Rome

Christ is risen!

Holy Week, Bright Week, the Easter season… These past few weeks have been so full of light, I’ve felt myself quite unable to write or say much about them. Maybe some days are meant for only for living and not for telling.

It’s been almost a week since I arrived in Rome on a cold, grey day and was welcomed with hot breakfast at Ben and Heather’s small apartment here in the Eternal City. On my way into the city on the train from Fiumicino I sensed the incredible age of this place. It has witnessed so much:  classical antiquity, the rise of Christianity, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance. Layer upon layer, the ground rises.

Today for the first time ever I attended a High Mass of the old (“extraordinary”, if you prefer) Roman Rite at Santissima Trinità dei Pellegrini and was moved by the tangible verticality of the liturgy. To say it another way, I felt pushed (taken?) upward. I also felt a sense of connectedness to the common tradition that once held East and West together, and simultaneously a blunt sadness for all that was loss in the so-called liturgical reform.

This evening, Ben and I went to Vespers at Trinita dei Monte of the Community of Jerusalem. I didn’t understand a word of the French, but that is not necessary for one to apprehend that this worship was directed at One who is Mystery. On the way back to the apartment I wished that more could see and experience what I had seen and experienced in that little church on top of the Spanish steps. I could not help but feel that its serene power was something that flowed beyond the doors of the church onto the unsuspecting crowd gathered on the steps—some to sing, some to chat, some just to enjoy quietly the setting sun and the spring flowers—but all somehow affected mystically by the psalms and hymns ascending from Trinita dei Monte.

I’ll try my best to keep writing on this trip. These days seem ineffable.