La Pace

Losing my religion but not my faith

Thursday morning, around 10:00 Pacific time, I happened to be in the car with my husband for an hourlong drive, the radio on, set to NPR. I know I shouldn’t listen to the news so much, and I was about to change the station when I detected some excitement from breathless journalists amidst what sounded like a buzz of people. This, I realized, was a live broadcast from Vatican City. Moments before, billows of decisive smoke, white against what I imagined as a blue twilight, rose into the air of Piazza San Pietro.

Maybe it’s regret for not having spent more time in that onliest city on a trip to Italy years ago, thinking it was a trap that would spoil any sense of authenticity I was going for, and realizing how wrong I was. Or maybe it was the words of Anthony Doerr in his memoir, his love letter to the city, Four Seasons in Rome, recounting the drama of the papal conclave of 2005, that have forever enchanted me to the place. Whatever, I was drawn to those voices from a continent away. I did not, could not, turn it off.

I am not Catholic, but I have loved enough of them to understand the importance of this event. Beyond that, though, the prominence of the Catholic church and its pope is a fact of our world. Waiting for the new bishop of Rome to emerge, the journalists filled the time with a back and forth of banter and speculation. Then, thank God, the doors to the balcony of the basilica opened, (I was told) and the announcement made (I heard). An American pope. Leo XIV presented himself to cheers filling the cabin of my car.

He spoke. “La Pace,” he began, and there was something about the voice. It cancelled out the racket of the Orange County streets. There was something about hearing and not seeing the man. The sound of him infusing the small space and washing over me in a way I hadn’t expected. “La pace sia con tutti voi,” The commentator translated from Italian, Peace be with all of you.

The sonorousness of his intonation flowed out like the sooth of a musical chord. It was kind, it was loving. And I realized in those moments, as I listened transfixed to the lilting Italian and Spanish, to the message of love and compassion, that this new pope, as he stood over the thousands in that epic and ancient setting, was ministering to a woman thousands of miles away who just happened to turn on her radio. Until that moment, finding myself so hushed, I hadn’t fully known how starved I’d been. How, little by little, I’d been loosing faith.

I was raised as far from Catholicism as California is from Italy, with twice on Sundays and once on Wednesday nights up at our Southern Baptist church in the heart of Los Angeles. When Brother Gatlin came to our house and prayed over me and I took Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior, I took it to heart. But about age thirteen I began to have questions. What about the Jews? What about our teenage church organist who was having a baby out of wedlock? What about my friend Debbie, a Mormon, who also worried about my damnation? And yes, what about the Catholics? Were they all going to Hell? Because the Baptist believe, as do many organized systems of religion, that there is one way and one way only to heaven. This conflation of believing and knowing is what gets us into trouble. Nobody knows.

I eventually left the Baptist church but kept my Christianity. Until recently. Recently I’ve seen so much harm done in the name of religion, (poor Jesus, I think) yet considering history and looking at the greater world, I see how it’s always been this way. These days I wonder, as John Lennon posited, what it would be like with no religion. These days I’m distrustful of all of it.

Even before hearing the new pope I knew that, in forsaking these stories, I was depriving myself of any kind of faith, any kind of hope. Lately, l’ve felt a bleakness. It’s hard, for me at least, to be simply “spiritual.” It’s as though all the props of scene and setting and pageantry, the details of how this happened, then that, then what, all the specificity, helps the human heart and mind connect. My mother was so certain of her God. Her relationship was personal. But that is exactly the kind of intervening deity I can’t grasp. At the same time, I don’t believe the world is random or pointless. Maybe it’s my residual Christianity, but I’d love to meet Jesus, and I’m inclined to think there is some powerful something somewhere. In other words, I believe in God. I simply can’t describe her. And it seems to me that this is the only certainty, the uncertainty. Yet the fact that I don’t have answers, and that the brutality of this world is so incomprehensible, has slowly choked my ability to recognize and accept the grace around me.

I’m not naive enough to ignore the power and politics of the Catholic church and the fact that the pope, no matter what essence is bestowed to him in his papacy, is just a man. Yet, maybe that’s the point. The voice coming to me yesterday seemed less holly, more gentle. Maybe the rank and position isn’t so much a elevation of one soul but a mirror for our own, that whatever God there is, is in us.

This man from Chicago spoke of a “disarming peace, humble and persevering.” He said he wanted it to “enter your hearts….all the people, wherever they are.” And in those unexpected moments, as the broken white lines of the road rolled out before me, it did.