Sola Fide

A few years ago I had a chicken named Kate. It wasn’t the smartest decision to have her, because I didn’t know much about keeping chickens in a place named Bear Valley. I had Kate long before we installed an electric fence around her coop, to keep the bear and lynx away, and a mesh roof over her run, to protect her from hawks and owls. She was a black Sex Link and the epitome of one tough bird. She was also a bit of a bitch. As the top hen pecker, she killed two of her flock mates. She kept one hen in her company, and it might have stayed that way if a friend’s dog hadn’t torn her comrade to pieces.

            For almost three years she was alone and for half that time, thinking she might be miserable, I wondered if I should off her. It was only after a Derick Burleson’s poetry class on Tennyson’s Ulysses and the dramatic monologue, in which the author takes on the character of someone else, that Kate, through my own hand, wrote herself into continued existence. Her poem was entitled “Black Chicken,” and she had this to say.

Thanks to Kaya, I’m alone.

The mongrel dog took the hen I pecked and plucked her feathers skullduggery style.

As usual, you didn’t even ask to see the carcass; your mate consistently makes death disappear for you right before your eyes.

This solitude of a chicken you say? So against flock mentality and the wants I’m supposed to have.

True, sometimes I cackle and await the answer that doesn’t come. I dust my feathers and feel no one’s heat, but the sun’s.

And so you look at me, in what? Sympathy? Intrusion?

You, who never raised a hatchet, except to chop kindling, think longingly of my neck on the block!

Know this, my considering executioner,

The night is wild, and I roost in sumac.

The earth is moist, and I inhale its dwellers.

The forest makes calls, and I cry, like an eagle, in return.

I can be myself.

A tribe of one, at rest in isolation.

So listen closely, wayward friend.

 Put that ax down!

There is no use for it or for you either.

Funny. It seemed once I wrote Kate into survival, our dynamic changed. Whenever I opened the front door in the morning or came home from work at night, she ran to me, with her wings outstretched and chortling a hen’s mix of greetings and complaints. It wasn’t just for food. That chicken followed me for walks in the woods, had a fondness for jumping on Cletus’s back, and chose a good IPA over a sip of water every time.

What predators she might encounter while I was away, I couldn’t predict each day, but she had the decided ability to outmaneuver all of them. My neighbor Allison once watched her outsmart a black bear in pursuit. That same summer, a lynx silently waited out a litter of feral rabbits living under our shed, just steps from Kate’s coop. Yet each morning and night Kate was there to greet me. Until, that is, she wasn’t.

It was the start of winter in 2010. By then we had moved her heated and lit coop, a monstrosity Richard had made for me the prior Christmas, to its permanent site. We surrounded it with a six-foot fence. Although we knew it would be difficult, we even contemplated introducing Kate to a new set of pullets. Then came the first day, then the second, and then the third, when we couldn’t find her. I thought the worst when I found a bear print on the coop’s window. While our fence was up, we hadn’t yet hooked up the electrified wire, and without it, the fence was no real barrier for any predator. It was, however, for a chicken. By containing Kate, she must’ve run out of escape options.

 I had just about given up on finding her when I remembered to check around the old doghouse, then dismantled that had once served as Kate’s first coop. I found her there, nestled in a corner, in old straw, and gathered her up to return her to roost. That’s when I noticed her sagging comb and her beak half open. She was struggling to breathe.

If there ever were a chicken I would consider taking to a vet, it was Kate. But usually by the time you notice an infection or ailment in a hen, it’s already too late. I took her in the garage that night. I tried to give her her favorite local beer, the Fairweather brand, and the bananas she used to gulp up like amusement park offerings. She would have none of it. All she would take were the eyedropper offerings of water I positioned over her beak, and even that she did reluctantly.

Can a chicken feel love? That’s certainly too much to ask from a direct descendant of the dinosaur, but I believe this. With me, that night, she felt unthreatened, and I think she knew her putative executioner had become her biggest protector.

I mention Kate not simply because she was one great chicken (yes, the two words can go together without the word fried between them), but because the moment before she took her last breath, she raised her head, flapped her wings—with the ferocity of a wild trumpeter swan, I should add—and then fell back into my arms.

