Journal 4: Life Is Like a Box of Chocolates, You Never Know What You're Gonna Get

Last week I talked about living on the border as a comfortable place to be: I can experience a new home in Italy, but only temporarily, as my real home is waiting for me in Amurrica.  Living on the border allows one to get deeper into areas of life that one would never have seen without undergoing "a temporary transplantation."  Because I yanked up my roots in my safe, comfortable, predictable life (some of which I didn't realize were so deep), I am able to experience a cultural connection with this country and a deeper identification with my faith.  My subject position is one who has about as much connection as you can get with a place before you've been there.  I have been waiting my whole life to be where I am today, and that's a surreal feeling (at least it was for the first week).  One thing that I have learned about the border is that there are surprises after that surreal feeling fades.  Borders are like the mixture of two paint colors; you know the color will change, but you never know exactly what shade you will get. 
As far as cultural goes, I felt a very close connection with this country, almost immediately, due to both sides of my family being Italian.  When I was outside, I felt so close to the world that my ancestors had grown up in.  Even learning the language back in America didn't get me feeling a powerful connection to my heritage- it was hearing the language I learned, in the mouths of little kids running around the piazza, in the clusters of old men and women relaxing in the shade, in the teenagers laughing boisterously on the metro.  This language was theirs, beautiful and ethnic.  But it was also mine, on the border, as I rest in the Venn diagram overlap in between our worlds.  The most powerful moment in language was when I used it to talk to my great-great-aunt's daughter (my 5th cousin?), Cecilia, on the phone to plan my visit to their house in Milan.  Even though I had to use the help of my teacher, I was still proud to say some of it in Italian. 

However, being on the border does have its downsides.  I was hit with a hard wave of homesickness in week 2, which came with the realization that, though I was in the country of my family, I wasn't experiencing it with my family.  Being in Italy connected me to an entire different sense of family that I mostly hadn't gotten yet, my family's cultural roots, but it separated me from the people that made up my family at home.  These faces were the reason I was here, the present-day family I enjoy in America.  And the communication isn't that great.  I can get in a Skype or a phone call about once or twice a week, and that's not enough to describe the moments in which I feel connected to them throughout the week.  But they will be here soon enough to vacation with me, and I am meeting my distant relatives in Milan in October.  The border has been hard for me in this area, but I am changing.  My identity grounded in family will remain the same, but the ways I can find family even when far away are developing.  I am finding family not around me, but now within.       

In the same way, border crossing has yielded surprises for me in the religious arena as well.  As a Catholic-but-not-so-excited-to-be-one, I was not expecting this trip to be specifically a religious one, or even have many connections to my faith.  I place myself in the contemporary Catholic zone: those just waiting for Vatican III:  allowing women to be priests, priests to marry, and birth control to be used.  I love the changes of Vatican II that make the mass more contemporary and accessible to believers, and I love even more the papal encyclicals on the church's new role in the modern world.

So the idea of visiting the burial sites of saints and popes wasn't too exciting to me before the trip.  I never have asked a saint to pray for me before, or been a fan of the Catholic history I was forced to learn for 12 years.  However, something happened to me during this trip, after I had crossed the border into the country that contains the most Catholic history.  It began with the Basilica di San Francesco, as I've written about before.  I felt such a strong connection to the life of St. Francis and to his contribution to the faith as I prayed in this Basilica.

Similarly, at the Basilica di San Marco in Venice, I saw hundreds of believers crying during mass.  They felt so lucky to be there, and I shared their emotions.  I usually don't get to see that kind of emotion at the typical Catholic mass.  In this basilica, I felt so connected to the people who also practiced my faith and who believed what I believed and felt the emotions I was feeling.  This same connection to emotions was present at the Santa Scala, which are the stairs Jesus is said to have walked on his way to hear the verdict from Pontius Pilate.  As I ascended the stairs on my knees per tradition, I observed the devotion to the rosary that many believers were praying.  Just because the rosary isn't my favorite way to pray, it does not mean that some believers do not find it a powerful way to pray.  In this way, crossing the border helped me to see the emotional side of the Catholic faith and also break down some of my intolerance regarding old-school Catholicism.

At San Giovanni in Laterano, I saw many statues of various saints.  When I gazed up at Peter, holding the "keys" to the church, I felt close to him.  How strange that he had walked in this same place that I did, the man who had given so much of his life to this faith that I now enjoy freely.  I remember thinking, "I never realized how large the Catholic family was."  I truly began to feel connected to these saints that I kept hearing about but never knew.  When I looked at the table that Saint Peter is reputed to have used (in San Giovanni in Laterano), I wrote in my journal, "This is even more of a religious pilgrimage than I had thought." 

I even began feeling close to Mary, which is new to me.  As I gazed upon the various depictions of her in the Uffizi Museum, San Giovanni, and other churches, I came to realize her powerful sacrifice for her faith and how much that she is revered for such sacrifice.  I asked her sincerely for the first time if I could ever sacrifice as much as she did.  I don't know what her response might have been; I only know that I felt a strong sense of peace.  I can't wait for the Vatican museum this week!