Salvation subject to availability

By popular demand, I'll start with the "near-conversion" story. It may not be quite as juicy as some of you were hoping, but it was still an experience. About three and a half weeks into my five week stay in Rome, two friends and I decided to check out St. Peter's basilica in the afternoon. We had been reading Mark Twain's The Innocents Abroad, and I had been particularly struck by this passage:

When we reached the door, and stood fairly within the church, it was impossible to comprehend that it was a very large building. I had to cipher a comprehension of it. I had to ransack my memory for some more similes. St. Peter's is bulky. Its height and size would represent two of the Washington capitol set one on top of the other--if the capitol were wider; or two blocks or two blocks and a half of ordinary buildings set one on top of the other. St. Peter's was that large, but it could and would not look so. The trouble was that every thing in it and about it was on such a scale of uniform vastness that there were no contrasts to judge by--none but the people, and I had not noticed them. They were insects. The statues of children holding vases of holy water were immense, according to the tables of figures, but so was every thing else around them. The mosaic pictures in the dome were huge, and were made of thousands and thousands of cubes of glass as large as the end of my little finger, but those pictures looked smooth, and gaudy of color, and in good proportion to the dome. Evidently they would not answer to measure by. Away down toward the far end of the church (I thought it was really clear at the far end, but discovered afterward that it was in the centre, under the dome,) stood the thing they call the baldacchino--a great bronze pyramidal frame-work like that which upholds a mosquito bar. It only looked like a considerably magnified bedstead--nothing more. Yet I knew it was a good deal more than half as high as Niagara Falls. It was overshadowed by a dome so mighty that its own height was snubbed. The four great square piers or pillars that stand equidistant from each other in the church, and support the roof, I could not work up to their real dimensions by any method of comparison. I knew that the faces of each were about the width of a very large dwelling-house front, (fifty or sixty feet,) and that they were twice as high as an ordinary three-story dwelling, but still they looked small. I tried all the different ways I could think of to compel myself to understand how large St. Peter's was, but with small success. The mosaic portrait of an Apostle who was writing with a pen six feet long seemed only an ordinary Apostle.

But the people attracted my attention after a while. To stand in the door of St. Peter's and look at men down toward its further extremity, two blocks away, has a diminishing effect on them; surrounded by the prodigious pictures and statues, and lost in the vast spaces, they look very much smaller than they would if they stood two blocks away in the open air. I "averaged" a man as he passed me and watched him as he drifted far down by the baldacchino and beyond--watched him dwindle to an insignificant school-boy, and then, in the midst of the silent throng of human pigmies gliding about him, I lost him. The church had lately been decorated, on the occasion of a great ceremony in honor of St. Peter, and men were engaged, now, in removing the flowers and gilt paper from the walls and pillars. As no ladders could reach the great heights, the men swung themselves down from balustrades and the capitals of pilasters by ropes, to do this work. The upper gallery which encircles the inner sweep of the dome is two hundred and forty feet above the floor of the church--very few steeples in America could reach up to it. Visitors always go up there to look down into the church because one gets the best idea of some of the heights and distances from that point. While we stood on the floor one of the workmen swung loose from that gallery at the end of a long rope. I had not supposed, before, that a man could look so much like a spider. He was insignificant in size, and his rope seemed only a thread. Seeing that he took up so little space, I could believe the story, then, that ten thousand troops went to St. Peter's, once, to hear mass, and their commanding officer came afterward, and not finding them, supposed they had not yet arrived. But they were in the church, nevertheless--they were in one of the
transepts. Nearly fifty thousand persons assembled in St. Peter's to hear the publishing of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception. It is estimated that the floor of the church affords standing room for--for a large number of people; I have forgotten the exact figures. But it is no matter--it is near enough.

Twain does not exaggerate. The place is immense, and, simultaneously, perfectly proportioned. It is easy to imagine that St. Peter's is God's house, and that God's house is decorated with hundreds of square feet of beautifully detailed mosaics, colossal statues of saints, and one of the most epic domes ever built. Epic, that is the right word to describe it. To walk through it was an odyssey, to turn a corner was to discover another church's worth of treasures, to look up is dizzying but hypnotizing. I spent four hours in this church. No particular ceremony was going on, no procession or mass. But it was not for a moment boring or tiring. After two hours or so of wandering through the arcades and apse and nave, we walked through the papal crypt, past the bodies of the politicians who really shaped the middle ages and the renaissance, past full-grown men crying like babies at the tomb of John-Paul II, and finally past the tomb of St. Peter himself. Here, I paused, and gave a short bow, a gesture I had purposely avoided at the altars of all other churches. Here was the rock, the foundation of Christianity and the Western world, the Godfather of civilization. A bow was appropriate.Next, we went up to the cupola, at the top of the dome of St. Peter's. The climb was grueling, but the view was monumental. The basilica, I believe by regulation, is the tallest building in Rome, by a very significant margin. The Pantheon which, when up close, looks like a giant structure, is barely visible among the streets and other monuments. Imagine marveling at the height of Harkness tower and then turning around to see the Empire State building. I believe the feeling is analogous. In any case, I was stunned by the whole ordeal. Tombs, views, and my goodness, the baldachino. What a structure that thing is. As I was walking out the church, and looked back at the gigantic nave with the gigantic altar and the rays of light coming through the gigantic windows, yes, I felt an impulse to belong. I've always said that if I were to join any religion, it would be Caltholicism or Congregationalism. Congregationalism for the apolstalic lovey-ness, and Catholicism for the grandeur. Several of us decided that we wanted to go to mass on Sunday: a 10:30 mass, in Latin, with full homily. It would have been... epic. Unfortunately, you have to get tickets in advance for a mass at St. Peter's, and we didn't come soon enough. Thus, I remained mass-less, and all possibilities of conversion were crushed beneath church bureaucracy. Ain't that always the way?