Let me testify, though you needn’t agree, when she offered herself up in that manner, head high, wings untamed, I had little doubt some force in her was flying away. Where did she go? My Christian faith tells me it’s not heaven for heaven is solely for the forgiven human soul who’s chosen Jesus as her way, her truth, and her light. Other religions might be of assistance. Zen Buddhists, for example, will tell me Kate’s purpose was to teach me a lesson and, once taught, her life force was again free to leave. I get that, but I also highly doubt Kate’s life was solely for my benefit. Therefore, my belief in something more universal takes refuge in this. Any force any of us might call the Father, Yahweh, Creator, or even Mother of the Gods is much greater than anything we can comprehend. That Kate should just perish? I don’t think so. Or that Kate existed only for me? No to that as well. That Kate still thrives somewhere, not for my benefit, but as a tribe of one. This gives me sustenance, because that little chicken didn’t go anywhere she didn’t want to be.

Which brings me to my purpose, one day before my second meeting with Ormechea, of exploring what it means to have faith, whether it be faith that even a chicken’s spirit might go on or, more on-point, that, if I really try to observe, every step I’m taking in this millennia-ravaged Rome is not alone.

*

Wednesday morning

Last night, this amateur photographer made it back to the Hotel Lancelot in time for our collective dinner. Perhaps out of fatigue, but more likely out of a renewed sense of openness, I felt freer to speak. Over roasted asparagus and skirt steak, Barbara looked at me slack jawed when I explained the day’s developments.

“I guess you didn’t need Matthew,” she said, somewhat sadly.

I next let Vivian know how much help Abbie’s little heart gave me. And on a later, Matthew-directed moonlight tour around the Basilica of Saint John the Lateran, Father Stephan and I had time to discuss his choice of religious life made in his early forties. He had been a wandering soul, a vagabond in spirit up until then, but with his parishioners he thought he was the calm one, the one whose ear I knew sweet-singing Beatrice would have, and the one who might prod Thomas back to gentle husbandry. Which brings me again to my question. Although our conversation never turned directly to the subject of faith, to me, he’s a walking example of what I think is most important about it.

The age-old debate between Martin Luther and the criminally and ethically flawed Renaissance papacy was whether justification by sola fide, that is, by faith alone, was enough to save the human soul. For the man who, like Saint Paul, believed that with God all things are possible, Luther’s answer, my Wisconsin Synod husband often reminds me, was a simple yes, born perhaps, as he said, upon the steps of La Scala Sancta when he pondered, “Who knows whether it is so?"

As for Luther’s opponents then and even today through modern Catholicism, Catholic course correctors will assert faith plus acts are necessary for a sinner’s redemption. “Faith, if it not have works, is dead,” pronounced the sixteenth-century Council of Trent. And, as described in the New Advent online Catholic Encyclopedia, faith must be attended with repentance, penance, love of God, charity, and virtue for the kingdom of God to ever be at hand. My friend studying to become a Catholic deacon will add that even modern-day Lutherans believe faith alone is not enough to achieve justification, but I can think of at least one modern-day Lutheran, my husband, who would still disagree.

As for me, my Catholic religion’s guidance would be less objectionable if the Renaissance system of bought indulgences, still active today, didn’t pollute what was charitable and virtuous. And Martin Luther’s guidance might also have sway if it did not theoretically (although likely practically impossible) permit the serial murder, with Jesus in his heart, to be justified.

I understand faith a bit differently and have come to believe that faith is an act or decision whose benefit has nothing to do with justification. That is, if, in the case of Father Stephan, faith’s sole purpose is to bring him contentment, then no end game of salvation, or even flying to where Kate might abide.is necessary. Heaven, it would seem, is right here on earth.

*

Two Loyola University freshmen recently met with my aunt and penned what they titled, The Memoir of Sister Ann Carolyn Blackburn. In it, my aunt described as gifts the times in her life when it was especially difficult for her to connect with God. These moments enriched her faith, rather than lessened it. So when a debilitating disease caused her unbearable pain, she thanked God for teaching her how to suffer, and when she fell shortly after a hip replacement, she further thanked God for the little things she could still do, like pray. The acts themselves of suffering and of prayer were building blocks of her faith because she didn’t ever believe she was going through them alone. With the appearance, yet again, of the Book of Timothy, my Alaska connection to the Khan family, and finally finding Ormechea so easily, neither did I.

            Last summer, my friend Pamela and I went to see Bill Maher in concert. We loved Bill, especially when he lampooned Alaska’s ex-half-term, Putin-imagining governor, but we both got quiet when he started to go on about the foolishness of believing in God. Like Pamela and me, he had been raised Catholic. Nevertheless, he called the belief in any higher power, be it Jesus, Buddha, or New Age spiritualism, “a purposeful suspension of critical thinking.” He asked if God exists, why didn’t he or she speak to us directly, and he concluded the only purpose of believing in a greater power is to allay our collective fear of death.

