a reflection from my recent pilgrimage to Rome

Art historians and tour directors are always talking about how great it was when artists finally figured out perspective. When there could be a background finally, and objects in the background, and people. A road receding. Trees.

But I think there’s something to be said for the way in Medieval paintings all the golden angels and saints with their stiff, bright golden halos are stacked up on the sides and arranged around the bigger, brighter golden figure of Mary with the baby Jesus, like in a children’s book or an art project with felt cutouts or paper clouds and paper trees glued down on the same flat surface, but brighter and more golden. Everything on the same plane. The saint right next to a bird. God on top of the flower.

Anything can happen.

June 18, 2016

Prose

The Triumph of the Name of Jesus

A reflection from my recent Rome pilgrimage.

The building that houses the rooms of St. Ignatius, in Rome, where he lived the last years of his life, is adjacent to the great Jesuit church Gesu.

The rooms are wonderfully spare, with whitewashed walls and stone floors and low, wood-beamed ceilings. When you walk upstairs you see the simple wooden desk where Ignatius wrote and the simple wooden chair where he sat. Light comes through small, latticed windows.

Gesu is completely different. You walk in and the Baroque is exploding everywhere, angels and saints and colors and clouds billowing and rising all the way to the great dome in the center, every surface emblazoned and curlicued.

But here’s what a guidebook says, and I think it’s completely wrong: that Ignatius would have been “embarrassed” by Gesu. By the contrast.

As if our own taste has to be everybody’s.

As if it’s not possible for a person to like more than one kind of thing.

June 18, 2016