I’m not sure if having no expectations is the same as expecting nothing, but the latter might better describe how I approached last week’s trip to the Vatican. It’s not a place that’s ever been on my bucket list, but perhaps one of the perks of being a husband is acquiring inlaws and their pilgrimages. Lovely’s family members are devout Catholics, and so it only makes sense that, when the opportunity arose for their first family vacation abroad, the Holy City was a no-brainer.
You’re thinking too much about it tends to be the answer to my questionings of God. My own parents met in Bible study, and I spent my early summers in Jesus camps. Like so many others whose worlds revolved around Christ Almighty, the topic of religion was inevitably the first area of interrogation when my mind developed into a critical one. I spent college writhing in spiritual confusion, and my early twenties coming to peace with my agnosticism. But the past few years have been a confluence of spiritual complications – visits to Muslim-predominant societies like Turkey and Indonesia, encounters with infamous Buddhist temples in Asia, intimate experiences in the context of Navajo and Hawaiian belief systems – all while Christianity has become an encroaching synonym for fascism.
That last thought feels both blasphemous and unpatriotic, and those two might also be synonyms.
The halls of the building where the Sistine Chapel sits are stacked with statues of gods and Gods. Greek, Roman, Egyptian, Judeo-Christian. Staring up at a sculpture of Oden outside the Vatican giftshop, one wonders if he’s put there to be worshiped or to be mocked for having been tamed, acquired, catalogued into the collection of another Creator’s museum. Long before seeing an actual depiction of Jesus or Mary, I lost count of the Anubises and Zeuses. Opening acts to the headliner.
In the parts of Vatican City where tourists have access, there is no space for solitude or quiet. Everything is so immaculate that you can’t stare at any single thing without someone in front of you raising their camera at it, or you yourself raising your camera at it. 30,000 visitors on a Tuesday. You can hardly hear the sound of your own voice, not to mention God’s.
By the time I reached Michelangelo’s famous ceiling, my feet and phone battery were zapped. Packed shoulder to shoulder, I raised my eyes to the ceiling and flipped on a Moses Sumney track to drown out the guards shouting at the crowd to quiet down. I stood directly under the iconic image of Adam touching fingertips with God. Time froze for a single moment. God looked so much smaller in person.
I left in awe of the ability of people to be motivated so deeply by their own notion of their own God that they could erect such structures. Paint such murals. Alter such history. I thought about the societies that fell at the hands of people who believe in this God, whose own gods are universally assumed falsified by virtue of the fact that they did not win against the swords and guns that bear the cross. None of those other gods get to be proper nouns, or have a church that’s actually a city that’s actually a country. I thought about the fact that Michelangelo did all of this for almost free. I thought about the fact that God did all of this for almost free.