I liked Bill Maher, always will, and no singular part of me can say he’s not potentially correct. Beyond my own experiences, I have no need or desire to press my beliefs on others. If they are happy to consider them, I’m happy to offer them, and to listen to criticisms of them, no obligation required. But, halfway through Maher’s critique of the Holy Trinity, Pamela leaned over to me and said, “He’s sounds so Catholic.”

She was right. His argument seemed Ignatian in presentation. Present the thesis and prove it in three parts, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit of it all.  I still have to disagree with Bill. From my singular human existence, I’ve come to believe faith is not the suspension of critical thinking; rather, it’s what steps in when critical thinking can’t provide an answer any more believable than the one critical thinking offers. An example. Judging by the number of pages in a typical Bible, there was a one in seventeen hundred chance that the man across the aisle on the plane would be reading from the Book of Timothy. So what are the odds that, at pivotal moments in my life, I would encounter these epistles a second time and then, you will soon find out, even a third? Is a threefold coincidence any more believable than the idea that a loving force might be finding a way to reach me through the best means possible? Perhaps, to Bill Maher, coincidence is the only plausible explanation, but I suspended no more critical thinking thinking otherwise than he. Critical does not mean hopeless.

 As to whether God speaks directly to humankind, I can think of numerous times, at least for me, that something greater than me got my attention. From seeing a dog reach her eleventh year when all doctors said she would die at six months of age, to my answered prayer on the Camino de Santiago, to a daughter falling into my life when I had given up on even the possibility of her, God whispered, “hello.” And if I were to take my aunt’s guidance, even moments of suffering are moments of conversation.

Maher’s last point? That a belief in God allays the fear of death? Sure. As much as any Christian, I want to believe the Book of John’s pronouncement that God’s house has many dwelling places and my savior has gone to prepare a place for me. If he had me in mind, my dwelling place would have one awesome patio at the corners of Pocahontas Trail and Hiawatha Drive. There, the Cubs game would be on the radio (and they would be winning). My uncle would be laughing the laugh that shakes walls, and my grandfather would be dressed head to toe in yellow, looking like one big banana. I also want to believe what my aunt has witnessed tending to sisters who are dying. She’s said she’s seen a spiritual aura around them when they pass on, and it gives her courage to face death. But the thing is, even with a belief in God, we still fear what is, in no uncertain terms, an end of an earthly existence. Whether an energy that cannot be destroyed follows or doesn’t follow, fear doesn’t vanish. A belief in God is no more its undoing than a belief against God. No, as my father told me, never expect to live, or in this case die, without fear, but don’t withhold making a choice because of it.

From my aunt’s memoir: “I remember when I was twenty years old, and now I’m eighty-three. My mother said you live and learn. That’s what living is: learning.” If there’s one thing I’ve learned, especially here in Rome, it is that a loving God, whoever yours might or even might not be, does not abandon. And that if you’re awake and alive, rarely the day will go by that you don’t feel this is so. Is this Christian enough? Do I still get to carry the Jesus card? The pope might disagree, but I’ve made my peace. And as to whether I might be wrong? Yes, Bill Maher, that is a decided possibility. But, in my critical thinking, I choose God.    

*

I don’t realize Wednesday is a national holiday until I see the Via dei Fori Imperali, from the Colosseum to Vittorio Emmanuel Monument, is free of all the crazy, maniacal Italian drivers I witnessed upon my arrival and open solely to pedestrians. It’s Festa della Liberazione, a day commemorating the end of World War II in Italy. Although I still need to prepare my list of questions for Ormechea and develop the best strategy for asking them, it’s feels like my liberation day too, the day to simply be a tourist.

Last night I came up with a plan. My first stop would be the top of the Emmanuel Vittorio Monument. Then I would walk to the Pantheon, and finally spend an afternoon lazing about the Piazza Navona, Return to Me style. Before leaving the hotel for the day, I ran it by Robert, the Ghanian diplomat. He did his best not to question my overtly tourist track steps, but I could still see his smile turn into a scowl, which I think implied, “Why not go see the real Rome? San Lorenzo or Trastevere?” He was off to look at the last of two apartments on the outskirts of town. We left together, me making a left at the hotel’s gate and he a right.

“Jo-ann,”he spoke my name the way the Spanish do, “be sure to have some fun!” he said, straightening his tie one last time. Even going to look at apartments, he was still the best dressed among us. 

