CHURCHGOING
Filbin, Diane
CHURCHGOING From Chicago to Santa Pudenziana Diane Filbi My father taught me to love churches. A surpris-ing feat, really, since he spent most of his time in bed. At least that is how I will...
...He had probably forgotten it, and he certainly wasn't one for looking back...
...Built around 400, on one of the earliest sites of Christian worship in the city, it is small and dark...
...She is wearing beautiful earrings for her presentation in heaven...
...Yet all the while I kept thinking, "If only the boys were here with me...
...The opposite side of the mosaic shows her sister, Pudenzdana, with Saint Peter's arm around her shoulder...
...To churches...
...There is a great deal of talk about abortion, celibacy, obedience, worldly vanity, parish fundraising, and even the pope's deeply ingrained suspicion of Americans...
...At the time of these visits he would have been about twenty-four and already settled into the job that he would hold for the rest of his life...
...Christ, his face in partial darkness, looks across the room at Matthew and points to him...
...But I suspect that they had everything to do with it...
...Several years before this day in Rome, at the time of my father's unexpected death, my family had kept vigil at the hospital during his ten days in a coma...
...Earlier that week, on the evening that turned out to be the day before he died, I had left my mother, sisters, and brothers at the intensive care unit so that I could get something to eat and go home...
...Looking back now I have to admire their patience...
...Entering from the right are two figures in shabby clothing...
...Perhaps my workaday urban background has conditioned me this way, but leaving one interesting city to visit another is usually what vacation means to me...
...This is his moment, his life now changed forever...
...On his days off, when you were a baby, he would put you in his car and drive you all around Chicago...
...Of course, you were the oldest and he was just a kid when you were born...
...The action centers on Matthew...
...I can still see him turning over on his elbow to show me Diary of a Country Priest...
...I hadn't until I saw him pictured in mosaic on the great apse, his arm around Prassede looking calm and relaxed...
...The church was crowded with workmen and noisy tourists...
...He could tell which one of his children was home by which artiste was being played, and once, in the early 1970s, he confided to me that he would lose his mind if he heard "American Pie" one more time...
...Preminger, fascinated by the church, picks up on themes of pre-Vatican II Catholicism...
...She isn't even walking yet!' we told him...
...He read in bed...
...It was smaller, and "The Dead" was his favorite story...
...Would my two sons have enjoyed discovering the painting in San Luigi...
...Probably...
...He died right after he retired, so he never had a chance to reverse his schedule and start getting a good night's sleep...
...He was crazy about you," she said...
...People who know Rome understand that the city takes its time to beckon...
...Watching the movie brought it all back to me...
...I turned the corner into Piazza Navona, took an outside table at Tre Scalini, and splurged...
...Saint Peter gestures to the boy to wait...
...When I walked in procession past him, lying down for the last time, I slipped him his paperback of James Joyce...
...We teased him about it because, do you know where he took you...
...I stepped around them, made my way toward the main altar, and turned left into a chapel...
...Low, like many early Roman gathering places, Santa Pudenziana invites a quiet approach...
...Although I had passed it many times on previous trips, I had never gone inside...
...In particular, I wanted to visit the ancient churches of Santa Prassede and Santa Pudenziana...
...People tiptoeing in and out of the bedroom prevented him from ever really sleeping, so he settled for a lifetime of resting...
...A boy at the head of the table is armed...
...Christ sits on a throne, holding some papers, and the heavenly Jerusalem is behind him...
...Of course, people who know Rome understand that the city takes its time to beckon...
...Beneath a palm tree at the far left is Saint Paschal, wearing nice shoes and the square halo of the living...
...I moved on to Santa Pudenziana, just across Via Cavour...
...To Saint Vincent's, or to Our Lady of Sorrows...everywhere...
...Perhaps the light is more important than the gesture-books have probably been written about it-but certainly it is what makes the painting so wonderful...
...He would stack his books on the floor next to his side of the bed, until he had thought them through, then he would move them onto his bookshelves...
...There are more important works of art than Caravaggio's The Calling of Saint Matthew, but we don't need reasons for having favorites...
