The majority of my group needed to leave our beautiful residenza at 3:30 a.m. on June 7; and so our indefatigable chaplain, Fr. Joseph Carola, celebrated a midnight Mass with us to finish off the semester in the most fitting way. Since the Eucharist is the Body of Christ, and yet we (as the living Church) are members of that Body, in a profound and mystical sense, we are never more closely united to our brethren than when around the Eucharistic Table. But despite this belief in continued closeness, it was quite bittersweet to be parting.
During his homily, Fr. Carola warned us that as soon as we got home and were enveloped in the world that was so much more familiar to us than our too-brief sojourn in Rome, the past four months would threaten to fade and feel as though they were but a dream. I didn’t believe him at the time: These months contained a handful of moments that stirred my soul as deeply (if not more) than any that I have ever experienced; the semester taken as a whole has been the most formative period I have ever been through.
Yet since coming home to Texas, I have come to realize that in a sense, he was right. I certainly find it hard to believe that it was weeks and not years ago that I lived twenty minutes by foot (well, thirty minutes with my crutches) from the Pope, that the highest artistic and architectural culture the West has ever achieved had become commonplace to me. In the sense of how long ago it seems, how distant, it does feel like a beautiful dream that’s over.
But that’s only half the story. For I have also realized that like those dreams that express something buried deep in the bottom of your soul, my semester in Rome sunk into my psyche at its deepest level. To some extent, I need not worry about ‘forgetting’ what I have been through, for I now in part *am* what I have been through. To quote After Virtue slightly out-of-context: a person is not some disembodied existential ‘ego,’ to whom events happen and drift by; a person is a character abstracted from a history. And the only way to make sense of who we are is to know and own our stories – our traditions, our communities, and our personal narrative taken as a unified whole.
It is rather after-the-fact, but since the events recounted below will be with me for the rest of my life, here’s a recap of what mattered most and is the kind of thing I can share (unlike the innumerable great conversations (and meals) I was blessed with):
April 10: Roccasecca (midway between Rome and Naples)
So it’s the week after Easter, and most of the house is gone on huge Eurotrips (two of my friends rushed through literally 21 countries in 17 days), but I’m still home because I’m waiting for my friend Ryan to get back from Jerusalem where he spent Holy Week. (The two of us went to Gimmelwald, Switzerland, when he did; it was a great trip, but that’s not part of this story.) One of my older friends, a veteran of the semester abroad, had told me that the best thing she did in her four months was go on a weekend trip by herself. Turns out that was the best piece of advice I got.
I knew that I wanted to visit Roccasecca, the birthplace of St. Thomas Aquinas, and that I needed to go alone. His ancestral castle is still there, though in ruins; the oldest church with his name on it is there; but I didn’t so much want to sightsee as to breathe it in without any distractions.
I got off the train about 10 a.m. (it’s only two hours from Rome) and crutched up to the first people I saw on the platform – an older gentleman and his grown son. In my halting Italian, I asked where St. Thomas’s castle is. They turned and pointed to the mountain range behind me, and I gulped: I had assumed it’d be nearby. I asked if there were a train or something. They said no, glanced at each other, and offered to drive me.
First, of course, we stopped at the grocery store. (By which I mean corner-store-with-completely-random-stuff-scattered-everywhere, but the Italians know exactly where what they want is. Instinct, I think.) So I had a good long chat with the elderly gent, who had just retired from working half a lifetime as an engineer in a chemicals plant, and was looking forward to playing with his grandkids more often.
We got to the top of the mountain maybe at 11. They waved goodbye, I thanked them profusely, and then I fell in love.
I have been obsessed with chivalry for as long as I’ve known that there once were such men as knights. But I had never been to a real castle until that moment. And though Roccasecca is in ruins, she is still beautiful. I spent two full hours climbing *down* the hill and around it before going ‘inside,’ just to take it all in. Next I went into the church, which was quite modest but peaceful and still functioning (the tabernacle light was lit).
And then I went inside the main walls and was overwhelmed. The castle had to be at least two football fields long, and there was a steep hill to climb to get to the ruins of (what I think was) the inner keep. I have pictures, but they don’t do it justice.