Fun. The last time I remember having fun ended with me making out with a cab driver on my “red shoes, no knickers” night out with my friend Jenny in London. Come to think of it, he wasn’t the cab driver. He was a passenger in a private cab we commandeered after the bars closed, and I believe he worked crew on some billionaire’s yacht then  iparked down on the Thames. Good thing I had Jenny to get us out of there, or I may have been found at the bottom of the river the next morning. We made it back to our hovel of a room near King’s Cross and I made my way home to Alaska the next day. Still, for my last memory of fun to be more than eleven years ago, something had to be done about that, just not today. With tomorrow’s fare still to come, fun seems so out of the question. But relaxing, inquisitive, and potentially stressless? These are possible. And how about sarcastic? Nessun problema.

 I take comfort that Romans, almost to a person, lampoon the Vittorio Emmanuel Monument, il Vittoriano, as an eyesore, giving it nicknames like the Wedding Cake, the Typewriter, and False Teeth. One website remarks that the best thing about riding the elevator to the top of the monument is taking panoramic photos of the city that don’t include it. One downside? Taking too many photos of its chariot ladies will eventually lead to me being too late for the noon closure of the Pantheon, applicable on all national holidays. But that’s okay. My photo of a municipal cop in a heated conversation with a gladiator wearing brown leather shoes and leg warmers and holding a tiara makes up for any missed frame of the Pantheon’s oculus or Raphael’s Latin epigram, Timuet quo sospite vinci, Rerum magna parens /  et moriente mori. “Living, great Nature  fear’d he might outvie / Her works; and dying, fears herself might die.”

            If anything were to die for in this city, it would have to be the tonarelli cacio provola de bufala affumicata grigliata (the grilled, smoked buffalo cheese with zucchini, anchovies, and chili pepper) offered at a small al fresco café off the Piazza San Salvatore in Lauro. But don’t ask me how to find it again. I thought I was following the signs to the Piazza Navona. Then I went a little right down Via dei Giovanni Vecchio, left on Via Banchim, and right again on some unknown street before I ended up three piazzas away. Even though I was starving, I was cautious before requesting a table at the Ristorante Sangallo Ai Coronari. The servers looked uppity in their white linen suits and pink ties and so did the primarily Italian patrons. Then I thought, if they’d let a French poodle stay (one still sits under a table just to my left), they could hardly complain about an American with euros.

            I write in my journal. “There is no dispute. I’m going to eat this entire bowl of macaroni. I don’t know how to explain it. Fresh noodles, thick cheese, lightly cooked bacon, and then the pepper.” I must be falling in love. Because after the first course and second glass of rosa (there will be four), I look at the snooty patrons with newly found admiration. “Even the old are fashionable,” I write. “Beautiful sunglasses, good skin, but I know by their looks they won’t fare well in my home. I keep picturing the woman wearing a pink sweater in this seventy-five degree heat freezing. But back to the pasta and the secondi piatti that tastes like fried cheese dipped in oil. Kill me now.”

            If it weren’t for the pasta and fried cheese with a second serving of grease, I’d have to admit I’m drinking enough wine this afternoon to put Roman cab drivers in trouble. Okay, I’ll also have to admit, London was not my first go-around with cabbies, which might be why I still think of the yachtsman as one. And perhaps that’s why I also don’t suspect that my walk along the Tiber River, just a block from my new favorite restaurant in the whole wide world, will lead me to the place I have no desire to go on the day of Pope Benedict’s papal greeting: the friggin’ Vatican.

            It was Vivian who told me at dinner last night that her group was going back there today. Matthew had secured tickets for the pope’s Wednesday audience. They’d leave early, at 6:00 a.m., to try get the best seats. I had no interest in going. As for Pope Benedict, he would always remain to me Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, John Paul II’s Rottweiler, and Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, who like his predecessor pope, ignored the clergy sex abuse crisis in the United States until press coverage wouldn’t allow it. Add to this the New York Times’ Maureen Dowd March 27, 2010, critique:

 He has started two investigations of American nuns to check on their “quality of life”—code for seeing if they’ve grown too independent. As a cardinal he wrote a Vatican document urging women to be submissive partners and not take on adversarial roles toward men,

Like many before him, there’s no doubt this man-crowned man has little to offer me.

            But Antonio Raggi, Lazzaro Morelli, Paolo Naldini, Cosimo Fancelli, Girolamo Lucenti, Ercole Ferrata, and Domenico Guidi? Each of them do. Each of their sculpted angels—angel with the thorn crown, angel with the column, angel with the cross, sponge, whip, lance, veil—pull me across Il Ponte Sant’Angelo just like I’m a sixteenth-century pilgrim. And once I turn left on Via della Conciliazone, I don’t have a choice. Saint Peter’s Basilica and the saint himself, it seems, are calling me home.

