My Fall into Grace

“God does not die on the day we cease to believe in a personal diety, but we die on the day when our lives cease to be illumined by the steady radiance, renewed daily, of a wonder, the source of which is beyond all reason.” --Dag Hammarskjold

I have done what I can to make the night holy. I’ve baked. I’ve made a pilgrimage out of baking, walking through skin-shrinking cold to the store for fresh supplies of butter and sugar, hoping for cookie cutters, in the shapes of a moon and a star—o holy night, o star of Bethlehem twinkling. I recalled how decades ago I would bake spice cookies with lemon icing for the children and serve them on plates with lemon verbena tea and say to them, in all sincerity: “I would give you the moon and the stars if I could…pretend that’s what I’m doing.” How they would giggle imagining themselves capable of, yes, nibbling a beam of radiance off a star or eating in one bite the curvy corner of a crescent moon stolen from the winter sky. This year, I will fashion them from a template of cardboard, a lopsided crescent, a star collapsing on one of its rays, over-baked too brown on the bottom thanks to a faulty oven; still holy is the fragrance of baking commingling with CD Christmas music I did not think I’d play and the cloying taste of my grandmother’s eggnog—Southern Comfort, real whipping cream, stiff egg whites—savored slowly, coating the tongue as I await the midnight mass I know will open the heavens for me, usher me beyond myself like Mary of the Assumption-- body and soul transported above in one indivisible lump.

Perhaps I expect too much of religion, protestant that I am, yet envious of the grandiloquent rites of the Catholic faith I can’t quite adopt, imagining in them a more exalted kind of reverence than I generally muster, even at Christmas when I am trying to muster everything I believe to bear on the wonder of the night. I am in Italy, in Spoleto, albeit alone, in terms of being the lone American here, playing music to myself, baking cookies for myself—still I expect much of a mass that happens at the stroke of midnight in the Duomo that boasts Fra Lippo Lippi’s Annunciation, not to mention the other of his frescoes brightening the apse: The Transition of Mary, the Nativity and, crowning all, her Coronation. And let’s not forget the other touch points of sacred memory: Alberto’s cross, his ogle-eyed Christ Triumphant; a page of San Francesco’s own handwriting cadged from a letter written to Fra Lorenzo. If things have the power to bestow holiness, or well-wrought buildings, architected a circle on a square, the power to call forth the divine, surely I will pray better at midnight in the Duomo of Spoleto than I can at home.

How heartening to see the crowds lashing through the streets this late at night comparable to the throngs I saw lining up for Jose Carraras or Alex Britti during summer concerts in the Piazza del Duomo when weather was certainly more a draw than it is this night with its sub-zero temps, frost already gathered on the roofs and hoods of cars in bewitching feathery crystals that catch the street lights and the twinkles of tiny bulbs strung in snow-flake patterns suspended above the narrow streets. Car exhaust billows, condensed breath in the night, illuminated by head lights, wisps of wraiths and other Christmas phantoms passing.

I certainly didn’t expect much of a turn-out at midnight. Feared, in fact, that I would be among a conspicuous few kneeling at the rail, my mouth squawking open like a bird’s, determined to accept the stolen host out of spiritual greed rather than reverence and respect for the religion I am approaching as a hungry interloper. Crowds give me courage, here where paranoia wrestles determination: As a protestant I am not invited to the altar to eat God’s body, am a mere sinner trespassing, a cannibal rather than a penitent. But I decide that if belief is truly conviction, shouldn’t mine reign over theirs? Surely Christ Himself wants me to feel that holy midnight zap of His presence, regardless of church doctrine and what part I think the host plays in bringing that presence to me. I don’t know what I believe, long only to suspend belief and trust the feeling: how I can one moment be an ordinary woman in a parka and funny hat, shivering on the Via Fontesecco as I make my trek to the church, and in almost the next, feel my soul catch the light of two millennia, my soul suddenly ample, beaming.