The time flew by, though I wasn’t doing all that much. I read Q83A11 from the Summa, ‘Do the saints in Heaven pray for us?’, and then asked St. Thomas for his prayers; I ate a lunch of apples, Parmesan, and Italian bread; I climbed the highest wall left standing and sat there for an hour, legs dangling, wind blowing, looking at the town at the foot of the mountain three thousand feet below me, looking at the sky and realizing what all of this was preparing me for.
It’s impossible for me to explain what this meant to me; either you will have had a similar experience and thus be able to relate, or not. But in a metaphorical-yet-overpowering way, I felt the hand of St. Thomas Aquinas on my shoulder for that hour while I sat there, as though he were my great-uncle lovingly welcoming me home.
More than at any point thus far that semester, I felt overwhelmingly at home in Italy, with my true people – the sort of people who would go far out of their way to give a ride to a young man on crutches who could only brokenly speak their language. But it is much more than that. I felt as though I understood how St. Thomas could give up all the riches of his life as a nobleman, the worldly pursuits that his brothers as dashing knights in shining armor were dedicated to. And I felt irrevocably sure that I was called to follow humbly in his footsteps, that I needed to become a lifelong student and teacher of philosophy in the Catholic tradition. The first half of the semester had imbued me with a deeper love of the faith than I had ever had before; but it had also opened my eyes to how slender the branch is that is currently supporting the mighty weight of the Church’s intellectual heritage.
When I was fifteen years old, I went on a retreat with the Brothers of St. John at their monastery in Laredo, Texas. There was one night when I lay, prostrate in prayer, on the stone floor of the chapel for over an hour. I hesitated to get up, because I knew that when I did, I would be different: When I arose, I would be committed to going into the seminary. It was the most decisive moment of my life until the age of 21; the next three years of high school, and the first two of college, were simply the spelling-out of what it had entailed.
Sitting on that wall, which I had scaled with my bare hands leaving my crutches at its base, the same thing happened. Except that instead of reluctantly accepting what I took as God’s Will, I was overwhelmingly joyful. I knew that when I descended, I would be different. I had already been thinking about graduate school for philosophy – but now I knew the fullness of why; I knew my vocation. And I knew that instead of prestige and sophistry, my leading criterion would have to be Truth.
It was the most decisive moment of my life since that first one; everything since then has been, and the next year or three or fifty will be, simply the spelling-out of what this entailed.
April 17: Rome, the Angelicum
A symbol of how good persists despite persecution:
A Slovakian seminarian in my politics class told me a Soviet-era joke that is still a statement of fact: “In Slovakia, we have two types of Communists: Protestant Communists and Catholic Communists.’
April 20: Vatican City
It turns out that my architecture professor, Andrea Baciarlini, completely renovated the San Columbano chapel in the crypt of St. Peter’s in the wake of the Vatican II reforms. He took us there, and proudly told us it was the most-requested private chapel in St. Peter’s; I believed it and could see why. (I also might – might – have momentarily seated myself in the presidial chair, which was a gift from Pope John Paul II.) Then he gave us an inside tour of the Vatican’s Mosaic Studio, where the best mosaics in the world are still being made – we saw the Pope’s future gift to the President of Brazil, a mosaic of the Madonna and child, still only half-done a week before Benedict was to leave. And yet despite the pressure, two of the staff members broke off work and talked to us for half an hour about how they did it (it’s a bit easier now, apparently, because they can print out exact images of what they want, glue the sheet to the surface that they are working on, and then bit by bit replace the paper with the stones). Those who stayed late and showed extra interest – myself included – were given some colored glass from their palettes as souvenirs. It was just an unbelievable day of inside-access.
May 2: Rome, Bernardi Campus
I mentioned earlier how the Little Brothers and Sisters of the Lamb are my new favorite religious order; they are an offshoot of the Dominicans that adheres to the original standards of poverty that St. Dominic intended. We had four of them over for dinner at our Community Night, and afterwards they gave us a talk and answered questions. Our chaplain had earlier mentioned to us a quote from St. Ignatius, that “The true defense of religious life is poverty. When that goes, all else goes with it.” This makes sense. But the way that Brother Samuel put a similar truth struck me far more deeply: “Only with empty hands can you embrace God.”