*

Which brings me to the last person who did so. It was the spring of 2010, and, after nine years of our one-on-one meetings, I had come to say good-bye.

 “Miss Joan, come, come sit down,” he said. Although eighty-two years old, I could swear he leaped over a small coffee table to clear a pile of books from an office chair to make it ready for me. From it, I could see out his window. Pickup trucks and Subaru station wagons in a nearby parking lot were slush-brown and circles of earth around birch and spruce trees were starting to show. Spring break-up was under way. The books I replaced, titles including Arise from Darkness, Faith and Revelation, and Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan: Philosophical and Theological Papers, 1965–1980, joined yet another pile of weathered titles, like Paying Attention to God, The Discernment of Spirit, and A Pilgrim’s Journey, on the floor near some still empty boxes. I couldn’t tell if they were staying or going with him on his move to Tacoma. But I was happy to see not everything had been packed away. He still had the quilt hanging that a parishioner had made for him showing the years of his journey from son of a grocer to his time in Anchorage directing the Holy Spirit Retreat Center. He also kept on his wall a map of Alaska with pins marking the villages and towns he and Father Armand Nigro had visited to codirect Ignation retreats.

Despite both him and Father Nigro, the Society of Jesus had decimated western Alaska. For over fifty years, its Northwest Province, based out of Portland, Oregon, shipped pedophile priests and missionaries from seven Jesuit provinces and even other countries to remote villages on the shores of the Bering Sea and Yukon and Kuskokwim Rivers, leaving child victim after child victim in ruins. The Order’s more than $160 million settlement with scores of Yupik and Athabascan victims was the primary reason the Jesuits were closing their Alaska operations. Just two months from the day I came to see him, Vincent Beuzer, S.J., would be the last Jesuit to leave.

However, take the image of a pedophile priest, say Father Ormechea or the long list of western Alaska criminals, and replace it with a kind, thoughtful, compassionate servant of God, and the best person, besides my aunt, who would fill that mold was Father Beuzer. Because he never stopped teaching, like the former Gonzaga University professor of theology he had been, I took a pen and paper to each of his Sunday homilies, recording all of his offerings over the years. February 24 of some unmarked year: “God’s dream is to fashion a human family into God’s own image and likeness.” August 3: “The biggest need people have is to feel the personal presence of God. To have a good heart is not good enough. Rather to have a good heart in which the Holy Spirit loves and lives is the goal.” May 20: “Give what you have to give to God. Don’t worry that it’s not enough.” June 2: “If you already think you know, you will never grow in knowing.” July 16: “The Holy Spirit is at work, whenever there is work of the spirit in us. Fear not, Jesus said, I am with you.” August 10: “‘Come to the water’ is an invitation to allow God to be operative in our lives. The call is always made. The question is, are we listening and are we ready to respond in the way God has planned for us?” Never, not once, did his homilies touch the subjects archdiocesan priests now seemed compelled to address, like abortion, homosexuality, or upcoming national elections. Instead, all Vincent Beuzer offered up was a God who wanted to know us and love us as individuals.

It was Linda, again, my Chicago Catholic compatriot, who suggested I see him for one-on-one spiritual counseling, even after Zoloft had evened out the lows of the clinical depression that followed my separation and divorce. Though I could get to work, run again, and start re-charting my five-year plan, I was tremendously still in a blame-game state of mind. I wrote a twenty-page statement in support of my marriage’s annulment entitled, “The Piercing.” As the title suggests, it cast my ex-husband as the evilest among evils and me as the perfect spouse who deserved not one wrong sent her way. Father B., as I and most called him, read this Gospel according to Saint Joan. After doing so, he just remarked, “Jesus is showing you his cross.” But over the course of nine years of regular spiritual counseling, some times more frequently than others, he gradually lifted me from the darkness neither Zoloft nor Marsha could banish. “Joan,” he would say, smile wrinkling, eyes so energized and ready, I would think, to shake me, “What makes you think you are doing this alone?”

By the time of his retirement and the Jesuit’s exodus from the Last Frontier, Father B. was white-haired old man with a receding hairline, who was still the size of a linebacker, although he played basketball in high school. He had gray-green eyes and a nose that leaned to the left. “Too many bar fights, like Uncle Dan?” I wondered. His smile looked like he was the only one in on an inside joke. And, like me, elevens were well creased into his forehead from too much thinking. This, for example, list of questions he levied at his former theology professor and twentieth-century equivalent of Thomas Aquinas, Father Benard Lonergan, in the above-mentioned treatise: “How can you justify starting methodology with cognitional theory?” “Could you explain authentic subjectivity?” “In doctrines, do you get a statement about God in which you have no understanding of the meaning of it?”