So many of the townspeople are here, but all seem tired, cold, impatient and a little surprised to find themselves out on a night like this when bed was what they’d really had in mind. The men wait outside the cathedral, bundled in leather jackets and parkas, rubbing at their raw knuckles, stamping their feet. Some smoke cigarette after cigarette, grinding the butts into the pavement with deft twists of ankle; the women in their show-off furs, the teenagers and babies all stake out the seats inside, though inside is hardly warmer. The Diocese’s confidence in crowds is reflected in the number of fold-up chairs set up in the aisles for the overflow of pews, black mesh director’s chairs, all full, anachronistic like the tree itself, with its fiocchi of pink and blue more reminiscent of newborn baby announcements, but perhaps, even so, appropriate and certainly more consonant with the tints of the Fra Lippo Lippi frescoes so vividly ignited. The hymns are the usual: O Come All Ye Faithful, Hark the Herald Angels, but in Latin, I guess. I can’t hear the words.

I want to understand the symbology of light and why the dozen grizzled priests in their gold-embroidered robes flip the switches that they do when they do. On entering the cathedral, the nave falls in shadow and only the Fra Lippo Lippi frescoes are lit—with more wattage than you’d ever find sight-seeing in ordinary time, by day, when one puts a little coin in a box to flash a floodlight for a skimpy moment. Tridents of candelabra stashed in bright pink and baby blue bouquets, electric chandeliers—all blaze while the men in robes scurry around making incomprehensible arrangements, whispering and tittering. Soon the midnight bells begin their wild celebratory clanging, two discernible strains of antiphony, one deep as a Buddhist gong the other frittering. And with the ringing of the bells, the lights change: now the brightness turns on us, the reluctant congregation, and the apse-stage dims.

I’m wondering do even the best of Catholics stay mindful of the message in the appearance of things. Do they count the heads of the priests who constitute the procession, the bishop in his mitre carrying the enormous cross, another the gospel, yet another three or four swinging the censer densely smoking incense? There are a dozen in the procession, all elders surely, representing—count them!—twelve disciples. Much later in the mass, when the gospel is read from a perch way up high, the four feeble-kneed priests who climb the ladder, staggering here, knocking into each other, losing a candle from its candelabra, are meant to be the four evangels. Everyone is far too tired for the grandiose, operatic parts they have been offered. Can’t we just squeeze each other’s hands, offer the kiss of peace—la pace—and go home?

Some of the congregants are soon lulled to actual snore-quaking sleep; the others gaze on bored, perturbed, some even seem angry. I join the dying, looking at my watch, trying to map out the least conspicuous route to an exit, my hunger for the host now a distant and ridiculous memory (hell if I am going to wait an hour in that line!), the only thing feeding my need for wonder and delight the memory of my friend Ann and her work on Alberto’s Cross, her stories of being locked behind the glass, making faces at people, waving.

It’s the Bishop who loses most of us, ranting on and on in his television MC voice—endless redundancy on finding the Light in the world. Light, light, let their be light…la luce, la luce. In my effort to renew myself, I recommit to living only by that light, no compulsory maneuvers, no performing out of expectation, out of shoulds or wants or need. I will, this year, learn to “wait on the Lord,” learn to wait for light to break through my own willfulness and selfishness and stubbornness, even if it means sitting alone and doing nothing for hours, days, forever—no precipitous action! Even if it means—this very night—sitting through the bishop’s 40 minute homily and the never-ending two hour mass.

How soon I let myself fall into doubt and irreverence, poking fun of people and their blind subjugation, poking fun of myself, a lumpish middle-aged woman making her way home in the hoary dark.

Perhaps I expect too much of religion and not enough of life. The true miracles of Christmas arrive when I stop grasping after them, when I’m snuggly in my fleece robe humbly puttering, nibbling on cookies. The sudden gift of memory when I bite the moon in two, the uncanny email from the friend I’d imagined waving from behind the Alberto cross, the sense of having finally given to another friend a gift that matters. In the morning I will dance with each minute as it arises, will kiss the mouth of one I wasn’t sure would still be here. I’ll eat with people I’ve never thought of as family and listen to stories about strangers who hand-sew the angels on table runners, will taste the Christmas capelletti in broth floating in the deep end of my spoon. Will crash mysteriously into my childhood when I hear “O Holy Night” and find my grandmother’s hand putting the 33 rpm on her console victrola, will taste her eggnog and feel the whole of my life cresting over me with the light of the zillion stars I count while standing alone shivering on the terrace, trying to name them one by one and commit each—along with myself—to the holiness of mystery.