Sacred Life Sunday: Transparency

Pienza greets us with a cheery patch of grass on which to have lunch. The elders are meeting here and the old men gabble, laughing as one when a pinecone drops from the trees, thumping Paul squarely on the head. We eat our typical Tuscan picnic fare, rounding things out with ricciarelli—sweet almond cookies which dust our fingers in confectionary sugar.

We have no agenda here. No cathedral to visit or museum to haunt. We want only to wander, to follow twisting cobbled streets under the clotheslines hung with shirts and slips, past the window boxes red with geraniums. We think, perhaps we might tour the small palazzo, or buy the local pecorino cheese and eat it warm with honey. Instead, we stumble upon a small chapel. It seems surprisingly spacious beyond the heavy doors; its four walls unornamented save for some crumbling frescoes, the space inside wide and welcoming. The detailed Nativity just inside the doors and the pale broken images of men in brown robes quickly identify this as a Franciscan cappella, my favorite among the old orders. We walk with echoing steps down the long central aisle as we are drawn to the altar at the head of the room. It is utterly unlike any we have seen – a huge slab of unfinished marble lying on its side, for all the world evoking the damaged block from which Michelangelo freed David. Paul and I cannot stop admiring it and of course I, being ever tactile, must lay my hand upon it. The front is rough-hewn with markings I cannot understand, reaching back deep into some hidden past. The back, the side that would face the officiating priest, is covered with images from Old and New Testament tales. Custom says the top must be draped with a cloth in the liturgical colors of the season—although no clearly no standard fare from a mail order catalog would fit this undulating stone. So someone has made one of green and gold, sculpted and scalloped to fit the curve of the gentle polished top of the stone. I am in love. I am deeply in love. Though I wander through the rest of the building—to the beautiful sun-lit Marian chapel with its painted ceiling of blue and gold; past the flat, metal modern sculptures on the walls and the unique candelabra—it is back to the altar I repeatedly come. I pass it round and round, slide my palm over its finished top, sink my fingers into the crevices on its rough sides. It is intended to be a place of adoration, so I adore.

Paul is deeply drawn to the lectern to one side of the altar. It is relatively new, modern in its styling. It reminds us both thinks of our friend Amber, a metalworker and sculptor. We know she would love it. We have forgotten our tripod, and no flash is allowed, so Paul stacks coins on the edge of a pew-back in order to make a sort of camera stand and snaps photos with a slow-closing shutter. The lectern harkens back to Francis’ love of nature and is made in the shape of a tree, its branches entwined and only partially in leaf, so the congregation would be able to see the Bible, the reader, the priest standing behind. I suddenly realize that this is not typical of a Roman Catholic Church. Where is the dramatic raised pulpit elevating the priest above the congregants? Usually it is large and obvious, separating the priest from the people, lifting him up under an ornate dome, rimmed in intricate carvings or fringed in velvet. It is gone. No, not gone—moved—hauled down the length of the transcript to the back of the church and chained to the wall.

I am shocked. I am stunned. Who is the priest here? Who is this innovative renegade? Surely he must be something out of Sue Monk Kidd novel—some romantic character doomed to run afoul of the authorities and into the arms of a clever nun or a pretty congregant with a curious mind. And then I am off and running, writing a sketch in my head of a postmodern misfit in the Catholic milieu. A doomed hero who realizes you have to use art to preach, who knows his people will intuit truth through art. Here is he in my mind’s eye with his open-weave lectern communicating transparency. Here he is, low and close to the community demonstrating equity. Here he is serving the Eucharist from behind an ancient stone, demonstrating a continuous connection stretching from our past to our present and into our future.

Most assuredly, I am in love.

Eden and I sit in front of the stone altar on the dark polished pews. We sing The Breastplate of St. Patrick, the surpassingly good acoustics carrying our voices and making them better than they truly are. We choose the verse Francis would most love:

I bind unto myself today
The virtues of the starlit heaven,
The glorious sun’s life giving ray,
The whiteness of the moon at even,
The flashing of the lightning free,
The whirling wind’s tempestuous shocks,
The stable earth, the deep salt sea
Around the old eternal rocks…

The crowds of tourists come in and out of the chapel doors, glancing just a moment at the plain interior before moving on in search of bigger things. Eden and I stay in the echoes. I cannot help but think, “Beware all ye who enter here. You just might find what you are looking for.”

Posted in Soulstories
Tags: Sacred Life Sunday, Soulstories |