He had used so much brain power in his academic career I could easily forgive him for losing his way mid-Mass, which he had been doing with greater frequency his last year at Resurrection Chapel, though he was the first to laugh at his own failings, to carry his own cross. Father B. never judged why I married Richard so quickly, especially outside the Catholic Church, or chastened me on my inability to forgive. He believed humans had to start where they were and if they had little faith, then they had to take little steps. When Abbie came around, he treated her like the miracle she was.

As for Ormechea, over the years, I told Father B. all about him and how I struggled remaining in a Church that kept him as a priest, just a mile from the Vatican, no less. I am certain I went on more than once about the inequality the Church afforded to women and that if and when I tithed it would be by turning over my donations to my brother. But when it came to me remaining Catholic, he always said the same thing, over and over, even on the last day of our meeting in his book-piled office. “Joan,” he said, “we need your righteousness. You can leave the Catholic Church when Jesus does.”

 On that last day, he smiled after saying it, tilting his head to the right, and giving me his “gotcha” laugh. His voice was calm and inquisitive but stained with a gravel that filled his throat. Although he wouldn’t be leaving Anchorage for a couple more months, the primary purpose of our spring break-up meeting was for me to say good-bye. I thanked him for everything he had done for me, including bringing a belief in possibility back to my life. I let him know that when I was broken, he healed me. I told him I would miss his homilies and those tiniest of reminders he would offer in sayings like, “Remember, often we focus on Peter’s failure, but at least he got out of the boat.” Or, “This is what you need to believe and trust. We are all part of God’s salvation story.” And finally, my favorite, “There are two dogs in this life, one represents good, the other evil. Which one wins depends on which one you feed.”

I said everything I wanted to say. I’m still grateful for that. And before leaving that day, he gave me the hug that I’d become used to only from him. Since in his philosophy, the Holy Spirit resided in the human heart, he pressed my back firmly where my heart would be. As if God the spirit were there, I felt Father B.’s love and care from the center out.

His retirement didn’t last as long as we had hoped. He died on a Sunday, just months before my visit to Rome. And when he did, it felt like Jesus had left the Catholic Church alongside him.

*

I think that’s why I don’t expect the view of Saint Peter’s from Via della Conciliazone to entrance me. God had already left the building. Even separate from my brother, the Archdiocese of Anchorage had wearied me after Father B.’s departure. Because every homily of replacement priests rang hollow and politics and prejudice became regular topics for their discourse, I didn’t think I would have any feeling for this parent church. But when I see it, I walk west, unbidden, unstoppable, a lamb to the slaughter, a lover to her beloved. Even the African street salesmen selling knockoffs of designer handbags and sunglasses can’t pull me off course with their propositioning “Veinte euros, senora” and “una bolsa, very nice.” I can’t stop until I rest, surrounded by Bernini’s colonnades and saints, against the footing of Saint Peter’s Square’s central obelisk.

Tongalese, Italian, German, French, Spanish, Japanese, and English. I can hear each language offered up at the same time, like a Pentecostal babble. Despite the obelisk as sundial, the bells of St. Peter’s still ring to mark the hour, just like the long-ago clock I once played. Bong. Bong. Bong. Bong. It’s 4:00 p.m. A cast of pigeons takes flight at the sound. A young Italian girl, five years old, maybe six, in a bubblegum-pink sweater eats chips that look like Pringles out of a paper cylinder. A Rubik’s cube is on the ground to her right. She and her family, I think this is who these people are, wear bright yellow ribbons that look like age-group awards for a 5K. Her grandfather, I think that’s who he is, has a bandaged hand and a red face. He calls to the little girl, “Francesca!” She drops her potato chips beside the discarded game and runs to him, smiling.

As for the Germans, they look like a pack of teenagers. They lay in the late afternoon’s hot sun. Boy, girl, girl, boy, girl. Their leader, maybe two years older than the rest, wears a Panama hat and carries a red umbrella. It seems like overkill. When he stands, the others rise. The leader yells; the pack responds. The leader yells again; again the pack responds. I trust they’ll be making their way to the Spanish Steps soon.