May 9: Rome, the Angelicum
Fr. Paul Murray, O.P., a professor at the Angelicum, is a published poet and respected scholar; he also was a very close friend of Mother Teresa’s, to whom she would go in times of spiritual darkness – which, famously, was almost constant during the last three decades of her life. His course ‘God and the Poets’ was simply delightful; it was impossible to leave without being refreshed. But on May 9, I had a spur-of-the-moment urge to sit in on his other class, ‘Spiritual Theology,’ which I had never done before. I did; the day’s topic was ‘The Cloud of Unknowing’ and the work of Meister Eckhart, neither of which I knew well. In an hour’s lecture to fifty people, Fr. Murray tore my heart open and planted a deeply-needed seed at the very core of it.
As you might have guessed by now, I have a rather intellectual approach to my faith. Yet one cannot live a religion as if it were a mere philosophy, and I have often grappled with St. Augustine’s problem (far more unsuccessfully than he, of course): longing to understand the mysteries of the faith with the same lucidity as a simple syllogism. Fr. Murray, a poet to the core, took the budding philosopher in me to school. The entire class was overwhelming, but one quote from Meister Eckhart penetrated above all else: “Where understanding, desire, feelings end, there is darkness. And there God’s radiance begins.”
Powerful and helpful as our theology may be, the bottom line is that in the practical questions that burn us the most, we’re not going to know. And when, exhausted, we give up our own efforts, there is often an emotional drain that is worse than the intellectual one. And yet – exactly echoing the quote from Br. Samuel above – it is precisely only then that we are truly receptive to God. It is only when we have ceased shouting that we can hear the voice of God; we cannot see Him face to face “Till We Have Faces.”
This is “The Cloud of Unknowing” – that ‘at the very bottom, we know nothing, but have a desperate inclination to God.’ And only by abiding in Love will we intuitively glimpse what we never will be able to adequately formulate; we must learn to be at home in this darkness, for in this lifetime, we who are trapped in the cave can catch but a flickering shadow from the Sun.
(The supernatural gift of infused contemplation is another matter. But as the overwhelmingly inspiring Fr. Robert Barron (wordonfire.org), our guest at Community Night that evening, reminded us, the Christian spiritual life is not a mountain that we climb on our own. Rather, He is the vine, we are the branches, and every good is a Grace.)
Fr. Bruce Williams, O.P., was my spiritual director for the semester (and my Political Philosophy professor). He is an elderly but spirited Dominican, and served well as the ‘wise old man’ I was looking for. (I half-seriously think he has the Summa Theologiae memorized, because he would begin every single answer to any question I raised with “well, as St. Thomas writes in Article X of Question Y of Part Z-A of the Summa …”) This was our last full session, and he told me that I was too hard on myself – which isn’t a bad thing to hear from someone you are under some level of obedience to!
Seriously, though, while I’m going to keep private what else was said, the grace that comes from finding a trustworthy director is truly powerful. So many of us carry our deepest burdens alone, when there are literally hundreds of thousands of professed men and women whose entire lives are sworn over to devotion to God and service to neighbor .. it just doesn’t make sense to me
Fr. Carola, after 27 years in the order, and about two decades after his ordination as a Priest, was received fully into the Society of Jesus by taking his final vows as a professed father. It was a powerful Mass in the splendid Baroque church which is also the final resting place of St. Ignatius. If you’re curious about the ceremony, you can search “Joseph Carola Final Vows” on YouTube and watch him make his act of profession.
May 25-7: Caserta (outside Naples)
After all these months, I finally found a day when I could go visit my relatives and most of them would be in town. My mom has three second-cousins in Naples – Anna Maria, Rosaria, and Wanda – who are more like sisters to her. I went to stay at Anna Maria’s house in Caserta, as it is the biggest; along with her and her husband, their sons Guglielmo and Stefano were home. I waited till the end in part because I wanted my Italian to be better – and I’m glad I did. Though Anna Maria and her sons speak excellent English, the rest of my relatives do not; and thus for the first time ever, I was able truly to enter into life with them.
They really went out of their way to be kind hosts. Guglielmo gave me stick-shift driving lessons and took me to Casertavecchia, the preserved Medieval town, on Sunday; Stefano took me to the beach with his friends on Saturday, and then even had his girlfriend set me up on a date with her best friend that evening! (The four of us went together as a double-date, of course, but that was still pretty cool of a guy I had only met once before, three years ago.)
