Fiesty Filmore #2

I’ve never been particularly religious, but I’ve had a religious experience. It happened in Santa Maria degli Angeli e dei Martiri. My friends and I arrived in Rome in the late afternoon and decided we had time to see one cathedral in the evening before getting dinner. We decided on the Santa Maria because it was close to our hostel. The basilica doesn’t look like much from the outside, seeing as it’s built inside the ruins of the Roman Baths of Diocletian. But in the golden hour, as dusk settles on the city, the last long red rays of the sun give the weathered façade a special glow. In some subtle way, the warm hues cast by the setting sun seem to not only bridge the day and the night, they fuse the past and the present as they splash against the ancient walls.

The friscalating dusk light, lovely as it was, didn’t prepare me for what awaited inside the basilica. I had never been in a Cathedral before in my life. I grew up in the Deep South, where the most architecturally impressive places of worship are enormous Baptist churches. Each town has an especially large one, usually referred to by the locals that do not attend it as ‘Six Flags over Jesus.’ While they’re big, they’re not anymore impressive than a basketball arena, just a big place full of seats. Needless to say, none of them were designed by Michelangelo, or the final resting place of Pope Pius IV. I didn’t know this before we entered the basilica. I didn’t know much of anything about cathedrals before we walked in. And I’m glad for it. Because being totally unprepared for what was inside made it all the better.

The great vaulted transepts create a diurnal space that sends the last rays of the sun dancing up into the soaring ceilings of its domes. I had never seen such an amazing creation of space before. The feeling was positively sublime. Staring up at the ceiling, you felt as if you were somehow lifted up out of yourself towards the heavens. And while I’ll never forget the feeling of looking up at those great ceilings for the first time, that feeling of the divinity architecture can conjure. But it was not the august arches, or the magnificent papal tomb that struck me the most.

That came when I saw another tourist who in any other setting I probably wouldn’t have paid a second glance, unless it was to make a joke to one of my friends. He must have been seventeen or eighteen years old. But he was one of those people with the misfortune of looking middle aged even while still in high school. It was as if his body decided to go ahead and assume the shape of someone in his mid forties, and just wait for his age to catch up. My impression was confirmed by the fact his dad standing beside him, the mirror image of his son, if a mirror adds thirty some odd years to your life. The kid had a thin mustache that would one day fill out and probably provide his lip much-needed warmth against the harsh winter winds of Minnesota, Iowa, or whatever other Midwestern state he was from. I guess what I’m trying to say, in my own elitist way, is that if you saw this kid you wouldn’t think he had much going for him in life. He was a mortal lock to be a Driver’s Ed instructor or the day manager of an Arby’s. To top it all off, he was wearing a black t-shirt with an epically drawn sword-wielding archangel that had the words ‘St. Michael Defend Us’ dramatically emblazoned across the chest in red letters.

But to look at his face, in that cathedral, you could have never guessed he’d been dealt a short hand. He stood there, neck craned toward the ceiling, mouth half open in a dopey smile, looking at Michelangelo’s arches with a look of absolute wonder. As I stood across the cathedral, looking at him look at the ceiling, I knew that for all the books I’d read and fancy adjectives I toted around in my head, like diurnal or august, I could never hope to even touch for the briefest of moments the sheer awe that was coursing through him. All those things that I would’ve been so scornful of, the Midwestern provinciality, the lame shirt, the hokey Catholic theology, all of those things were thrown right back at me in that dopey smile.

I hate it when people try to use the fact that “it could be a whole lot worse” as a source of comfort. The first thought that comes in my head is “well it could be a whole lot better too.” There also seems to be something perverse about using the fact that someone has it worse than you do to make yourself feel better, as if seeing somebody lower on the totem pole makes you better off. But that day, I did feel better about somebody else being somewhere else on the totem pole of life, only it was reversed. If you had asked me if I wanted to trade places with that kid I would have said ‘no’ any and every day of the week. But on that evening, in that cathedral, I envied the hell out of that kid. And that’s the beauty of the human spectrum. Depending on the time, the place, and especially the light, we can all shine brightly.