My sister Joycie, what would I do without her? She sends me another text. “Good luk tmrow-don’t get arrested please.” I text back, “Won’t happen, sure I want to go home.” And she quickly replies, “K-good 2 hear. Will be thinking of u. gonna be hard. Won’t be surprised if he hides from u but hope he doesn’t.” Because of her, I decide it’s best to pen my second letter to Ormechea, the just-in-case-he-won’t-meet-with-me one. I write,

Dear Father,

Sitting here by the obelisk in Saint Peter’s Square, I’m writing to you once again. I had hoped to deliver Tim’s message to you and give you necessary perspective to receive it. But in case you change your mind and don’t meet with me, I still need to fulfill my promise to Tim. So here you have it. The letter is enclosed. For my part, I thank you for the greeting you provided me on Tuesday. It was greatly unexpected.

As a closing, I try out, “Journeying toward peace.” Hmmm. The German leader yells out something forceful. The Italian grandpa with the bandage yells back something that shuts the boy up. I consider rewriting my letter. That damn word peace showed up again. Peace was never on my wish list. Revenge was. Answers still are. And “Why,” the old argument between critic and taskmaster starts in my head, “Why, again, is this my fucking journey?”

            “Stop swearing, especially here.”

            “Okay.  Why, again, is the my journey?”

“Because it is your journey.”

“What?”

“I’ve told you before, Joan.” Even his voice in my head held his cadence, both deliberate and half amused. “Righteousness is a misunderstood virtue, especially when the word self is too often affiliated with it. Again, what is righteousness?” Father B. was in college-professor mode.

“The quality of being morally right or justifiable.”

“And where does it reside?”

“‘Ontological’ or ‘real righteousness’ is the quality that adheres to the soul when one does righteous acts.”

“And who bestows righteousness?”

I quote his source. “In Augustine's view, God bestows justifying righteousness upon the sinner in such a way that it becomes part of his or her person.”

“Maybe that had something to do with you becoming a lawyer?”

“Perhaps so.”

“What was that answer?” He’s smiling.

“Yes, Father.”

“And, maybe, this is why this is your quest and no one else’s?”

I’m reluctant to answer, even him; so he tries again. “If I can tell you anything, Joan, it’s to learn not to be dismissive of who you are. When you do that, you’re dismissing the righteousness God bestowed. So, do me this favor. ‘Learn not to be afraid.’”

*

“Be Awake and Alive.” It was a reminder Marsha gave me when I went to her office last December, just after learning of Father B.’s death. It was her Kundalini yoga teaching talking, much more than her behavioral modification therapy training, because what she was telling me was Father B. wasn’t done me with yet. If he had more to teach, he would find a way to reach me, even if it had to be through my embedded memory of him.

*

 My Germans are leaving. Little Francesca already has. Oddly, the Square seems small without them, and even the pope seems like one tiny man I can handle. I can’t help myself. I search the colonnades for any presence of woman. While I know 15 percent of Bernini’s statues depict females, it’s difficult to find their curves and femininity under their billowing marble robes, especially at a distance. Only Mary herself stands out, and not in the statues. Coined the Mater Ecclesiae and a gift of Opus Dei to John Paul II, her mosaic fills a corner square of the papal palace, just to the far right and a couple levels below Pope Benedict’s bedroom. It’s a young Mary. She holds her toddler son, who, even at this age, raises his right hand, index and middle finger extended, in the form of a blessing to the multitude. The crowned Mary, Mother of the Church, looks queenly; not a hint of sentiment floods her dark brown eyes, but her blue hooded robe still symbolizes just what it had for illiterate pilgrims centuries before. She is purity herself, and her mission is sacred.

I know, according to Catholic teaching, I’m supposed to love her as a daughter does her mother, but if I do, it’s the love of a teenage daughter pissed off at her mom for not supporting the feminist cause. Her humanity and loss of a child, I can embrace, but her seeming deification and revirginization? Never. To me, this image, created in the hands of men, is a hierarchical afterthought that separates her from her sisterhood. But today, at this moment, she’s all I have.

When John Paul II had her mosaic installed, he expressed his wish “that all who come to St. Peter’s Square may raise their eyes to Mary and greet her with filial trust and prayer.” So here goes, Mary, “If there is an ounce of real woman in you, help a daughter out.”

*

Combine these theoretical questions from Father B.:

How do we discern God’s unique desires for us, individually, and how do we respond?

with the following from the Second Vatican Council’s teaching on faith:

[It] is a supernatural virtue by which we, with the inspiration and assistance of God's grace, believe those things to be true which He has revealed,

and you get my answer. The answer to all of my questions, the tonic for all of my fears, the courage not to be afraid might be found in the singular example a chicken named Kate once showed: “Wherever you might be going, raise your head. Believe you can, and then you will, fly.”