...I don't know if his visits with me as an infant in his arms had anything to do with the feeling of peace and the love of God that I can often summon just by walking into a beautiful church...
...Even then I knew it was a cheesy movie, but some of the scenes have stayed with me all my life...
...All of it reminds me of the hours I spent as a girl, discussing such issues with my father...
...He had never mentioned any of this to me...
...I had but one option...
...And for that, I owe him a debt that can never be repaid.hat can never be repaid...
...Then, a few years later, a vacation day evoked his legacy even more...
...I intend to relax someday and quiet myself with nature, but I really am less drawn to a mountain brook than to, say, the Baroque frenzy of Ignatius Loyola's tomb...
...Emerging from a damp church into Roman sunshine may be one of life's most invigorating delights...
...I thought of him as the Proust of our city block, resting but thinking...
...He commissioned the church in the ninth century, and I enjoy thinking of him studying the plans and nodding his approval of this golden panorama...
...He worked at a night job for more than forty years and seemed to lengthen the time away from home by using public transportation...
...Although his business is serious, he looks kind and at ease...
...I walked for over an hour trying to find the inviting trattoria I had spotted the day before, but by the time I found it and realized it was closed on Mondays, the bright promise of lunch had begun to fade...
...I had taken it from his bookshelf, instead of picking up the volume on Christian tradition by Jaroslav Pelikan that lay on the floor next to his bed...
...The verb "looks" is inadequate and "points" is wrong too, but this is how the action begins...
...For me there is no surer way to sense God's protection and love than to enter a church and to see what's beautiful there...
...I had visited them before and hoped that seeing them again would give me the boost that I needed...
...As I rose to leave, I decided to visit San Luigi dei France-si, the French church nearby...
...Visiting the church on impulse and seeing the painting in the flesh transfixed me...
...People say that they feel God's love when they are in natural settings, but when I think of nature, I just hope that the basement isn't flooding...
...We were so earnest...
...He rarely went into the living room, just ran up and down the stairs from bed to table and then back to bed again...
...I entered Santa Prassede...
...It was a dazzling finish to a wonderful morning...
...So, for the third time that day, I left the sunshine behind and entered relative darkness...
...That he rarely complained about any of this enshrined him for me as a model of patience, which he held highest among virtues...
...Sentimental Education impressed him, as did other French novels, though he never went into detail when telling me why...
...We used to laugh about it...
...His sister, my beloved aunt, did her best to comfort us...
...And there it was, a surprise to me...
...Christ is in the center, surrounded by his friends, these early Christians...
...At one point she stood with me at a window...
...But Patrick would say that he wanted to show you what's beautiful...
...At least that is how I will always re-member him...
...That was a mark of the time...
...Do people think of Saint Paul as easygoing and friendly...
...At points in the daytime he would appear downstairs at the dining room table to visit with my mother and to talk with any of his seven children who might happen to be home...
...I had been in seventh grade in the mid-1960s when my best friend and I went to see it...
...I had read that this mosaic is pre-Byzantine and free of stylized influences, but its direct effect unsettled me...
...I had no idea...
...She looks purposeful and his gaze is steady...
...So, for the third time that day, I left the sunshine behind and entered relative darkness...
...But they would have teased me about it: church after church...
...On the way, I stopped at a video store to look for a film that I had been thinking about all that day, Otto Preminger's The Cardinal...
...The tax collector sits at the money table with his cronies...
...Although he was probably still thinking that one through, I chose the Joyce...
...The arches above depict the Paschal Lamb with the angels and saints...
...I saved for years to take them to Chartres, but what they remember is stopping at a Paris carnival and eating all the croissants the next morning...
...Even in the poor lighting and behind a wall of scaffolding, the power of the great painting was undiminished...
...What I remember is two little boys in shorts entering the cathedral and, well, looking up...
...The two of us puzzling it out together: Is the Catholic Church the only true church...
...The winter of 1998 had been a sad one for me in several respects, and I comforted myself by booking a trip to Rome in late March...
Vol. 130 • February 2003 • No. 4