But I would have had a fantastic time even if we hadn’t been running around. I loved the time I just spent around the house, being shown my uncle’s vegetable garden and chatting with the family about everything from politics to TV. From the first dinner on Friday night to the last kisses goodbye, I was exposed to a style of living that is rather different from what I am used to, but felt overwhelmingly right – exuberant conversations with dramatic hand gestures (I have **never** heard only four people get so loud at a dinner table!), long and very very very filling meals, home-grown fruits and veggies and home-made desserts, and comfortable silences filled with peace.
It was the perfect way to end the semester; when I got back to Rome, I realized that although there were literally dozens of things I still wanted to do and places I wouldn’t be able to see, exactly everything that had **needed** to happen had done so, and in the right order for me to appreciate it.
June 4-6: Rome, The Angelicum
It was good that I was content, because then I had a 20-page paper, a 6-page paper, and a final exam in the next three days; then a weekend off, and then from the 4th-6th I had three more exams and an architecture presentation. Oh, and did I mention that my ‘personal growth’ had taken total precedence over my academic studies all semester till that point?
It was fun. A tad stressful at times, but once the first half was done, I realized that I had in fact learned some school-related things along the way. And the Roman style of testing, thankfully, played to a strength of mine: Oral exams that count for 100% of your grade were a terrifying prospect for some of my housemates, but I have taken about two of them each year since I was a sophomore in high school, and so I tend not to be nervous.
Except for my Medieval Philosophy exam. The class was taught by Fr. Walter Senner, O.P., who is rumored to be the world’s leading researcher on St. Thomas, working with the actual manuscripts to produce definitive editions of some of his books that haven’t even been translated into English yet. He’s a lot more than that, though: Fr. Senner is the closest person that I will ever see *to* St. Thomas Aquinas. He is tall, large, overwhelmingly brilliant, and the most humble/quiet/gentle/soft-spoken man I have ever met in my life. It was standard practice at the Angelicum to begin class with a prayer, but his were always improvised directly from the heart, some of the most simple and yet most moving prayers I have ever heard. As one of my friends put it, “he IS faith seeking understanding.” (And as Fr. Senner closed the very last lecture by saying, “I hope that, if nothing else, you have realized that you cannot hope to understand Medieval Philosophy if you do not believe in God.”) I have a habit of hero-worshipping my favorite professors, but this wasn’t the case. Rather, I was worried about the exam because I frankly knew that most of the class would do quite poorly – indeed, about two-thirds of the class was not even there most days; for all his holiness and brilliance, Fr. Senner was Scholastic in the stereotypical sense while lecturing, patiently plodding from one detail to the next while the students gradually became overwhelmed. And so I was worried simply because I know that this man probably loves Truth more than any other person I will ever meet, and he takes his vocation as a teacher enormously to heart for that reason. Fr. Senner once told me a story about St. Thomas that struck me to the core: During one debate, St. Thomas became so hurt by the malice of his opponent (who was being a pure sophist, using every possible trick in the attempt to win regardless of how much he disregarded the truth) that he simply burst into tears. Likewise, based off of how little learning had gone on among my housemates, I honestly feared that Fr. Senner would be personally hurt by how little we Americans had learned, how recklessly we had tossed aside this pearl, these truths he had offered us. (And, having come to Rome to study at The Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas, I wanted to have learned something about him there!) So I studied. A lot. And was rewarded by a number of gifts; Fr. Senner grilled me as patiently and thoroughly as he had everyone else, and yet it seemed that the questions he asked me were all ones I had just reviewed before walking into the exam, or things I had learned in previous classes and thus could draw on to show ‘extra diligence.’ Fr. Senner was quite pleased, and I was quite grateful that it worked out.
Then the next day I had to give my architecture presentation, which I had **begun** at 4.30 in the morning that same day .. let’s just say that that one went well enough.
June 6: Vatican City
I wound up sleeping for only 1.5 of the last 60 hours that I was in Rome, actually; definitely squeezing every last drop out of the rind. My last full day happened to be the Wednesday Audience where a man jumped the barricades and tried to attack Pope Benedict, who didn’t even notice and peacefully went on blessing the crowds .. I was there, saying goodbye – and getting a big bag of various religious articles to bring home blessed. I went back later that afternoon to pay my final respects to Pope John Paul II as well. One of the first things I wrote about was how deeply seeing his tomb for the first time had torn into me; over the semester I came back to visit when I could, and now I had come to say farewell one last time. I knelt there for over an hour; there was too much bustle and I was too tired to focus deeply, but I was very much at peace when I stood to leave.