*

And so I have it. My day of tourism is nearly coming to an end. True, earlier in the evening after leaving Saint Peter’s Square, I’ll have eventually found the Piazza Navona and laughed as an old man lip-synched Elvis tunes for the evening crowds. I’ll also have bought wooden toys for Abbie in a Pinocchio shop and experimented at a gelateria with two flavors of gelato, lavender and chocolate cranberry. Afterward I will wind my way home to the Lancelot, getting lost at least three times before I find its evergreen gate. Every moment of the way, however, I will relish in another night’s soft warm air and feel just a hint of my bare shouldered childhood returning.

*

“Did you have fun?” Robert might have asked.

“I’ve become too serious to have fun. But I do have this,” I would have said. “I do have joy.”

And, thus, perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised, when I’ve grown so nostalgic, that I find him once again, set free, like Kate, when I’m back in my room. I search YouTube for his name: “Father Vincent Beuzer, S.J.” Though posted in 2009, almost exactly two years before his death, I’ve never seen this Totustuusproduction video nor known it to exist.

In the video, Father B. is much younger than I ever saw him. Black haired with graying side burns and clad in a Roman collar, he stands behind a classroom podium. Written on the chalkboard behind him is the date, “Wednesday, April 5^th.” I look online through old calendars for a year that might match the weekday. Perhaps this is 1989. The intended subject of his lecture, “Coping with Stress . . .” is also written on the board. Then, he starts speaking. In a voice sounding younger and gravel free but still familiar, he sets up this parable:

A person comes to a priest. He has serious problems. The priest listens to him and says, “You know what I’d recommend is that . . . I recommend that you see this person because he really is a good clinical psychologist or good psychiatrist.” And so the priest refers him to a psychologist or a professional therapist or someone in the healing services. Isn’t that what takes place? When you see people who have deep serious problems, when there is real serious suffering, interior suffering, what you do is you say, “Well I really think you should see a doctor. You should see someone who’s really trained to deal with these things.”

Then, he summarizes what’s wrong with this scenario:

Usually we send them to everyone, [he pauses and gives that Father B. smile] but we never pray for them. Priests don’t pray for them. Mothers and fathers don’t pray for their children. Husbands don’t pray for their wives. Wives don’t pray for their husbands. You say, “Sure I believe in the God who heals, Father. God can do anything.” And I say that is not the proof of the pudding. The proof of the pudding is to take a look at your own actions, for priests to take a look at their own actions, for bishops to take a look at their own actions, for people within families to take a look at their own actions, and if you are not praying for specifics graces of healing, then you do not have faith in this area.

His smile lingers when he says the last phrase, “then you do not have faith in this area.” He concludes:

You have God in your pocket, but he is not a God who is so near to you, you would call upon him with familiarity and ask him for anything you want. You don’t have the kind of faith that the leper has who says, “Jesus, son of David, have mercy on me. I want to be able to go back to my family. I don’t want to be on the outside of the city all alone.” And Jesus asks him, “Do you really want to be healed?” Now, that same Jesus Christ? Do we believe that he is so near and that he still has the power of the Holy Spirit that he will cure when we ask. That’s the question. Our actions will reveal our faith or lack of faith. Or inner expectations will reveal our hope or lack or lack of hope.

            After at least three viewings, I have to ask myself. Is his theory one of faith alone? Sola fide? No, for him faith depends on works, even if the works are solely of the interior variety: like the choice to believe. So then, is his theory one of justification through both faith and works? No, never at any point does Father B. discuss heavenly reward. All of his stories are occurring down here on earth. They exemplify the question, “How should we live? Not, how shall we die?”

For Father B., the answer appears to be, “We truly live only when our earthly actions demonstrate a faith in a God who heals.” “In such a case,” he might even add, “faith is neither a lie nor a suspension of critical thinking; it’s just a way of being, exhibited, as always, through daily choice.”

I want to say more, to add to his teaching this final thesis.

“Actions, Father, even internal choices, are the building blocks for faith, the components that make it stronger. They’re why faith, without any connection to justification, can and will be enough to feel an affinity with a loving God every single day.” And here I find myself saying out loud, mimicking his wise, wry countenance, “Perhaps I’m more your student than I know. For let me tell you what I’ve learned, because this is what living is: learning. In the beginning was the Word, Father, and the Word was just this, sola. Fide.”