June 7: Paris
My plane got delayed for 8 or so hours. It took me over a day to get home. I barely noticed, as I slept for almost all of it.
June 16: Austin, Texas
My mom and I were talking about something political, and she started to get excited and worried-sounding and her voice raised. My initial reaction was one I have inherited from my dad, who is frankly a very dour Irishman (he taught me the importance of speaking slowly, clearly, and precisely): ‘Oh, there she goes again, getting carried away.’ But I realized that I was thinking that, and then it just HIT ME that this isn’t something bad about my mother; this is the simple fact that she is a first-generation immigrant who speaks English as a second language. (It’s a fact that is very hidden because my mom has no accent and in most ways is very assimilated; but I had no idea how important it was until that moment.) And instead of trying to play the pacifist and calm things down, for the first time in my life I chose to join in like her: I intentionally let myself get carried away, exaggerating my rhetoric and letting my voice stray from its usual monotone (I have a reputation for being too rationalistic and restrained). She loved it, and responded in kind; within a few minutes, I simply burst out laughing uncontrollably, because we were just having too much fun. My entire life I have had what I somewhat disparagingly called my ‘goofy’ side, the part of me that made me German Folkdance and wear Winnie-the-Pooh t-shirts in high school. I have kept that side tightly under wraps, letting it free in closely constrained areas while mostly remaining as calm, thoughtful, serious, and sincere as I possibly could. This semester, though, and particularly that weekend with my relatives, simply made it impossible to do ever again. I had been a Cartesian, with a split down the center of my soul; I knew in some ways that it wasn’t good, but now I finally understand that it’s not **me.** I am genuinely, in fact overwhelmingly, Italian. And that, like all of life, is something to be celebrated. Home for the summer, speaking more Italian than English with my mom – and getting cooking lessons from an expert! – I’m doing my best to learn how this is done.
My ‘Theology of Divine Providence’ professor, Fr. Arthur Kennedy, introduced me to the General-Empirical Method of Human Understanding this semester. Based on Aristotle’s ‘three acts of the mind,’ it’s a complete philosophical overview of how we know anything (‘Insight’ by Bernard Lonergan, S.J., is the book to read if interested). One of the key distinctions made is between the vector from the bottom-up and that from top-down – the vector of achievement and the vector of gift – in short, what we can do and what God can do for us. This has been a really fruitful way for me to look at what I was hoping would happen this semester. I’m almost certainly missing a number of crucial components here. But what I’ve got so far is:
In the vector from the bottom-up, to understand yourself is to know where is the source of unity for the narrative that is your life, as well as what communities and what traditions you have been born into and shaped by.
In the vector from the top-down, to understand yourself is to just-barely-but-just-barely-enough glimpse God’s Providential plan for you, to make sense of where you’ve been led and strive to know where the straight and narrow path is leading.
In these four months in Rome, I have been given an overwhelming gift of understanding in both those vectors. The first half, my long Lenten journey with crutches to the station churches, focused on the top-down in my growing sense of vocation and my deeper participation in the grace-filled Tradition that is the Church. This culminated with Holy Week, Easter, and my immediately-following visit to the birthplace of St. Thomas Aquinas. The second half of the semester was more Italian-heavy, teaching me more about tangible traditions, local communities – letting me understand my mother and myself. Just as grace builds on nature, so of course both these vectors interpenetrate.
When I was maybe 16, it hit me that God has an idea of who He wants each of us to be, who He created us to become, with a unique vocation and an important mission – and that only this person is the ‘real’ you or me; our flaws and foibles keep us as mere shadows of the archetypes that we could be instantiating. (When God first conceived of us even before He knit us in our mother’s wombs, how big of a role did He intend TV to play in our lives?) I knew there was a radical discrepancy between who I was and Who I Am – who I am meant and called to be.
After this semester, there’s still that gap, of course. And yet now for the first time, I can honestly say that I know Who I Am – and that if I am trusting and willing, even in the midst of our inescapable human imperfection, I will be led to that fulfillment in due time.
Thanks for listening. I’ll make a special intention in my prayers for ‘anyone who actually read my never-updated blog.’ And if you would keep me in yours … despite my optimism, I could use it.
